Starbuck’s recently held their “Race Together” campaign which had a barista writing the words race together on customer’s cups to encourage people to talk about the racial conflict that have been recently going on in America.
The idea was brought to Howard Schultz, the chief executive, in December on an employee forum. Since the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner they felt the need to open the conversation to all the inequality still in the world today. Their mission was just to bring awareness to the racial inequality problem in America.
Their message was quickly criticized and then just as quickly taken out of context. While some people still did get the true meaning behind their message other took the words wrong and ran with that.
The most common criticism for Starbucks was that they were just trying to capitalize on the race issues to make their company bigger and stronger. It’s said that companies like Starbucks are already too big and campaigns like these only let them get bigger and flex their corporate muscles. The campaign got so much criticism that Schultz shut down his twitter due to all the activity on it.
Starbuck’s only wrote on the cups for a week. Schultz asked the baristas to end that section of the campaign on March 22nd. They still are trying to think of other ways to keep the campaign alive.
Since they ended the campaign Starbucks seems to be getting even more negative attention over it. They were recently the butt of the joke on a Saturday Night Live skit that recreated the Starbucks campaign but instead had the Pep Boys car mechanics and people taking to them about their sexuality in their “gender flect” campaign. Many others have been all over the internet sharing their opinion about the attempted campaign and most say it was doomed from the start.
Schultz is still determined to stay true to his cause and bring attention to the racial problem. “While there has been criticism of the initiative — and I know this hasn’t been easy for any of you — let me assure you that we didn’t expect universal praise,” he wrote. “We leaned in because we believed that starting this dialogue is what matters most. We are learning a lot. And will always aim high in our efforts to make a difference on the issues that matter most” said Schultz. With his partnership with USA Today he plans to keep the campaign online in their new section for the rest of the year and claims that the writing on the cups was only supposed to be a week long section anyways.
While Starbucks is trying to bring people together to talk about the race issue in America today it seems they have only made people come together to talk about how much they dislike their campaign. The writing on the cups may be over, but with their determination to the cause we will see what is next for the Starbucks campaign.