The Best Thing That Happened This Week: Starbucks Said “Never Mind”
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz speaks at the coffee company’s annual shareholders meeting in Seattle on March 18th.
When Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced the company’s new social-justice initiative — having baristas write “Race Together” on coffee cups to encourage conversations about, uh, race — we here at Philly Mag shuddered, long and hard.
Hey, we’re journalists. We love us some coffee. And while we have a fancy in-house coffee machine — it grinds the beans right before your eyes! — we are journalists, so we prefer to watch someone else work. So we love Starbucks. Besides, what journalist today doesn’t have five bucks to blow on a caramel flan skim-milk latte?
On the other hand … we’re Philly Mag. And if anyone has learned the hazards of a flat white approach to the touchy topic of race, baby, we have. Oh boy, Howard, we thought, you are gonna get schooled.
He did. Last Sunday, with its grand scheme mocked by everyone from Gawker to Twitter to NPR, Starbucks threw in the towel. No more messages on coffee cups. No more worrying that your barista will open up a dialogue instead of just getting you your goddamned coffee. Now we can all get back to not talking about that thing we all talk about all the time.
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