Starbucks heats up more than coffee with race initiative
Starbucks (SBUX) is looking to stir up more than steamed milk along with your café latte, with the company tackling race relations in an initiative involving full page newspaper ads and messages scrawled on paper cups.
Starting this week, Starbucks employees, otherwise known as baristas, can write the words "Race Together" on cups to initiate conversations about race issues.
The company also placed advertisements in the New York Times and USA Today with the phrases "Shall we overcome?" and "Race Together."
"It's an emotional issue, but it's so vitally important to the country," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told his staff of nearly 200,000 workers in a video released Monday.
Schultz is expected to address the issue at an annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday.
The company's campaign is the result of a December forum at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, where workers were encouraged to talk about racial tension in the country after the police killings of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and 43-year-old Eric Gardner in Staten Island, New York. Both were black and unarmed, with juries declining to indict white officers in the deaths.
As would be expected, the initiative drew criticism on Twitter, with one user tweeting: "The coffee is $4.25, the lecture is free."
Starbucks did not immediately respond to an emailed and telephone requests from CBS MoneyWatch for comment on a Business Insider report that Corey duBrowa, the company's senior vice president of communications, had deleted his Twitter account after the backlash on social media.
With reporting from Kate Gibson