Starbucks Is Opening Its Bathrooms to Everyone, No Purchase Required
Starbucks has a new policy — one that would open its bathrooms to people who need to use them, whether they are paying customers or not. This decision looks to be prompted by an incident where two black men were arrested after asking to use the restroom at a Starbucks in Philadelphia.
Previously, Starbucks left it to store managers to decide if someone can use the coffee shop bathroom or not, especially if they were not customers at the time. The new policy followed another announcement that Starbucks will be closing all its stores in the US on May 29, in the afternoon.
"We don't want to become a public bathroom, but we're going to make the right decision 100% of the time and give people the key, because we don't want anyone at Starbucks to feel as if we are not giving access to you to the bathroom because you are less than," Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said on Thursday, May 17, as quoted by the Atlantic Council.
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Before this decision, Schultz also said that they have a "loose policy" in place that meant customers can use the bathroom if they buy something first, "and it's really the judgment of the manager."
During the incident that resulted in the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, it was a manager who elected to call the police after they asked to use the bathroom. The men were reportedly waiting for a business meeting and refused to leave.
On that day, the Starbucks manager involved asked one of the men if they were a customer, to which the man replied that he is not.
"And one thing led to another. And she made a terrible decision to call the police," Schultz recalled.
Starbucks is now planning to conduct a seminar that involves "racial-bias education geared toward preventing discrimination in our stores," according to the Business Insider. It's the reason that the coffee shop giant has announced that they are closing down all their stores across the country on the afternoon of May 29, a week from now.
"The training will be provided to nearly 175,000 partners (employees) across the country, and will become part of the onboarding process for new partners," Starbucks said in a statement.
When the video of the two black men being arrested at the Philadelphia Starbucks went viral, other people of color have come forward to share similar negative experiences that they had at Starbucks. Even black employees who work at Starbucks stores were not surprised by the arrests.
"I feel like their reaction was not well thought out," a former employee who worked at several Starbucks stores in Milwaukee said, referring to Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson's apology.
"I feel like the apology was not really an apology ... I don't know if a Tuesday afternoon is really going to do anything, because this is generational. And this is a cycle," she added.
