Starbucks closes thousands of stores for racial bias training

The two men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, said they were at the store for a business meeting. Also, employees are still encouraged to call police if they witness a drug deal or if a situation poses danger to customers or employees.

Starbucks fiends stood perplexed outside their 8,000 coffee stores as employees inside underwent anti-bias training for just roughly four hours.

To develop the training, Starbucks cast a wide net.

Each store will receive a toolkit which employees will use to “learn together in small self-guided groups”, the company said.

The company said the training session is “not a solution, but the first step” in making Starbucks an “inclusive gathering place”, reported The Guardian.

Alaska Starbucks locations will be closed several hours earlier than usual, as employees and management engage in “anti-bias training” to combat racial profiling.

Employees will watch a film from documentary maker Stanley Nelson on African American history and the civil rights struggle, before discussing in groups their own experience of racial discrimination.

Starbucks declined the PBS NewsHour’s request for an interview.

Most anti-bias programs involve education on what unconscious bias is, why humans have it, its impact on social interactions and society and mitigation tools.

The training will cover topics such as “implicit bias” and “conscious inclusion”.

The short answer: It’s hard to say. The NAACP’s Sherrilyn Ifill, who is one of Starbucks’s advisors on its anti-bias training material, has previously noted that “this can’t be a one-off”.

Starbucks has also made it clear that this is only the beginning for their sensitivity training. The approach is different because it treats bias as a habit and comes up with strategies to break that habit.

“It’s a start. It’s a place to start at”, Jones said.

“I support what they’re doing”, he said.

“We find that oftentimes diversity training has mixed effects, and in some cases it can even backfire and lead people who are kind of already reactive to these issues to become even more polarized”, Lai said. “So I really admire them”.

“Trying to, as a white person, fully understand as much as possible the fact that a person of color never quite feels comfortable in a public space in America, and hearing it from them, because its not something we think about, how can we be better people?”

Its success hinges in part on if and how the company is able to measure Tuesday’s trainings.

But solving the issues caused by racial bias will take a lot more than just training, he said.

Democratic strategist Michael Starr Hopkins said he appreciates what the company did, arguing “far too often in this country we’re afraid to talk about race”.

It also enlisted a cohort of activists and advocates to provide input into the companys workshop. That follows comments from Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said he didn’t want people to feel “less than” if they were refused access.