It is apparently nigh impossible to spot character in others while having never cultivated your own.

Or nice clothes, if you aren’t in a spot to let people who don’t cause problems hang out.

Can't speak to the LA thing. Nor, really, can Ms. Herzog who has only a YouTube video to go by, suspiciously turning up right in the wake if an incident in Philadelphia. But I will say that as a corporation and in treatment of employees and customers Starbucks is well left of center, to put things in context.

In Philidelphia the cops were in the right as was the store. If the owner or employees of a store repeatedly ask non-customers to leave and they refuse there's a handy old word in English to describe them, regardless of skin color. Trespasser.

If someone meeting me is 2 hours late I'd never know it. I'd have texted them 15 minutes in to confirm they were coming. Half hour in I'd be gone.

For those of you who don't know: it's common courtesy either to buy a coffee or leave the limited tables to paying customers at coffee shops anyway. They aren't public rest stations. These men sat down and hung out for two hours tten got angry when requested by employees to buy something or leave. They left neither employee or police much choice.

They didn't order anything. Bad manners - that's all.

Starbucks is anti-black, that's why they now only serve blonde... Kappa

Racist. All Starbucks employees, training, corporate culture, coffee, and scones are racist. Boycott them into the stone ages. Throw rocks through their windows in protest. Shame their employees out of their social circles. Attack the corporate patriarchy until there is nothing left...

Or buy something before you sit down and enjoy the beverage and free WiFi racism free.

With all the BS @3 wove into the telling of what happened in Philadelphia, I'm surprised the two men weren't grabbing white women and smoking crack in the cafe.

He only apologized for damage control.

Anybody who goes to a Cafe should know it is customary to buy something to sit down, even something small while you "wait for a friend" (for 2 hours! Convenient story). But trash doesn't care about social norms like this... Ave Rats do it up in the Udistrict all the time. It's good that the police were called; the response was over the top though.

@3 & 8: Former Starbucks barista here, and neither of you know what you're talking about. People meet up at Starbucks all the damn time without buying anything while they wait. I've had people sit in my store all damn day sipping on a free ice water. I personally have gotten the code to the restroom at Starbucks while on the road without buying anything.
This incident was racist.
These men were treated horribly and all the other customers recognized that and objected to their treatment.
The manager of that store has been fired.
The fucking CEO of Starbucks is flying to fucking Philadelphia
To apologize in person to these two men.
The two of you are wrong, wrong racisty wrong.
Now please, for the love of good God Almighty, Shut. Your. Racist. Fucking. Pieholes.

@13: *Drops mic*

@12: You also can join @8 & 3 in the Racist Douchbag Penalty Box.

@9

Which part?

They were there for 2 hours 'waiting for someone' without purchasing anything.

The only place I'm waiting an addtional 2 hours for a late appointment is someplace I want to be anyway. Like a coffee shop with a good book. Buying coffee. Rather than assuming Starbucks just wanted to create a public oasis for hanging out gratis out of sheer good will.

Asked to leave by employees, they refused. Police arrived and asked them to leave. They refused. Conveniently the person they were waiting for for 2 hours showes up just then. None of that is controversial.

Starbucks is reviewing policy for damage control. If you ever get a job outside McDonakds you'll find admitting wrong falaciously is often a better policy for monetary reasons than standing one's ground.

But I breathlessly await your aid in correcting my factual errors. Well, until I breathe again in a second or two.

@14: <3

@13

Go to hell.

I'm awfully tired of being called racist by peopke who can't be bothered to look the damn word up.

Where did I mention the race of tbese men? Where is the manager accused of doing so? The police, onr of whom was black, did they shout racial epithets?

The answers, since English appears not to be the first language of anyone onbthe far left, are: 1) nowhere 2 and 3) no.

Starbucks will do what corporate officers must. They'll protect their brand. I don't begrudge them. Don't care since Ibrarely buy their coffee. But to use it as evidence of sonne kijnd of Starbicks based systemic racism is just ignorant.

The cops shouldn't have been called - but going into a restaurant or coffee shop and treating it as if were your living room without ordering is depraved. I say that as a former waiter - and I know what I'm talking about.

@7: Service has to be requested first.

@16: We have already established that you don't know what you're talking about as far as how things roll in a Starbucks.
I. Do.
The CEO is flying all the way across the country to personally apologize to these two men because what occurred in that store was racist and wrong

And may I suggest that if you are tired of being called a racist that you stop behaving like one and shut your aforementioned pie hole until you learn to do so.

Fear may be the common denominator in this society. It may express itself as racism or bigotry or sexism or whatever, but at its heart so much of this behavior is motivated by fear. It may be fear of harm, or fear of that the Other is not like me or fear that the Other is like me or simply fear that this Other’s existence somehow diminishes my life (like the way the asshole Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby frets that the “colored empires” are coming for his stuff, his womanz and his race).

Fear is never an excuse for bad bigoted behavior, but it may be a compelling explanation. I suspect that if this manager had a close black friend or family member who she trusted, she wouldn’t have called the cops on them if they waited in the store. Or maybe not if these guys were wearing Armani suits. But the unknown can make us really stupid sometimes. I think if everyone were versed in some basic statistics, could accept them as reliable describers of our lives and interpret them honestly we could soothe this fire a bit. For example, the overwhelming majority of black people are not going to and never will hurt anyone else, white people especially. That is a fact, not an opinion.

The question is what do you believe is ethical: Reducing the fear? Ignoring the fear? Defending the fear? Denying the fear? Managing the fear? Exploiting the fear?

Can you sufficiently eliminate the fear? I don’t know; human history doesn’t suggest so. Can you drive down the harmful expressions of it? Human history does suggest so (if you believe the knowledge, experiences and opinions of people like Martin Luther King Jr., Stephen Pinker, Dan Savage, for example). What we have to do is realize fear will always create bigotry, and bigotry will make people do stupid and harmful things. What you do next is up to you: You can deal with the people who do the stupid and harmful things, like disciplining or firing this Starbucks manager. You can defend or rationalize the stupid and harmful things that fear creates and resist any potential progress. You can tear down and paralyze the society and culture from either side of the fence because of a perceived ubiquitous black threat or a theorized menacing white privilege or a theory about the evolutionary hierarchy of crustaceans. You can deal with the fear and its expressions when and where it crops up in life. You can hope to educate people enough to ameliorate it. You can do nothing and just watch it all float by. You can post smug and snarky comments on social media. You can try to engage in conversations and give and takes online or IRL. You can imagine a universal humankind with shared aspirations and challenges. And on and on and on.

There are certain realities. Crime is real, but most black people – or people of any background – aren’t criminals. Discrimination is real, but not all, maybe even not most, white people practice, perpetuate or exploit it. One final one: Racism and bigotry are real, and it doesn’t require that every white person be a racist or bigot for a black person to experience it. So maybe we can start there, with the unity and human decency of declaring a single sentence – “Bigotry, racism and discrimination are wrong in every instance and under every circumstance.” And follow that up with “Try not to be afraid of everything.”

@19: Except that Starbucks bills itself as a "Third Place", which is supposed to be a social setting other than work or home.
They explicitly want people to hang out there, and as I've already said in the stores I worked in I had people hanging out all day sipping on free ice water, I had people waiting to meet up without ordering, and free to use the restroom without ordering.

@24: Thank you for trying to pour oil upon the troubled waters of Slog. You are wise uncle and/or mom. <3

It's only courtesy to buy something first, but plenty of people don't. I think it's only happenstance that these are both Starbucks, this could just as easily happen at any local cafe (and assuredly does frequently, but goes nowhere without a readily identifiable villain), or any convenience store (there is nowhere, nowhere more routinely racist than a bodega). Anti-black bias is the air we breathe. Do people believe that there's anything specific about Starbucks training or employee selection that makes them more racist than other fast-casual restaurants?

Back in the day before I could buy it at a store, I used to buy my weed from a guy name Devon. I've known him and his family for a long time. He happens to be black. I happen to be white. This is also before cell phones. He had a pager. I'd page him and we'd arrange to meet up; Usually behind Dicks on Broadway. My point being that often times he would be late- very, very late to our pre-arranged meetings. My Germanic sensibilities forced me to always be on time to appointments. As I grew up and experienced the world I realized that not everyone has the same sense of time as me. Devon fell into this camp. I'm imagining that the dudes who were arrested were just going about their lives, on their own sense of time and this was at odds with store management. This situation was handled very poorly. I also believe it is an example of unconscious bias on the part of the employees...... not everyone operates on the same speed.

@19 - Agreed but we're not talking about an Applebees. We're talking about a convenience coffee chain whose whole business model is predicated on people parking their asses in the store and mainlining coffee and tea biscuits.

Seattle Starbucks are different in that for the most part I don't see them treated the way they are in Los Angeles and New York and I'm gonna got out on a limb and guess Philly, too: free office space. Starbucks in most places are treated as free office space for people who would rather buy a cup of coffee and homestead wifi than pay for co-working space or deal with a public library. Routinely, the homeless would post up in my local Starbucks and sleep at tables. The baristas would ignore them and the (probably) not homeless as long as they sat quietly, didn't cause a ruckus, and didn't stream porn on their personal devices.

The local Starbucks have slowly started remodeling their stores to be a fancy living room with fireplaces and nice lounge furniture. There is nothing about this situation that suggests that they don't want you to linger forever, especially now that they're starting to sell booze as well. My local Starbucks is filled with retirees who literally camp out there on a single cup of coffee from 8 a.m. until well into the afternoon every single day of the week. The baristas there ignore their penchant for loudly dragging people who show up to buy coffee in yoga pants (Slovenly! Heavens!) and let them take up every single chair in the joint and literally no one seems to care.... because they are white.

Otherwise, yes, its a Starbucks - not a 3 star Michellin experience and the whole thing

...went down the way that it did because of race.

As a point of clarification I don't think Starbucks is implicitly racist as a company at all. This incident is against their stated company core values. Their leadership is holding a company wide meeting this week regarding this and the steps and training that can be implemented enterprise wide to prevent such reprehensible things occurring.
Because they recognize that what happened to these two men was 100% wrong.

@22

First and most importantly, you got the brunt of a more general frustration. For which I apologize. Having said that throwing baseless insults either from the right or left is less than helpful.

2nd I did work in a Starbucks 2 decades ago while in college. Though things may have changed.

3rd, nowhere in any of the reporting I've read were racial epithets or other indications of bias used by either the store manager or responding police.

It is however unfortunate that subconscious racial bias plays a bigger role in things than it ought or than is acknowledged by those who have it.

But they're precisely the ones who can change. An openly racist Aryan Nation thug has a much harder challenge to do so. And calling everyone in that camp names won't help them do so.

@31: (why are we both 31?) centrist, thank you very much for extending an olive branch. I apologize.

Good thing no white people ever loiter in coffee shops, spreading their laptop and shit all over a four-top for hours without ordering, do they? Never happens. And when they do we know the thousands of times the police have been called by business owners to clear them out. Happens thousands of times a day.

Oh. Wait. No, it doesn't.

At that very Starbucks were white people who had been there for hours without ordering anything who were NOT asked to leave.

We know this because they were witnesses who came forward to confront the manager and police at the time. Multiple witnesses have confirmed this. It's even on video.

It was only the "scary" black men asked to leave.

@23: Well taken, but I'm sure you'd agree that bad manners can result in not just a 'first world' drama.

@26 - Thank you Lissa. You are enormously kind and generous for a ferocious rabbit (looks can be deceiving!).

Shaun King pretending to be black is the greatest LARP since Bruce Jenner pretending to be a woman. This guy’s whiter than porcelain but tries to act like he’s all woke and shit.

@37: William, no one knows or cares what you're talking about. A state of being with which I am quite sure you are familiar, as you must experience it on the daily.
Scoot along now.

Re: 33

I'm curious what this program is supposed to accomplish. At a guess it's a false flag program. It's supposed to look like what a certain kind of conservative ideologue thinks the left acts like. Incapable of engaging ideas because the programmer didn't want anything but inchoate rage and childish name calling? Seems an odd site for that though.

Or is it, far more sadly, a real person who is really incapable of anything but this odd juxtaposition of toddler temper tantrums and fully adult vulgarity? Maybe in real life, if so, he or she is capable of thought and engagement with others, and this is the place all the frighteningly intense venom really felt are spewed out? If so at some point he or she will seriously injure both self and probably others- the others in family or friends least expendable. At any rate that level of irrational hatred is a problem needing resolved, not vented with startling frequency daily. If in fact this is a fellow human being it bodes very poorly for him/her and anyone else in their life.

Many of the people who say “Boycott” will be back next week.

I also worked for Starbucks more than a decade ago. There was no consistent policy on "who to let use the bathroom" and "who can sit without ordering". We were told to assume the customer is right. These cases were absolutely racist.

To the guy above: Just because you dont hear someone make a racial slur doesnt mean it isnt racist. Treating someone differently because of their skin color = racist. You dont have to use a slur to meet that threshold.

Starbucks admitted it was racist. The CEO is flying to PA to apologize. You don't find Mea Culpa's bigger than that. For the CA incident, the defenders seem to forget (or ignore) that the manager let the white man who did not order anything use the restroom after denying the black man. I know some of this is typical right wing "soft trolling", but how many argumentative loops are you going to jump through to defend the indefensible? If this were 50 years ago, you would be saying "theres nothing wrong with blacks sitting at the back of the bus. How do we know they didnt want to sit at the back of the bus, its quieter there? I didnt hear racial slurs so how can it be racist?"

@42

With respect this isn't 50 years ago. Racism still exists. It will as long as some people feel the need to blame whatever their problems ore on some 'other,' more's the pity. But the legal structure perpetuating it no longer does. Nor does social acceptance in most people for it.

With equal respect calling someone a racist is seripus enough that asking for some reason to believe the claim isn't unreasonable.

Starbucks is handling this as American should have handled flight complaints. You take seriously how customers view you whether you think the perception well founded or not. An unanswered accusation is, to my thinking unfortunately, thought to be well founded.

There's a reality here for a black man or woman I can't live and must listen to with respect- the reality of being a black man or woman in the world. But there"s also a reality that sometimes if you expect only to be treated as a second class citizen you will only be able to see that kind of thing, whether it actually exists or not.

You can never be too woke for faux social justice outrage

In another account of this, a white jogger had come in, not bought anything, and STILL been allowed to use the damn restroom.

What the hell happened here? Was the manager(who was forced by reality to resign), mentally stuck in the Philadelphia of Frank Rizzo's era? They were obviously telling the truth about waiting for somebody else. Why not believe them, when the manager would clearly have believed any white customer who said the same thing?

These men were going to order, they obviously weren't doing anything threatening or even wrong, and Starbucks itself has admitted they didn't deserve what was done to them.

What, exactly, is there in the former manager's behavior that could possibly be worth going to the mat to defend?

@43: You were doing so well but just couldn't resist the impulse could you?
There is nothing, nothing in the incident to indicate that these the men did anything wrong, including some how bringing this on themselves by "expecting to be treated like second class citizens"
Dude, they were treated like second class citizens.
This is a text book example of racism and you still can't acknowledge that we have a serious problem in this country without trying to shift the blame back onto black people.

It was a shame these men were arrested its a bit to much for their actions they should have just been asked again by police to relocate it wouldve been a much more sensible response and not drawn so much attention. But it is bad form to take up room at an establishment that is meant for customers who have purchased something. Ive been asked to leave stores i was waiting in and out of courtesy obliged and now wait outside unless im meeting someone at the establishment then ill order a small coffee and wait.