“Coffee Is Black…Not Blonde”

By Shawn Jorgensen on May 3, 2018 • ( Leave a comment )

On May 29, 2018, Starbucks will not be accepting your Starbucks coffee cards in payment for that venti coffee frappuccino double-double with two scoops of ice and blended with extra whip, that you love so much. In fact, they won’t be accepting your orders at all that day. Why? Because management has decided that it’s more important to instead play the race card with all 157,000 employees, at all 8,000 stores in the United States. One question remains – once the leftist social justice warriors are finished with this latest example of corporate virtue signalling gone wild…

…will you ever be able to order your coffee “black” at Starbucks again?

Police officers stand guard in front of a Center City Starbucks in Philadelphia as protesters demonstrate on April 16 (Credit: Reuters/Mark Makela). News headlines today (May 2, 2018) across America bleated the fact that the largest coffee company in the world reached a financial settlement with two black men that they recently had arrested at one of their stores last month.

On April 12, the two men, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, were awaiting a third person for a business meeting at one of the company’s Philadelphia locations, when one of them asked a staff member if he could use the restroom. The store manager refused, stating that the facilities were for paying customers. The men had planned to order a coffee, but were simply waiting for the third man to join them – even offering to have the third man speak to the manager on the phone, to confirm he was on the way.

However, she asked them several times to purchase something or to please leave – having had many similar experiences with people before of every color. When they refused to leave, she perhaps over-reacted when she called the police to have the men removed from the store. Of course, the police could have refused to do so, if they actually thought it was a nuisance call. But they didn’t.

The two men arrested at the Philadelphia Starbucks in April. (Credit: Jacqueline Larma, AP)And it begs the obvious question – why didn’t the two just buy a coffee to shut her up? Her request was not unreasonable – many restaurants have an obvious “buy something or get out” policy – and why shouldn’t they? The fact that they even had the police called on them and STILL DIDN’T buy something, says to me they were just deadbeats.

That particular staff member is no longer a Starbucks employee. The fact this was so blown out of proportion was not her fault – it was escalated by the two men’s lack of purchasing an item in the store, as requested on several occasions. It was the CEO’s comments and charges of racism concerning her and her actions, and the massive over-reaction with this racism training day, that caused the most problems. Frankly, it might give her grounds for a classic employment standards lawsuit. I kind of hope it does.

How many times have you been to Starbucks lately, and noted that half the restaurant was filled with university students and other assorted, unwashed vagrants who were there for the free Wi-Fi and weren’t drinking or eating anything either? It’s an annoying commonality – to the point that I personally avoid the stores like the plague if at all possible. So clearly Starbucks has some corporate culture issues they need to address with their “clientele” as well – not just blaming staff for being racist, when that was not the real issue here.

Melissa DePino, a Starbucks customer who recorded the video of the arrest that went viral on social media, said:

“These guys never raised their voices. They never did anything remotely aggressive . . . I was sitting close to where they were. Very close. They were not doing anything. They weren’t.”

Starbucks’ CEO Kevin Johnson in happier, more rational times. (Credit: Starbucks) Yes, we know – that’s the problem. At the point it started to escalate, they should have been BUYING A COFFEE. But they didn’t.

And the Starbucks CEO and his weasel statements didn’t help either. “I want to thank Donte and Rashon for their willingness to reconcile,” CEO Kevin Johnson said in a statement. “I welcome the opportunity to begin a relationship with them to share learnings and experiences. And Starbucks will continue to take actions that stem from this incident to repair and reaffirm our values and vision for the kind of company we want to be.“

Sigh. I’m happy to note that in this settlement – each man will a crisp, new… $1.00 bill. That’s a ONE DOLLAR bill. An interesting settlement offer from a company that was so concerned about the message that their arrest sent. But the men obviously started to realize how badly this was starting to look. I hope. Regardless, this settlement still doesn’t give enough to buy a coffee of any size at Starbucks, so I hope they plan to bring their wallets next time.

This same CEO wingnut took their “former” employee’s singular over-reaction at one store – and turned it into a cringe-worthy over-reaction at all 8,000 stores nationwide. It was his brainiac idea to force all staff to go through race sensitivity training. No no no – it doesn’t matter if, as a Starbucks employee, you don’t have a racist bone in your body. You are guilty until proven innocent at this nuthouse, I’m sorry to tell you – because all of the employees there apparently suffer from “unconscious bias“, according to the company.

The only thing “unconscious” in this story is the senior management.

I’m positive that the CEO and others advising him thought that this would be a great way to score brownie points (oops, we can’t say that either, I guess) with their mostly left-leaning clientele. At least, they thought they were left-leaning clientele. Turns out that a lot of these people were even more offended by Starbucks for this race training plan than if they had just left it alone. If I worked at Starbucks, I wouldn’t be for long, if someone dared to tell me that I was inherently racist and had to take special training as a result.

Not surprisingly, the news media was all over this story too – and they were equally all over the place in how they covered it as well:

“Starbucks’ epic fail after an epic fail.” (Al Jazeera, April 23)
“Why Starbucks shouldn’t be praised for its misguided racism workshops.” (The Guardian, April 18)
“In Starbucks Controversy, America’s Anti-racism Industry Opts for Symbol Over Substance”. (Haaretz, May 2)
“Starbucks’ racial bias training alone won’t fix a racist society (The Conversation, April 24)

It seems the company can’t win with the left or the right.

Of course, the company brought it on themselves. First they announced that, as part of this racism training, that the Anti-Defamation League was going to be participating. Leftists freaked out and protested across America, and Starbucks demoted ADL to a consulting role, and named representatives of three prominent African-American-led civil rights organizations to lead the training.

Yet another stupid mistake of Starbucks’ in this whole idiotic scenario. You may recall that the mission of the ADL is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” How Starbucks can show their face in public after inviting one of the most prominent anti-racism groups in the world – then, in a completely racist move, falling to the howls of the anti-Semitic far left.

Linda Sarsour, also co-chair of the Million Women’s March (and an outrageous anti-Semitic Muslim cow), wrote on Facebook that ADL is “an anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian organization that peddles Islamophobia and attacks America’s prominent Muslim orgs and activists and supports/sponsors US law enforcement agents to travel and get trained by Israeli military.”

So what? By the way, Libtard Linda, most thinking people in America are against any Muslim group that spouts such hatred. This is the same woman who famously tweeted: “Nothing is creepier than Zionism”.

No, nothing is creepier than HER.

So then Starbucks appointed Eric Holder, Attorney General under the Obama administration, to run the training day. They just cannot figure it out. This is the same guy that suggested in April 2014 that he and President Obama had faced tougher opposition from the Republican right on account of their race. Oh no, not because of your socialist, anti-American policies that rewarded countries like Iran and insulted allies like Israel. It couldn’t be because of that.

Racism training is Big Business. Imagine how much it will cost Starbucks to pay and train 157,000 people for the day (at let’s say 6 hours at $8/hour). That’s over $7.5 million, plus the lost revenue for the day, and the cost of the trainers – whether they have people at each store, or are watching it on some kind of televised feed – this is costing a fortune.

Of course Black Lives Matter activists jumped all over this story as well, desperate to be included in any news cycle today – let’s face it, most of America were happy to see them in the rear view mirror ages ago, thanks to their antics in cities like Ferguson, Missouri.

Protestor Jack Willis, 26, demonstrates outside a Starbucks on April 15 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Credit: Mark Makela/Getty Images)I think the nonsensical, virtue signalling, leftist crap that Starbucks has stirred up over this situation could not be expressed any better than was seen on a sign held up by one black protestor at an anti-Starbucks rally recently, that said:

“Coffee is BLACK, not Blonde”

NOPE, not correct. And how do people think that they can state such overtly racist and stupid nonsense, while protesting racism, and think they can get away with it?

By the way, “black” coffee is simply the stated preference of a coffee drinker not to have milk or cream in their coffee. Coffee is, in fact, dark brown in color. “Blonde”, however, is actually a variety of roasted coffee beans that come from Ethiopia, Uganda and on the slopes of the Tacana Volcano in Guatemala. They are light in color, have smooth, dry surfaces, and are more flavorful and acidic tasting than darker roasts. They are sweeter, and have more caffeine apparently as well.

These are also black, not blonde….Being “blonde”, by the way, is not the opposite of black. Many Asians, Latinos and even black folks dye their hair blonde as well, as a way of standing out.