Starbucks has finally admitted that it wasn’t a great idea to allow anyone and everyone to sit in their coffee shops and use their restrooms. In practice, this has meant that every type of cheapskate, grifter, and drug addict could set up shop in any Starbucks, monopolize the bathroom, and generally crowd out the paying customers.
The AP summarizes how the current policy came to be. The policy was adopted
after two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks where they had gone for a business meeting. The individual store had a policy of asking non-paying customers to leave, and the men hadn’t bought anything. But the arrest, which was caught on video, was a major embarrassment for the company.
Put another way, two men decided to meet up at Starbucks and rather than pay even a few bucks to use Starbucks’ real estate, which was maintained and kept clean by Starbucks staff, these men insisted they had a right to use other peoples’ property for free.
When police were called to eject the trespassers, the two non-customers threw the usual temper tantrum that we have come to associate with race grifters who use threats of lawsuits to get what they want.
2018—right in the middle of the first Trump administration—was a time when corporate America was going to great pains to show the world how enlightened it was. Starbucks’s then-CEO, Howard Schultz was especially enthusiastic about pandering to race-based pressure groups like BLM and its clones. So, Schultz instituted the open-door policy which ensured that paying customers would subsidize the non-customers who demanded to use Starbucks stores as a free recreation area.
Now, it turns out that it wasn’t a great idea. Sales at Starbucks stores fell repeatedly throughout 2024, and Starbucks’ current CEO is trying to repair the damage done by Schultz. Perhaps all those paying customers got sick of having to sit near tweakers and aggressive homeless loungers in Starbucks stores. Perhaps customers got sick of being lectured by baristas about race relations. Or maybe people are just sick of paying five bucks for a mediocre cup of coffee.
In any case, Starbucks has now decided that you have to actually be a customer to use their property.
Whatever the cause, this is clearly a victory over the politics of the BLM era when race baiters repeatedly used lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits and legislation, to exploit private companies. Essentially, the open-door policy victimized the civilized paying customers who didn’t mind conforming to the basic rules of civilization. That is, the paying customers thought it was fair to pay for access to private property.
Thanks to the discipline of the marketplace, Starbucks has been forced to come back around to caring about the company’s actual customers and now thinks that the stores should be for the customers only.
We all know what will happen next. Some cultural Marxists will test the company’s resolve by staging a “meeting” at one of the stores but will refuse to buy anything. Then, when the police show up, the would-be trespassers will record it all and post it on social media to show the world how Starbucks is perpetuating colonialist exploitation by refusing to allow everyone to use someone else’s property. We’ll be told that everyone has a right to make a scene at the Starbucks, and shoot up in the Starbucks bathroom, as a way of striking a blow for “decolonization.”
Fortunately, it seems that the moment when this tactic worked may be past. For now.
