Starbucks closing stores after 2 black men arrested

Close. Racism is legal (we haven't outlawed thinking anything yet), but discrimination based on race is illegal in certain contexts (see the Civil Rights Act of 1964). My argument is that those federal anti-discrimination laws are unconstitutional, because they are justified relying on an over expansive reading of the interstate commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause.

 

Gee, please stop that crap about misogyny and sexism. ( No, the concept of misogyny and sexism is not crap. You introducing it to this conversation is. I have to be very careful - knowing now your mental gymnastics ability)

My posts many pages ago:

"Now certainly, as I've been reviewing the situation, that in certain circumstances, local practices are implemented. In this particular case, the local practice of asking someone who is not a customer to leave the store--and unfortunately, then followed by a call to the police."
- SBUX C.E.O.

"Practice is not policy. It is not complicated."

"I am not arguing that kind of policy does not exist elsewhere (other companies)."

Thanks for posting that signboard of a local practice. Since you are UNABLE to, I will search the policy myself stating that it is Starbucks official policy and mandates staff to turn away "customers/patrons" who, in their perception, are not generating revenue. Because I find it hard to believe that a company will make a major mission statement and in a flip of a page, will codify a policy contradicting it.

Are you getting the drift now Bobby? It is not race related, there is no misogyny involved ON MY PART. Subliminally, maybe it's you?

I apologize I did not keep my last word. This will be it.

 

What evidence do you have the employee was acting in a racist behavior? Why are you making assumptions? Do we live in a world where if anything detrimental happens to a black person and there is not a mound of facts, we automatically default to "but its racism?".

There is evidence these two guys were self entitled assholes. Nobody is faulting the officers for doing their job and the two self entitled guys put themselves in a position to get arrested. We know they were denied access to the restrooms based on not being a customer, not because the color of their skin. They were offered service and they denied it. You're quick to cry racism with no facts when there is suggestive reasoning the two self entitled guys could have acted rudely towards the staff when denied access to the restrooms, which prompted the management to invoke their right to throw out a loiterer.

I tend to find people who find racial boogieman in everything have serious racial issues themselves.

 

Liberals eat their own by not defending a company that did something wrong even though it tends to sway to the left.

Got it.

 

Interesting that you say I have no evidence when your entire post reeks of assumptions with no evidence. There is no way that in 2 minutes the manager could have concluded that these men were loitering without making assumptions herself about the two men based on what they look like. It is common for people to wait on friends at Starbucks first prior to ordering. It's a coffee house for crying out loud. Literally one of the most common places where people meet up for Craigslist transactions too. That also involves a lot of waiting. There is no way that their skin color did not play a part in the cops getting called immediately. I suggest you take an unconscious bias test. Everyone has it.

 

https://www.bizjournals.com/houston...coffee-solutions-to-cease-all-operations.html

 

I ALWAYS wait. I see nothing unusual about their behavior of waiting. They may very well be entitled assholes, but I cannot conclude that from the video or the reported stories. I do conclude that people making that leap of assumption are bias at a minimum.

 

You are just playing semantics games in order to come to the defense of the patriarchy who was attacking this poor woman. A practice is a policy. You know this, but you also know you have no case if you admit the obvious. This was a clear example of men lashing out against a woman for having the audacity to hold them to company standards....and then the male run company turns their back on the woman to defend the men. This is clearly an example of implicit bias against women that is all too common today.

You denying that sexism and misogyny exists shows where you stand on this.

 

As someone who owned a coffee shop for 10 years, I can pretty confidently say a large portion of our sit-down customers did not order right away, either waiting for friends or grabbing a table and setting up laptop, etc. And plenty used the restroom before they ordered. I can't speak for this particular shop, but this is pretty standard practice in virtually every coffee shop I've been to. I'd suspect there are dozens if not hundreds of customers every day at that shop that do the same thing. It would never even occur to me to concerned by it unless the people were repeat offenders who came all the time and never purchased anything.

Also, the "suggestive reasoning" of racism is that the CEO said it was unacceptable and is shutting down thousands of stores for a day and costing themselves millions of dollars in order to do implicit bias training. If it was 2 ******* customers, pretty sure the company wouldn't go through all that to address the wrong issue or get some PR for a day - it's pretty clear that CEO, after looking at the issue, decided it was at least partly caused by implicit bias.

 

We have videos showing the two guys giving the officers a hard time ... to the point where they get arrested. In the video, they are pulling the race card. These are not assumptions. Go watch the video. The two men admitted the employee came over to them and asked if they wanted something.

There is no evidence of this being racial. There is no evidence of it not being racial. The only bias is people taking the two guys words as facts, which includes them feeling being profiled.

We have no idea why the employee called 911 if it was indeed within two minutes of their arrival. Just as much as you look for the racial boogieman in everything, we can come up with dozens of other reasons why she did it, including these two guys were self entitled assholes and provoked her for not letting them use the restroom.

Many of us have been asked to leave the premises at one time, for various reasons. Most of us leave w/out incident when asked. We dont defy the authorities. We dont come up with 'common knowledge' rules like 'everyone meets at Starbucks for Craigslist transactions'.

We dont need to burn the world down based on assumptions.

 

First of all, they weren't customers, secondly this is clearly just a PR stunt that is 100% due to the 2 assholes being black. If they were anything else, this wouldn't even be a story. It would just be "2 random assholes kicked out of store for loitering, film at 11"

The race pimps blow it up to be more than that....because that's their job. If they don't make mountains of molehills, they don't have a job.

 

I dont disagree that coffee shops are a common place to just hangout. I also believe Starbucks encouraged people to come hang out at Starbucks and use their wifi. What the two guys did was not unreasonable to choose Starbucks. I dont think any of that is unreasonable.

What we dont have is the employees side of the story. We only have the two guys side of the story. And everyone is automatically assuming its a racial thing. Im not saying its absolutely not a racial incident. It could be. Just like the two guys could have pissed the employee off and she was looking for a reason to kick them out.

And yes, it is ABSOLUTELY a PR thing, even if it was a racial incident. If you had a chain of thousands of restaurants, would you shut them all down for one bad apple? And even if the chain had a racial issue, you wouldn't shut them all down at once if you were truly trying to fix a problem like this. As you said, its costing them multi millions of dollars to do this. This is a very inefficient way to provide training. It is a very public way to provide training. Most jobs provide continuous on the job training which this could be covered. Out of all the chains out there, Starbucks is going to be the one that least likely needs this kind of training considering the company is very progressive and tends to hire progressive employees. How much racial training can one get in a day? Are all future employees going to get a full day of implied training? I think not. This is 100% PR.

Why would the police commissioner come out in a definitive manner and say he stands behind his officers, what they did was correct, and it was their obligation to remove the two guys .... only to come back several hours after the story went viral about racism, retract his statement and give some half ass response about how 'everyone knows Starbucks is a place to meet up' and the officers should not have removed them.

This is damage control well executed by Starbucks and poorly executed by the police commissioner.

 

At what point does one become a customer? I have been at restaurants and "hang-outs" before and I have waited to order (appetizers, drinks or meal) until the rest of my party showed up. While I sit there for 10 minutes waiting am I a customer? Or do I become the customer once my party shows up and I order a beer to start?

 

Tough question, but I can tell you when a person becomes a non-customer, that happens when they refuse to become a customer when informed they need to do so in order to use the facilities of a business.

I'm sure the specific timing varies, but once that conversation is had, you either become a customer or you are a non-customer. For example, you can sit by yourself at a bar for an hour before the bartender finally asks you to order something or get out and at that point you either become a customer or leave. If the bartender asks you that 30 minutes into you sitting there, that's when it has to happen. If you ask the bartender for darts 5 minutes after you get there and he tells you that they are for customers only, at that point is when you have to decide either to be a customer or leave.

In this instance, the 2 guys asked to use the restroom which was for customers only and when they were informed of that, they decided that they didn't want to become customers, that decision is why they had to leave.

 

This isn't really true - we also have a lot of fellow customers' sides of the story. And the CEO saying it was discrimination. And the police saying there was no evidence of an actual disturbance. It's a lot more than just the 2 customers.

If Starbucks just wanted to fix PR, they would fire the manager, publicly apologize to the men, and say the company is going to do better and say "we'll do more training blah blah". They wouldn't shut down thousands of stores for no reason. As you said, no one really doubts that Starbucks is a progressive company, so there's no need to spend millions of dollars and piss off lots of their daily customers who aren't going to be able to get coffee that day - they can pretty easily fix it with words and small actions, if that's all they wanted to do.

FWIW, I don't have too much problem with the cops' actions, on the surface - if they are called for a disturbance, they have to probably assume the employee is telling the truth (I'm assuming it was all cordial / non-violent, etc). And then once the people refuse to leave, they are trespassing and the police probably don't have a lot of choice but to forcibly remove them. If it was my staff, I'd want the same from the police, regardless of whether my staff ultimately were in the right or wrong. The problem was at the Starbucks manager level.

 

Well they do have to instruct their people that rules don't apply to black people. It's very important that they spread the soft bigotry of low expectations. You can't expect certain people to act like what you'd expect from "normal" humans. If people are from any clear oppressed group, you have to threat them differently, their identity makes them different from normal people. Rules cannot apply to them or the company is going to throw you under the bus. It's important for every employee to know that.

 

You can also conclude that people leaping to racism are making assumptions as well. There's no evidence for or against racism in this incident.

 

Regardless of what happened here, I don't think it takes more than ten minutes at a fast food service to assess rather they are purchasing something

 

Except for the Executive Chairman saying there was. Now, folks can say that was just PR, but as @Major said, they could have done a lot of other PR related things without the EC saying he has no doubt there was racial bias involved.