Remember last week when billion dollar coffee franchise, Starbucks, decided it was going to fix race relations and rolled out its grande-sized sociology experiment, Race Together? Well, they’ve decided that the campaign is now over, but it’s totally because they planned it that way and not because the internet made fun of them.
The company had planned all along to end the cup messages on Sunday and continue the campaign more broadly, Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson told the AP.
Really, Jim? You thought that a week was all it was going to take for America to forget about the problems in Ferguson and the Eric Garner case? Starbucks coffee is good — depending on which coffee snob you ask — but it ain’t wipe out racism in a week good. In case you didn’t visit Starbucks in the last week, the coffee company’s baristas would write “Race Together” on customer’s cups in an effort to draw them into an awkward conversation about race relations. Not surprisingly, people were quick to criticize the idea.
Of course, Twitter pretty much jumps at ANY opportunity to crap all over a new idea, Still , Starbucks remained firm that their decision to abandon the campaign was not because of negative feedback. “The phase-out is not a reaction to that pushback,” Olson said. “Nothing is changing. It’s all part of the cadence of the timeline we originally planned.”
Okay, glad that’s over with. Now we can all get back to giving our modified coffee orders to the dead-eyed baristas and silently asking ourselves why they don’t just call their sizes small, medium, and large.