I walked past the Starbucks on Southwest Broadway at two thirty this afternoon and there was a printed sign taped inside the door. Closed for the afternoon. Getting together with our partners to talk about how to make this a place where everyone feels welcome.
Roughly eight thousand company stores, dark at the same time, on a Tuesday, in May. Somebody ran that number before anybody signed off on it. It is a real cost and a large one, and I do not think it was cynical.
Which is exactly why it worries me.
A gesture that expensive is almost guaranteed to be mistaken for the fix, and the company will make that mistake before anyone else does.
What happened in Philadelphia on April 12 was not a training gap. Two men sat down to wait for someone, and a manager called the police on them. What made that possible was a store where the rule about who counts as a customer had never been written down, which meant it got written on the spot, by whoever was on shift, out of whatever they walked in carrying.
You cannot train your way out of an unwritten rule. You can only write the rule.
Starbucks did write it, quietly, a week or so back: anyone may sit, anyone may use the restroom, purchase or no purchase. That is the actual intervention. It is one paragraph, it cost nothing, and it will do more work than this afternoon will. Almost nobody covered it.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and the pattern is reliable. The visible act gets the budget, because a visible act is finite, photographable, and easy to report as complete. The unglamorous fix gets four lines in an operations memo.
Here is how you will actually know, and none of it happens this week. One, whether that policy survives its first collision with a manager who is two people short at seven in the morning. Two, whether any district leader is ever held to it when holding to it is inconvenient. Three, whether the company says a word about any of this in November, when no news cycle is asking.
You cannot train your way out of an unwritten rule. You can only write the rule.
The training itself is not nothing. Four hours in a room with your coworkers about race and bias is more than most American companies will ever attempt, and the willingness to eat an afternoon of revenue over it is a signal to the people who work there. Signals matter. They just expire.
I will go back tomorrow, because it is on my walk and because the closure was not for me. The sign will be gone, the line will be long, and everything that actually matters will be invisible from where I stand. Tomorrow is the whole thing.