The reason? Well, according to initial reports the “reason” may have been strictly because the two men were of African-American descent.
In a video posted to Twitter by a woman who was witness to the travesty, police are speaking to a pair of black men the woman says were just sitting inside the shop while they were waiting for a third person before ordering their coffee. The interaction ends with the two men being arrested.
The witness, author Melissa DePino, told media that the men were sitting and chatting at a table for less than 15 minutes before employees of the store called the police.
On the surface, it appears as though the crime committed may have been “sitting in a restaurant while black.” The men, revealed to be real estate brokers, did not appear to have done anything wrong and, according to reporting, were merely waiting for their friend and associate. They were formally arrested for “defiant trespassing.”
For that, every employee at every single Starbucks store will now be forced to endure an afternoon of what promises to be a berating Alt-Left beatdown of political correctness.
According to the company, Starbucks will close all of its stores on the afternoon of May 29 to conduct “a racial-bias education program,” according to CNBC.
Not even kidding.
“I've spent the last few days in Philadelphia with my leadership team listening to the community, learning what we did wrong and the steps we need to take to fix it," Kevin Johnson, CEO of Starbucks, said in a statement Tuesday.
One question that immediately comes to mind is, “Fix what?” Is there a systemic, wide-ranging racial bias problem within the most liberal coffee company on the planet? Because if there is, I’ve been missing those reports.
This is pandering of the worst kind. One manager at one Starbucks who may or may not have a racism problem (the two guys taken out in cuffs could not have been the first two black patrons the manager encountered, right?) does not a company-wide problem make. And yet tens of thousands of Starbucks employees are going to have to sit through “racial-bias training” as though they, too, were guilty of the infraction. That’s 8,000 stores and 175,000 workers.
As I previously reported, if what we were initially told is accurate, then obviously, targeting someone over the color of their skin is unacceptable.
But according to The Blaze, there may be more to the story.
“Holly,” the former store manager who made the call, told Apple News that the men initially refused to leave the business when police arrived and asked them to do so.
Holly said that in the year she managed the Philly store, loitering had become a problem. She had encountered “many individuals” who loitered there without any intent to buy anything. She also said one person “chased her around the store” after she asked them to leave. And she said the company’s policy expressly prohibits “excessive loitering” in Center City Philadelphia locations.
It sounds like the media may have leaped too soon. It sounds like she followed policy, which allows management to call police in such instances.
But that won’t matter. The first version of the story will be all that gets reported in most outlets and therefore all that most people will remember — because it fits the Left-wing media narrative about America in general.
And now, the company will spend untold amounts of money to stage a politically correct “training” session because an employee who followed company policy dared to enforce it against minorities.
See more of this reporting at LeftCult.com.
J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel.
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