Observations from a caller to Ben Shapiro's radio show:
On Tuesday, Starbucks announced a national day of retraining for all of its employees in the wake of a supposedly racist incident: a Philadelphia store manager named Holly calling the police on two black men for allegedly loitering, after refusing them access to the restroom since they had not bought anything. Holly, the media claimed, was obviously acting out of racial intent.
The same day as Starbucks’ announcement, a listener to my show emailed me from Philadelphia to talk about Holly. According to the listener, who regularly frequents the now-infamous Philadelphia Starbucks in question, “I don’t know what happened last week with the two guys. I wasn’t there. But I highly doubt that she saw the two men and decided to call the police based solely on the fact that they are black.”
Why not? According to this patron, “From my observations and interactions with her, I was actually under the impression that Holly is an SJW feminist of the highest order. Once I even overheard her scorn a male barista for not using the proper neutral pronouns with somebody. That's why this whole situation is so shocking to me! Even though I did not agree with her and all the SJW pins that adorn her beanie, I think calling her a racist all over the news and doxing her name, address, phone, family, etc. is disgusting.”
This patron explained that Holly “is not racist and doesn’t deserve what is happening to her here in Philly.” The patrons of the Starbucks are “both black and white, and I’ve personally seen Holly give the oh-so-coveted restroom code to both black and white people, patrons and non-patrons. I’ve seen her train both black and white staff members and she has been nothing but nice to everyone, and I’ve never witnessed any racist behavior.”
As I said yesterday, someone may think he / she / it has his / her / its leftist creds in order, but it's all relative. There's always someone who has out-jackbooted you.
Recently, Chipotle had a similar one day training shutdown to address issues they were having with the handling of unsafe produce. Dang those Health Department "jackboots".
ReplyDeleteUnsafe produce and "unconscious bias" are two very different critters.
ReplyDeleteTrue, and let's hope that the training in each case was not identical. However, the point of commonality is that in both cases the leadership of the corporations in question recognized a real problem and took decisive measures. Chipotle wants diners to feel confident their burrito won't kill them outright and Starbucks wants African-Americans to feel confident they won't be singled out for any sort of harrassment up to and including arrest in their establishments. In both instances, it was good business sense at work.
DeleteBoth instances are merely PR (bottom line) damage control. They close nationwide for a display to the public of their commitment to correcting the problem and voila, the numbers crunch out nicely moving forward.
ReplyDelete