Today, May 29, in an historically significant act of showy self-flagellation, all 8,000 company-owned Starbucks will close at 2:30 p.m. for what is being called “racial bias training.”
For those who want to drink Starbucks coffee or protest Starbucks, most of the 7,000 Starbucks licensed stores, like those in Target, will remain open.
For those who may want to shift their coffee loyalties–69 cents for a senior coffee at McDonalds and you only have to be 55!–it might pay to review the incident at the Philadelphia Starbucks that prompted the company wide re-education.
Two men came to the Starbucks. They bought nothing, but they did take up a table that was thus denied to paying customers.
When one asked to use the restroom, he was denied the punch-in bathroom code which is reserved for staff and paying customers.
To free up their table for customers, the manager asked the men to leave Starbucks three times. The men refused. Lacking any other option, the manager called the police.
The police politely asked the men to leave the Starbucks three times. When the men refused, the police felt they had no option but to arrest the men for refusal to obey a police officer and for trespassing on private property.
Had the two men been white, the story would have gone no further than a neighborhood Starbucks in Philadelphia. But they were black, and the story quickly went viral nationwide.
The manager failed to understand–shhhh!–that public relations at a piously progressive company like Starbucks dictates a disparate treatment for customers based on race.
To assure something this horrible never happens again, Starbuck’s famously “woke” CEO Kevin Johnson will join his 175,000 employees in submitting to “training around unconscious bias [and] conscious inclusion.” This, said Johnson repeatedly, was the “first step in a journey.” Where to? Best not ask.
“The world that the diversity trainers will usher the baristas into has a pristine, seamless wholeness to it,” argues Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard.
Ferguson continues, “It is a world unto itself, unblemished by contact with reality, built from pure ideology: untutored trainers instructing blameless subjects in bogus science to cure a psychological defect that can’t be shown to exist, all at a staggering expense of time and money.”
Business as usual in the wonderful world of corporate “diversity.”
