Alternatively, I've seen how this has affected Starbucks in the nicer parts of San Francisco and the East Bay. Some Starbucks locations smell horrible, some of the restrooms are trashed and there is toilet paper everywhere. In one Starbucks on Market Street, a homeless person decided to hole up in the restroom and take a nap on the nice, cool floor with the a/c going.
I can never support forcing a private business into offering a public utility.
But this was decided by Starbucks itself?
I totally agree that the public sector needs to step up and offer its own solution. But in the absence of that, this is better than nothing.
>"In April, two African American males were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after one asked to use the restroom but was told only paying customers could use them. After he sat down with his friend while waiting to be joined by a business associate for a meeting, the police came and arrested both, sparking national outrage.
Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson subsequently apologized to the victims and reached an undisclosed financial settlement."
So I suppose you support increase taxation to fund these public utilities?
Also, Starbucks wasn't forced to do this. They chose to.
Thank you for judging people/organizations based on their actions and not their intentions. Intentions are complex and hard to accurately determine.
Some don't, but on average, it can be a net positive.
It's the kind of thing you need a scientific study with randomization to tease out. You can control for all the confounders you want, but you can never control for unknown/difficult to estimate confounders, like human emotion.
While SBUX has all that data, they would only see their own data.
Or just... the fact that the company is still doing it. That's the other thing that's weird to me about this study: surely Starbucks itself has already studied and worked out the calculus that the PR effect is a net positive?
That is: it's hard to rule out the possibility of this being just coincidence.
The problem is the lack of randomization.
We can't know if something else Starbucks did at or around the same period caused the drop. E.g. the initial protests themselves upsetting customers in the first place or a change in pricing/promos by itself or a competitor. Maybe Starbucks jacked up its prices (or others starting discounting), which is why the public disclosures don't indicate the relative drop in traffic.
But "The decline in visits is around 84% larger for stores located near homeless shelters." is quite damning.
I live in a major metro city like Austin. The homeless can easily get three hot meals a day, a warm bed every night, and all the hygiene necessities they need for free.
I don't think you should assume they're in Starbucks because the resources aren't available elsewhere.
As a customer, there's sometimes a smell, and you tend to sit where you can keep an eye out (since you never know the mental state of people in that situation), but I've never witnessed any real problems.
Honestly, it's heartwarming. It's dystopian, of course, that the provision of basic needs like these falls to a private coffee chain, but regardless of that I admire what they're doing (even though it's probably PR-driven, if we're being honest). It's not unpleasant enough for me as a customer that I'd refuse to go to that location (or even walk half a dozen blocks to the next one).