By Julie Jargon 

Top Starbucks Corp. executives and approximately 40 Philadelphia clergy and community leaders met on Wednesday in what local leaders say was the beginning of an effort to push the coffee company to play a leading role in addressing racial injustice.

The meeting, attended by Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz and Chief Executive Kevin Johnson, came a few days after a social-media outcry about the treatment of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks last week.

A Starbucks manager had called police when the men allegedly refused to leave the cafe after they were denied use of the restroom because they hadn't purchased anything. A video of the men being handcuffed by police went viral online over the weekend and Starbucks apologized.

"We want to develop a partnership with Starbucks that will extend beyond this crisis moment," said Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, pastor of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the meeting was held, and a member of POWER, the group that organized it.

Starbucks didn't respond to requests for comment about the meeting.

The coffee chain's consumer-perception scores have fallen to the lowest level in more than two years in the wake of the incident, according to YouGov BrandIndex, a consumer-perception research service. The firm said Starbucks's consumer "buzz" score, which measures what consumers are hearing about a brand, fell by 21 points in the days since the video of the incident went viral -- the steepest drop since November 2015, when customers accused Starbucks of being anti-Christmas for coming out with red holiday cups instead of its usual cups illustrated with Christmas designs.

Following the incident in Philadelphia last week, people took to social media, calling for a boycott of Starbucks and there were protests at the store on Monday. The manager who made the call to police no longer works there, Starbucks has said, and the company on Tuesday said it would close all of its more than 8,000 U.S. company-owned stores for an afternoon next month to provide employees with antiracial-bias education.

Members of POWER and other advocacy groups that attended the meeting provided Starbucks with a list of demands, including that the company team up with them to address the role it plays in the gentrification of black neighborhoods and to examine its policies regarding how customers are treated.

The group also asked that Starbucks pay all of its workers at least $15 an hour and to open cafes in black neighborhoods of Philadelphia and invest revenue from them back into the community the way it has done with other "community" Starbucks cafes in low-income neighborhoods of Queens, Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., where the stores employ local workers and serve food made by neighborhood vendors.

Hugh Taft-Morales, head of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, who attended the meeting, said he was impressed with the Starbucks executives' willingness to engage with community leaders.

"We are calling on them to raise the level of dialogue about race among CEOs who may not be as open as they are," he said.

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 18, 2018 16:44 ET (20:44 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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