Starbucks’s New Policy: Buy Something or Get Out

Starbucks recently announced that people who don’t buy anything will no longer be welcome to sit in the store or even use the bathroom. While this policy is reasonable on its face (why should they tolerate people loitering in their cafe for free?), why do I get the feeling that the wealthy CEO who decided on it didn’t think or care about the Starbucks employees who will have to actually enforce his edict? Those workers have enough on their plates without keeping track of who has been in the store for how long without ordering something. And they definitely don’t get paid enough to then have potentially heated confrontations with people who may not appreciate being asked to leave.

And if you think everyone is just going to shyly slink away and go, a little anecdote for you. I was once in a Starbucks in a low-income neighborhood in which literally no one sitting down had ordered anything (yes, I was one of the freeloaders). The manager, a short, young white girl, got tired of it and started going to everybody in the store one by one to politely inform them that the tables were for paying customers only. When she came to me, I promised that I would order something, and she moved on. Then a few tables later, she encountered an older black gentleman whose height towered over her diminutive form. He demanded to know “Why are you telling ME?”, and continued to do so in an increasingly angry tone, despite the manager’s assurances (and the fact she had been walking from table to table) that she was telling everyone. It didn’t matter - it soon became clear that the man believed this was a racial issue and that he was being singled out because he was black. The manager repeated herself one more time, then basically backed down, the man glaring angrily at her as she walked away.

And mind you, I witnessed this randomly, the first time I ever saw a manager try to eject loiterers. That is what Starbucks employees are going to be faced with, probably on a regular basis, if they have to actually enforce this policy handed down from a CEO’s cushy, safe corner office.