STARBUCKS

offices will be closed on the afternoon of May 29 for the training. In addition to the company-owned stores, Starbucks had as of January about 5,700 licensed stores in the United States, such as the ones in Target and Barnes & Noble stores.

The company said the training is “designed to address implicit bias, promote conscious inclusion, prevent discrimination and ensure everyone inside a Starbucks store feels safe and welcome.”

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 ridicule that the “Race Together” message drew and pressed on with his public efforts to engage in the debate over race in America.

“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, 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-based 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 percent 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 percent 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.

Those efforts were in stark contrast to the video that went viral over the weekend.

“I watched the video, which was hard to watch,” Johnson said. “That is not what Starbucks is about. That is not representative of our mission, our values and our guiding principles.”

Gauda, who has developed workplace inclusion and diversity strategies for corporate clients, cautioned that any unconsciousbias training should not be treated as a “special subject” but incorporated as a core part of its employee training.

“I would suspect that this particular issue is something that has occurred before,” Gauda said. “The company is in crisis mode now, but they should not look at this as an isolated issue.”