Philadelphia Community Leaders Push Starbucks to Address Racial Injustice
April 18 2018 - 04:59PM
Dow Jones News
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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