Howard Schultz is the latest sacrificial lamb for trigger-happy political journos and talking heads. His crime: Having announced that he might run for the presidency as an independent. This morning, Schultz was asked on Morning Joe how much a box of Cheerios costs, to which he answered that he didn’t know (as if Joe Scarborough knows the answer). And on Tuesday, Timothy Burke wrote in the Daily Beast that under Schultz, Starbucks’s music offerings were “painfully white.”
Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO now actively contemplating an independent presidential bid, has had a tricky history dealing with race issues.
He was loudly mocked in 2015 for launching a “Race Together” campaign, which was done to spark conversations about racial inequality among patrons of his coffeeshop empire but which critics called tone deaf. Even before then, his tenure leading the Seattle Supersonics ownership group, raised eyebrows when the team replaced in-arena hip-hop music with “mellow jazz” and Bobby Darin.
. . . Starbucks, which sold music alongside coffee from 1994 to 2015, had, what could only be described as, a flat and white selection of tunes to offer.
A “tricky history dealing with race”? Schultz was responsible for launching the initiative in 2015 that encouraged baristas to stimulate discussions about the “divisive role unconscious bias plays in our society and the role empathy can play to bridge those divides.” He offered baristas tuition reimbursement if they didn’t already have a degree, which 70 percent of Starbucks workers didn’t in 2015, as part of a program that, by its own terms, was aimed at helping underprivileged young workers. Starbucks has also offered healthcare to full-time and part-time employees since 1988, and beginning July 1, will give all employees working 23 hour weeks five days of sick leave and paid parental leave for up to six weeks. A tricky history?
Sure, if I were to be a Starbucks patron — which I am not — I would prefer not to pay a 600 percent markup on a drink only for it to come with a lecture about race (I studied poetry in college, so I’ve paid my dues). But what I want doesn’t matter.
Starbucks is pretty generous to its employees, and is more generous to its part-time workers than any employer I’ve ever encountered, and was evidently so concerned by race relations that it tried to use its perch to improve them. Playlists? Really?