When Public Relations involves going “You know what? This was the wrong thing to do, and we’re going to make sure that everyone in our stores knows it was the wrong thing to do, and how they can avoid doing it.”, then PR moves are a good thing.
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Great, great image. You have caught the spirit of this event with 100% accuracy.
In a normal world, an employee who treated a coworker or customer in a racist manner would be fired, and that employee’s manager would be disciplined. This is perfectly reasonable, and I have been involved in disciplining employees in that scenario.
It’s only in the world we live in right now that a company thinks it necessary to involve all 100,000+ employees in a global demonstration of self abasement.
Why do I envision a caffeine addicted person going postal after tearfully beating on every Starbucks door in his neighborhood and then ramming his truck into the last one. I want to see 8000 security camera feeds from that day.
It’s only some people in the world we live in right now who think that when a company has acknowledged publicly that it could do better, and then makes an effort to help its employees do so, its actions shoud be sneered at as a “global demonstration of self-abasement.”
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I’m genuinely impressed. It may be a PR move, but it’s not a cheap one, and it makes for a powerful statement.
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Oh, hell, you know what will happen here.
For the 98% of Starbucks employees who would never treat a customer in a racist manner, this is superfluous.
For the 2% who might, they’ll sit through the videos, doodling on their notepads, working on their passive-aggressive moods. Maybe they’ll do something racist in the future and get fired, maybe they won’t.
This is all about Starbucks management making an effort to tell the world “Hey, we’re sorry. We now know that no matter how woke you think you are, you can never be woke enough. Never, never, never. We’re so sorry. And here are some well-known diversity experts we hired to tell you how sorry we are. Did I mention that we’re sorry?”
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So people are going to be assholes and we might as well just shoot on sight cause otherwise they will keep existing?
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And here’s the thing, rarely have I ever been convinced that a company issuing a public apology really is sorry. Their sincerity veiled by a carefully worded press release which too often turns into a non-apology.
I hear what you’re saying, but I have a hard time understanding how this should color my perception of the intent behind these actions.
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People who suffer from such a paucity of vision that they can’t imagine the world can ever change are doomed to be surprised when change does occur. They also, by their resignation that nothing can change, surrender any chance to influence the direction of that change.
People who have the vision to imagine a better future may be often disappointed, but because they at least have an idea of what could be better, they can try to make choices and take actions to bring it about.
Which would you rather be?
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OBVIOUSLY Starbucks is run by a bunch of crybaby soyboys.
In a NORMAL world, REAL MEN never admit they did anything wrong.
REAL MEN identify OTHER PEOPLE as the problem and then PUNISH THEM!
I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN DISCIPLINING EMPLOYEES because I am an alpha dominator, not an estrogenicized cuck. You’ll never see ME abasing myself in public like this. Starbucks is WEAK.
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Sounds like the plan is working.
Yeah. I see no evidence that the leadership of Starbucks did anything wrong. A couple of their employees did.
Edit: Something like 10,000 drunk drivers were involved in fatal crashes in the USA each year. How productive do you think it would be to require all 220 million American drivers to spend a day sitting in a room where someone tells them how bad drunk driving is?
From the company’s announcement that Xeni quoted:
partners will go through a training program designed to address implicit bias, promote conscious inclusion, prevent discrimination and ensure everyone inside a Starbucks store feels safe and welcome.
I think you may be underestimating the extent of implicit bias within the general population, and correspondingly in the population of Starbucks employees all over the US.
Implicit bias—in which, even though people don’t intend to treat someone in a racist manner, and even if they sincerely may not want to be a person who treats others in a racist manner, and even if they sincerely believe that they would never treat others in a racist manner, they still do—because of unconscious opinions, widely-shared unexamined erroneous beliefs, lifelong social training, etc.
The issue of implicit bias exists far beyond just this one employee at this particular store. I imagine Starbucks realizes that if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere—and that it does. Thus the need for training at all 8000+ US Starbucks stores, because disciplining a single employee isn’t going to address widespread underlying issues.
I suppose you’re familiar with Harvard’s Project Implicit, which can show you about the implicit associations you make in regard to race?
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Heh, I think you reeled in at least one with that one!
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Real life just isn’t as clean as all that. The two men in question were there to wait for a third person who they were meeting with. If you have a “tables are for customers” policy and someone comes in and puts their coat down over the back of a chair, do you run right over to them to say, “Hey, tables are for customers only” or do you wait a second, figuring they’ll probably come and buy something when they are done or that their friend is already in line ordering for them?
How long do you wait? How much understanding do you show? When someone says, “Oh, my friend is supposed to meet me here in five minutes” do you enforce the policy? What if their friend doesn’t arrive in five minutes? Ten minutes?
Customer service is more complicated that applying a set of policies. Being kind and considerate to other humans beings is as well. Making policies that don’t reference race doesn’t end racism.
Public information campaigns about drunk driving are why we have so much less drunk driving today than we did in the past.
You may doubt that a one-day training course is an effective way to change the behaviour of the employees of a corporation. Having been to one-day training courses I share that doubt. I don’t think anyone has any idea how to effectively combat racism or change the behaviour of employees in general. That doesn’t make their attempts to do so disingenuous.
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I’m familiar with “implicit bias”. I’ve taken the online tests. And there is a good deal of difference of opinion as to whether or not those tests are internally reliable or good predictors.
The Starbucks case would be a great test subject though. Suppose we were to randomly select 5,000 Starbucks employees worldwide and give them an IAT on May 1st, one month before the day of racial bias education, and then retest test them on July 1st, one month after. Do you think that there would be a statistically significant difference?
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While I totally agree that a one-day training isn’t going to reverse employees’ racial bias, closing the majority of their stores for a day sends a powerful message to them: stop fucking up. This sort of behavior will destroy our company if we don’t fix it, and it’s up to the employees to fix it. Starbucks needs to have a zero-tolerance policy around racial bias.
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I translate that as “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.” That is a philosophy which I have always rejected.
(Edit) Excellent article here:
Makes the point that Starbucks’ corporate image is all about making the white, professional demographic feel good and guilt-free about shopping there. I couldn’t agree more.
Well, the alternative of doing absolutely nothing seems to have paid off supremely well so far, so I can certainly understand your objection to any attempts to address the issue, however imperfect they may be.
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The point of being aware of the implicit bias phenomenon is not to some how eliminate this in yourself. Eliminating something that is largely an unconscious effect is very difficult. What you might do instead is to not just react to this bias and then act in a racist way, but instead stop, think a second, and then not do the racist thing. We are very fortunately not required to go along with the first instinct that pops into our heads!
Being aware of implicit bias means we can take positive action to circumvent this effect. For example, since it has been shown that job applications with non-white sounding names get fewer call back, any company that is serious about tackling racist hiring patterns will anonymize incoming applications and then do their selection for whom to interview.
It is more about making a conscious effort to think things through and act correctly than somehow eliminate “bad” unconscious impulses! Which is also why it is so fundamentally uninteresting to ask if some person is “really racist” deep down inside somewhere. I don’t care! Its not important! Strive to not act racist, stop, think, act. Don’t just react!
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