Challenge in History and Logistics

“It always seems to me that they’re doing it to save face. It is, to me, too little too late,” said Doug Brandt, who was sitting at a Starbucks cafe in New York with two other men on Tuesday afternoon, several minutes before the store would close. “But it can’t hurt.”

One of the men, De’Monie Jackson, joined in. “It’s not Starbucks that needs the training,” he said. “It’s the police.”

Not even Starbucks pretends that the training will solve systemic racism and abuse. But the company is trying to start a dialogue.

“We also have to recognize that there will be some customers for some reason or another who are having a bad day, and that’s the moment of truth where we have to perform,” Mr. Schultz said.

“We as a company are systemically dealing with things that are far, far out of the control of Starbucks as a company or the four walls of our stores,” he said.

Putting aside whether a corporation is well equipped to address hundreds of years of racism, Starbucks is also up against a “customer is always right” ethos. And it is putting the burden on employees to rethink their own prejudices to offer better customer service, while doing little to help Starbucks’s nearly half-minority work force address the bias it may face from customers.

Then there are the more logistical concerns. Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who was consulted on the training, worried that Starbucks was moving ahead too quickly. Productive sessions, he said, require concrete goals, specific behavioral standards and a clear metric for evaluating performance.

“Training to make a caramel macchiato can be quite effective,” he said. “Training to be unbiased toward your fellow human doesn’t achieve any of those criteria.”