Starbucks: Reaffirming Commitment to the Third Place Ideal

On April 12, 2018, two African American entrepreneurs had scheduled a business meeting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. They sat without ordering, waiting for a local businessman to show up for the meeting. The store manager called 911 on them, despite the fact that they were behaving neither violently nor disruptively. When the police arrived soon after the call, they arrested the young men. The incident was viewed by the Starbucks’ leadership team, including the CEO, as “a disheartening situation” and, in the words of John Kelly, the company’s Senior VP of Public Affairs and Social Impact, “a profound failure to live up to our ideals and a violation of our values.” Starbucks, which employed around 175,000 individuals nationwide and served more than four million customers daily in its approximately 8,000 U.S. stores, strived to abide by its mission statement: “…To inspire and nurture the human spirit, one cup, one person, one neighborhood at a time.” The case describes how the company and its leadership responded to the crisis. To react to the incident, the leadership decided to close down its stores for a day of unconscious bias training, aimed at raising awareness of racial bias and discrimination in particular. The company also started a journey of providing more training and development for the partners, to assure that they lived by the company values on a daily basis, and revised store policy that, the leadership believed, contributed to how the store managers and employees in the Rittenhouse Square store behaved back in April 2018. As the case closes, CEO Kevin Johnson reflects on how he could assure that every Starbucks employee not only understood the company mission and values but also truly connected to them emotionally and carry them out daily in their work.