Ken, can you or anyone explain someting to me? I go to fast food places from time to time, and notice that often, at Burger King, etc., the staff is entirely minority young people (sometimes all latino, sometimes all black, etc.) Maybe not in every neighborhood, but this is pretty common.
Funny thing is, whenever I go to a Starbucks (again, I travel a lot, see Starbucks in many cities) I notice that Starbucks employees are uniformly white.
Can anyone explain this??? My intuition is that Starbucks has a "culture" of upscale, expensive coffee, served in an attitude rich environment. Employees are supposed to act a certain way. OK, but this seems to translate into white, white, white.
I think there is some kind of subtle discrimination going on. Perhaps minorities don't want to work in such a honky / cracker place - I wouldn't blame them. Personally, I would just like to order a medium, not a "tall" or "grande" or whatever the other pretentious name is for their coffee.
As gen-x says, "whatever."
But from an investing point of view, how long is it until Starbucks gets hit with a discrimination suit? You can bet your beans that if anyone was to start digging, they would find stories of how various minorities just, somehow, well, you know, didn't get the job.
What a coincidence -- almost everybody that works at Starbucks is white!
Is there a danger they will be subject to a discrimination suit that will hurt the stock's price and damage their image? Any inside stories on their hiring practices? |
