Philly Starbucks: Black coffee OK, black people notsomuch

https://crooksandliars.com/2018/04/two-black-men-were-arrested-sitting

Two black guys sitting in Starbucks waiting on a friend. Not buying anything, but that's OK because there's a white woman who has been there for hours on her laptop and hasn't ordered anything either, and someone just came in and was given the bathroom code without buying anything.

Nope, apparently not. Employee calls the cops to remove them. Doesn't even ask 'em to leave, just why they're there and, when it doesn't involve ordering, is right on the phone.

Cops have to side with the owner of the premises, I guess but woulda been nice if they could have warned the employee about police time and the consequences of wasting it.

Starbucks have issued an apology but no indication of whether the employee will be fired or just "re-trained".

Hopefully Starbucks fires whoever called the cops and any other employee involved in this incident.

But it's unfair to blame the cops on this one (as I've seen in other comments on other sites). If a store calls the cops and says they asked people to leave and those people refuse to leave than the cops have to ask them to leave and finally arrest them for trespassing if they still refuse to leave. Watching the video the police were pretty calm about it.

man this is fucked up! Starbucks is the loitering capital of the world. They have two kinds of customers - those grabbing a quick coffee/snack to go and those planning on camping out with their computer sipping coffee until they are covered in cobwebs. And give me a break with the employee being "retrained". Is basic common sense something that can even be taught once let alone twice? Yeah can't blame the cops, they have to show up and follow their normal protocol. Fuck Starbucks anyway with their overpriced fancy fucking named 63 versions of coffee.

In my ideal society, the employee would have his arms held behind his back by the cops while the black guys each got two free punches.

so mob rule? Sounds great - hope you piss somebody off by acting like a dick and cops hold your arms while you are punched unconscious. Tell us how that works out for you.

Replace punches with bullets, and guilty with innocent, and that's how black people are living.
Your sympathy goes AWOL all of a sudden.
Its eerie.

yes Diacanu, nearly every single black person is shot by cops. On any given day their number might be up. Hell in about a week we won't have any more racial issues to worry about at that rate.

Don't ever change.

They get everything else for free so this seems quite reasonable.

I hope Starbuck's apology didn't include any free drinks.

Adding insult to injury and all that.

As a southerner I always chuckle when racist incidents pop up in bastions of "northeastern liberalism." Sorry I can't help it.

Philly a bastian!?!?!

Philly is Detroit with better infrastructure!!

And it’s always sunny there.

City of Brotherly Thugs.

right back at you baby!

Idaho is not the south. Idaho is a private thing for each of us.

The one I agree with Muad about re: how the civil war and slavery is taught is that slavery is a stain on *all* of America. Not just the South. Rich Northerners were fine with it because it meant cheap cotton for their mills and poor notherners were fine because most of these people were Irish and Polish and could more easily sell out to the American "Dream" in a generation or two and it meant less competition for jobs.

Even in California, the Civil War unit paints the South as people just fighting for state's rights and that Lincoln wanted to free slaves as his first priority. Just....no.

The seats are for paying customers. Buy something and you can stay but if not you have to leave. They chose to not only not buy something but to get mouthy and refuse to leave. They deserved to get arrested.

I am still not seeing any racism him even though muckrackers obviously are trying to turn it into that. I saw a white homeless guy get banned from Starbucks before because he never bought anything and when he wasn't bothering customers he was locking himself in the bathroom for extended periods of time. I was sipping on a coffee and surfing the net when an employee reminded the bum he had been told he had been banned from the shop, the hobo got mouthy, but changed his mind when cops who were regulars walked in to get their free cup of coffee the franchise owner gives them.

Philly is pretty bad.

Management would have been within their right to ask them to leave...provided they asked every other "customer" sitting there sucking up the free Wifi and not ordering anything to do the same. But calling the cops? Overkill.

Think it would have been called anything else if it happened in Georgia?

I'm sure their mom's got scared, so they'll be moving in with their Aunties and Uncles in Bel Air.

I will agree to a certain point. Starbucks is a hang out and meeting place for many people, but they do have to make money and they can clear out nonpaying or loud people when they need to. If it is true that these men were singled out over loitering white customers then I could see forcing the issue and taking the arrest for publicity of the bullshit.

I have actually been in their place a few times. I was tossed out of Wal-Mart in Alabama because a customer said I flashed them. The customer lied, but the Wal-Mart staff called up the police and said I was drunk and disorderly. The police did check me out as I was driving when I left. They had to be sure I was not doing what they said. In the end the police ticked the customer and managers for wasting their time, and when I wrote a complaint to Wal-Mart the management present that day was terminated. The next time I came in there was no shenanigans.

You have to make an issue with the racist people or else they won't get tossed. Had the black guys just complied and went away whoever did that to them would not have gotten any negative attention and would continue to discriminate. The police did their job, the men obviously protested the action, and now Starbucks will review what happened and most likely terminate the offending employee.

Yes, but this sounds like people who frequent Starbucks and buy things. I will use a bathroom in stores I frequent even though I might not be shopping that day. There is a difference between a bum and some guys meeting up with friends. I don't know how they acted, but it sounds real bad when the customers are taking their side. Customers do not protect the homeless bum, they ask them to be removed because they often panhandle and annoy people.

I chill at gas stations or the mall for hours and don't get tossed, but if I started begging up the customers or being loud security will fuck with me.

Sokar would have loved this thread.
Perhaps he's looking up at us, screaming.

Funny how the white people who were doing exactly the same thing weren't confronted. (And certainly didn't get the cops called on them.)

But it wasn't about race...Dinner said so!

We should have employees wear body cameras.

Because I've got questions. This store certainly has other customers who are black. Do all blacks get treated the same shitty way? If so why only now has this store come to light? Was there something that hasn't been reported that happened between the two men and the employees when the men asked to use the bathroom and were turned down?

Corporations should start requiring employees to wear body cameras.