Taking action
Starbucks to close stores for an afternoon for bias training
Starbucks, trying to tamp down a racially charged uproar over the arrest of two black men at one of its stores in Philadelphia, plans to close more than 8,000 U.S. stores for several hours next month to conduct racial-bias training for its nearly 175,000 workers.
The announcement Tuesday comes after the arrests sparked protests and calls for a boycott on social media. Starbucks says the stores and corporate offices will be closed on the afternoon of May 29.
Starbucks, which once urged its employees to start conversations about race with customers, found itself through the looking glass: under fire for its treatment of black people.
The company reacted from a high level: Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson said the arrests should not have happened and the company said he met with the two men. Starbucks also said the employee who called police no longer works at the store, but declined to give further details
The episode highlights the risks large corporations run when they tie their brands so closely to social messaging. In 2015, then-ceo Howard Schultz shrugged off the “Race Together” fiasco as a well-intentioned mistake and pressed on with his public efforts to engage in the debate over race in America.
Johnson was scrambling to keep the Philadelphia incident from shattering the message Schultz was going for: Starbucks is a corporation that stands for something beyond profit.
“The more your brand is trying to connect emotionally to people, the more hurt people feel when these kinds of things
happen,” said Jacinta Gauda, the head of the Gauda Group, a New York strategic communications firm affiliated with the Grayling network. “They are breaking a promise. That’s what makes it hurt deeper.”
Beyond racial relations, Starbucks has staked much of its brand on its dual promise of providing good customer service and treating its employees well, said John Gordon, a restaurant industry analyst with Pacific Management Consulting Group. The Seattle company has a reputation for well-managed stores, “a point of difference that allows them to sell primarily drinks and coffees that have a higher cost,” he
said.
But in a multinational company with more than 28,000 stores worldwide, there has “to be a situation every day where some human being handles things wrong. You can’t have that many employees and not have something stupid happen,” Gordon said. “Even with a huge operations manual that lays out what to say and what to do, you can’t cover everything.”
Still, Starbucks has set its own high bar.
Last month, the company claimed it had achieved 100 per cent pay equity across gender and race for all its U.S. employees and committed to doing the same for its overseas operations,
an initiative publicly backed by equality activist Billie Jean King. The company also touts the diversity of its workforce, saying minorities comprise more than 40 per cent of its employees in the U.S.
In 2016, Starbucks promised to invest in 15 “underserved” communities across the country, trying to counter an image of a company catering to a mostly white clientele. One of those stores opened in Ferguson, Missouri, the scene of the 2014 protests that erupted following the police shooting of Michael Brown, one of several such killings that moved Schultz to launch the Race Together campaign.