US: 8,000 Starbucks outlets to shut for racial-tolerance training
Starbucks
The outlets will shut down for the afternoon on May 29. The move comes after a Starbucks employee called the police on two black patrons in Philadelphia
Starbucks Corpwill close 8,000 company-owned US cafes for the afternoon on May 29 so 175,000 employees can undergo racial tolerance training in response to protests and calls for boycotts after the arrest of two black men waiting in a Philadelphia store.
Starbucks will be working with Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Heather McGhee, president of Demos former USAttorney General Eric Holder and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League to create this program.
Once the company has completed this training at its company-owned locations it will make it available to its licensed partners.
The company said in the Tuesday announcement that it will also provide training materials for non-company workers at the roughly 6,000 licensed Starbucks cafes that will remain open in locations such as grocery stores and airports.
The announcement from world’s biggest coffee company comes as it tries to cool tensions after the Philadelphia incident last week sparked accusations of racial profiling at the chain, which is the subject of a boycott campaign on social media.
During the early demonstration that forced the store to close in Philadelphia on Tuesday, protesters called the mammoth coffee chain "anti-black." The store reopened hours later.
Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Kevin Johnson hopes to meet with the two afro men arrested at one of its Philadelphia cafes last week to apologise for the incident, which has sparked accusations of racial profiling at the coffee chain.
The men, who had not made a purchase, were handcuffed and arrested for trespassing on Thursday after a store manager called 911 and reported them for refusing to leave. Witnesses said the men were calmly sitting in the cafe and in a widely viewed video, some patrons asked police whether they were targeted because they are black.
Police released the men, who were not charged.