Dear Starbucks Employees:
The only thing you had to do was chill on the racist stuff for a month. That’s it. Go through most of May without doing some inane, easily documentable, biased bullshit.
Then you’d take your afternoon of racial-bias awareness training, where you’d watch a video (or a really dynamic Powerpoint!) about how you shouldn’t be terrible to people, your racism would have been cured, and all would have been right in the world.
Close, but no racism-free cigar, thanks to a California Starbucks that referred to a customer as a “beaner”—a derogatory slur for Latinos—on his drink order.
As a local CBS affiliate reports, a Latino patron by the name of Peter walked into a La Cañada Flintridge Starbucks on Wednesday to get an iced coffee. When he picked up his order, he saw that his name, “Peter,” had been written as “Beaner” on the drink.
“En español es ‘frijoleros,’ ‘beaner,’ you know, in English,” the victim’s friend Miguel Acosta told KCAL-TV.
“That’s not fair,” Acosta sad, adding that his friend was saddened by the incident.
A Starbucks representative told the TV station that the way the store treated Peter “is not indicative of the type of experience we want our customers to have when they walk into our stores.
“We have apologized to the customer directly and are working to make things right,” the statement read.
The incident occurred just short of two weeks before a scheduled racial-bias training day for the company, when around 8,000 Starbucks stores nationwide will close. Set for May 29, the training day was announced by company leadership in response to the high-profile arrest of two young black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks in April. There, a manager summoned police because the two men were waiting for a friend at the store.
Still, the increased scrutiny on Starbucks’ interactions with its customers hasn’t appeared to change behaviors. Not only was the La Cañada employee bold enough to jot down the racial slur where it was easily visible to the Latino customer, but earlier in the week, a black patron in Torrance, Calif., says he was denied access to the bathroom at his Starbucks.