The Times They Are A-Changin'

Starbucks reverses its Great Awokening decision to let anybody use their restrooms without ordering anything.

The iconic photo of Starbucks in 2018

From the New York Times news section:

Starbucks Cracks Down: No Latte, No Lounging

Starbucks said visitors to the coffee shops would be required to buy something in order to use the restroom or stay in the store, as the company’s new chief executive responded to a decline in sales.

By Amanda Holpuch

Jan. 14, 2025

Starbucks will require people visiting its coffee shops to buy something in order to stay or to use its bathrooms, the company announced in a letter sent to store managers on Monday.

This being the New York Times, with its policy of Upside-Downess (put all the interesting and important news at the end of the article where most subscribers won’t see it), you have to read the article all the way through a lot of boring quotes from corporate spokespeople to get to the good stuff about why this is noteworthy, which finally begins in the 13th paragraph:

… The new purchase requirement reverses a policy Starbucks instituted in 2018 that said people could use its cafes and bathrooms even if they had not bought something.

The earlier policy was introduced a month after two Black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks while waiting to meet another man for a business meeting.

Officials said that the men had asked to use the bathroom, but that an employee had refused the request because they had not purchased anything. An employee then called the police, and part of the ensuing encounter was recorded on video and viewed by millions of people online, prompting boycotts and protests.

That was a huge deal back during the Great Awokening.

From a 2023 Los Angeles Times article about two women who made careers out of the Starbucks Bathroom Crisis:

A Black woman and a white woman went viral fighting racism. Then they stopped speaking to each other

Two women who witnessed two Black men arrested at Starbucks … met when they witnessed two Black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks. They became friends and launched an anti-racism nonprofit. Then things fell apart.

BY JAWEED KALEEM
NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
MAY 17, 2023 3 AM PT

Few know the names Michelle Saahene [black] or Melissa DePino [white]. But millions have heard the beginning of their story.

They were witnesses at a Philadelphia Starbucks five years ago when two Black businessmen asked to use the restroom and a white barista called police, who led the men away in handcuffs.

“They didn’t do anything!” Saahene shouted as another customer recorded the confrontation.

Saahene and DePino didn’t know each other. But in their shock and anger, the two women started talking, and after DePino got a copy of the video, she conferred with Saahene before tweeting it out.

The tweet triggered a public relations disaster for Starbucks and a national uproar, raising questions about racism, policing and public safety.

It also launched lucrative new careers for both women, who teamed up to promote awareness about racism and started a company to provide sensitivity training to corporations just as the diversity, equity and inclusion industry was about to take off.

What they could not anticipate was how their joint venture would go awry — or how they themselves would become a potent illustration of the racial animosity and misunderstanding they had set out to combat.

“This is what happens when white women insert themselves into what should be Black-led organizations,” Saahene, who is Black and 36, said recently. “White supremacy and emotional abuse get masked under kindness.”

“This is what it looks like to be canceled,” said DePino, who is white and 55. “I’m not really sure what I did wrong.”

What you did wrong was being white when your business partner was Black and therefore deserves more money. Can’t you read which race is capitalized and which isn’t?

Within days of the April 12, 2018, arrest, the video had been played 8 million times.

Did the third customer, the one who actually recorded the video, get anything?

In interviews with CNN and other outlets, DePino accused Starbucks of racism.

… Two days later, the corporation vowed to close every company-owned U.S. store for an afternoon of racial bias training. Now many coffee shops, including Starbucks, let anyone use their restrooms with no questions asked.

The controversy ushered in a new genre of viral videos on race — clips showing people of color having cops called on them for shopping, barbecuing, swimming and other everyday activities.

In the aftermath, DePino tracked down Saahene, hoping to process what happened, gain insight from a Black woman and make a friend.

The two met over drinks, planting the seeds of a passion project they named From Privilege to Progress. It had a stated aim of creating “a national movement to desegregate the public conversation about race.” In reality, it was a few social media accounts attempting to go viral, with the women unsure of whether they were making a dent. …

They slowly gained followers, mostly white liberals, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. … They released guides on “racism interrupters,” phrases that witnesses to racist acts can use to interject. They launched a website that sold one-on-one anti-racism coaching and $20 T-shirts with the logo “#ShowUp.”

And they pitched corporations to pay them to share their stories.

DePino, a marketing professional and liberal mother of two, told audiences of becoming an activist after “seeing racism on display right in front of my eyes” and of educating herself by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin and Frederick Douglass.

The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, [Sahene] used lessons she’d learned from an online diversity, equity and inclusion certificate course to talk about race.

She spoke of being one of the few Black children in her small town outside Hershey, Pa., and of never feeling “Black enough.” Black Americans often told her she was instead “African,” and she felt more at home with Ghanaian culture than with Black American culture.

… Their effort could have stayed relatively small at a time when so many people wanted to make a dime off viral fame, when activism increasingly was happening from keyboards instead of on the streets. …

Then came May 25, 2020. …

Diversity initiatives had been around since the 1960s …

But this latest boom was unprecedented. Corporations pledged tens of billions of dollars to further racial equality. … Many outsourced training to people like Saahene and DePino.

… The number of followers on their Instagram account shot up from around 20,000 to roughly half a million. By late 2020, the women had monthly, sometimes weekly, paid engagements at Google, Spectrum, Ikea, Yale, MIT, Tufts and the United Nations. …

The two had become close. Saahene house-sat for DePino and had the code to her marijuana safe….

The duo nearly doubled their joint speakers rate to $10,000 total per appearance. In 2021, each netted more than $100,000.

Saahene did much of the work remotely. She was living for months at a time in Accra, Ghana, reconnecting with family members and disconnecting from news on police violence, racism and divisive politics in the U.S. Still, she talked to corporate audiences about it all on Zoom.

She left her healthcare job and was working life-coaching gigs on top of P2P.

… Though she still had her day job in the marketing firm she co-founded, DePino thought the cash flow from P2P was becoming enough for her to be a full-time activist.

The two women dreamed of a national tour and documentary series — and it felt within reach.

Then the demand for talk and training on race slowly started to subside. …

[Sahene] began to think back to disagreements she’d had with DePino — differences that had seemed minor at the time but in a new light felt more troubling.

… Then there was the question of how to divide the profits from their business. The two women had always split them evenly, but in 2019 Saahene had suggested that she deserved a greater share. It seemed clear that the venture would have gotten little traction without a Black woman on board, and in her view, speaking about racism required more “emotional labor” on her part. She said DePino disagreed, contending that she did more background work: nonprofit filings, managing money and posting to social media accounts. …

Saahene texted, saying she felt unheard and pointing out past moments she now considered “microaggressions.”

One involved a suggestion by DePino that they visit a lynching memorial in Alabama together. “As if we haven’t had numerous conversations about how traumatizing it is for me to witness violence against Black bodies,” Saahene wrote.

… She accused DePino of “defensiveness and other manifestations of whiteness.”

… On April 22, 2022, Saahene took over the platform. In a written statement to nearly 500,000 followers, she said DePino was “not honest” and had no “commitment to ending colonialism.”…

DePino deleted the posts and dashed off an email: “You cannot legally slander me… I will send a cease-and-desist ASAP.”

Saahene shot back: “My life experiences and statements are truth.” …

Saahene and DePino stopped communicating, except through lawyers. …

DePino, for her part, is still … recovering from an onslaught of online abuse, nearly all from white former followers. They called her a racist, a “Karen,” a manipulator, a fake.

Should I write a book that’s a history of the rise and fall of the Great Awokening? I’m basically a historian of the present. I’ve got a colossal amount of material on how the country went crazy over the last dozen years.

Would there be a market for that book, or does everybody just want to forget the years of insanity?