Conservative people get exercised about the strangest things. For example, Megyn Kelly is upset that Starbucks will now formally allow people to sit in their stores even if they are not paying customers, and that they will allow anyone who enters to use the bathroom without confirming that they intend to buy anything. As a white person, I have always considered this a feature of the very concept of a coffee house, whether it’s some privately run affair in New Haven across the street from Yale’s campus or it’s a corporate franchise at the local mall. I have frequently used coffee houses when traveling because of their free WiFi. Even today, when WiFi is available almost everywhere I go, I still think first of coffee houses because they were the early adopters of giving the service away for free. I also think of coffee houses first when I’m looking for a bathroom that I can use without hassle and that I can expect to be at least moderately sanitary.
Coffee houses uniformly offer comfortable places to sit, with most of the quiet of a library but fewer of the stultifying expectations. Plus, yes, they have coffee and tasty things to nosh as your peruse the internet and check your social media and email. If coffee houses were to change and require a proof of purchase before you could be seated, that would vastly diminish their basic appeal, and even the way we think about them.
More than this, though, these relaxed norms aren’t as free as they seem. It’s expensive to get your coffee at a coffee house. Paying customers are willing to pay more than they would at a diner not only because the coffee is generally better but because they can drink their coffee without some ticking clock in their head that tells them they need to move on so the wait staff can makes some more tips. Even when you buy a cookie or a beverage, the coffee house has appeal because they welcome you to stay as long as you want.
So, when Starbucks makes these basic features of a coffee house formal, they’re not changing anything. At least, they’re not changing anything for white people.
Megyn Kelly doesn’t see it that way, however, because one of the things she feels will change is the prevalence of undesirables.
“They’re allowing anyone to stay and use the bathroom even if they don’t buy anything, which has a lot of Starbucks’ customers saying, ‘Really?’” Kelly remarked on her Today Show program. “Because now the Starbucks are going to get overwhelmed with people and is it really just a public space or is it not?”
“For the paying customers who go in with their kids, do you really want to deal with a mass of homeless people or whoever is in there — could be drug addicted, you don’t know when you’re there with your kids paying for the services of the place.”
For those of us who frequent urban coffee houses, the sight of apparently homeless people is not particularly unusual especially in winter months or bad weather. Unless their smell is particularly offensive or they’re displaying signs of mental illness and making people nervous, their presence barely merits notice. And, by the way, those would both be fully justified reasons to ask someone to leave a place of business, whether a paying customer or not.
The new Starbucks policy, which I haven’t parsed, could conceivably make staff overly reluctant to kick people out who really should be kicked out. But, if it the training is done correctly, this shouldn’t be a problem. Anytime you try to formalize previously informal policies, you will run into a few problems. But it’s not like Starbucks just made itself a target for every homeless person in the country to treat their stores as a residence.
What Kelly means, whether she’s fully conscious of it or not, is that she wants coffee houses to be welcoming to people like her and to exercise some kind of rigorous admittance standards for anyone who doesn’t look right. But coffee houses can’t operate like Studio 54 with people at the door deciding who is beautiful and well-dressed enough to merit entry.
Of course, you could create a coffee house like that, but it would probably fail as a business because drinking coffee and surfing the internet and finding a place to use the bathroom are nothing like going to a fancy night club. Plus, if Studio 54 had only admitted white people, half the beautiful folks would have been stuck out on the sidewalk.
Yet, to the conservative mind, this policy is just one more example of political correctness run amok, with the familiar result that undeserving people get something for free at the expense and discomfort of decent white folks.
Ah, the rich aroma of white entitlement!
I am fed up with these whiny white racists. And they are equally disgusting in their prejudice against those who don’t match their economic standards. Perhaps they should just stay home with their thousand dollar espresso machines and avoid all contact with the masses.
What example is Kelly setting for her precious darlings by holding her nose in the presence of those who are less entitled than she? It means another generation of spoiled, prejudiced brats. Ugh.
At least we know who the “latte sipping elites” always were – and it ain’t us!
What happened to mocking us for being latte sipping elites for drinking at coffee houses in the first place? I still see it occasionally but they’ve definitely moved on to other narratives to suit the current climate. Now we need to keep icky people out of “our” coffee houses. That’s more in line with today’s political atmosphere.
All these arguments reveal is that Kelly and others simply want homeless people to stop existing, or at least corralled into areas where we don’t need to interact with them. You don’t want the homeless shelter because it’ll reduce your precious property value — and will argue about drugs, crime, children to mask these feelings. You don’t want to build public restrooms that are free to the public. You want to ban panhandling. And now ban them from coffee shops unless they buy something. GFY.
Even they could recognize the hypocrisy of slamming “latte-sipping liberal elites” between sips of their lattes. Some of them, anyway. Maybe.
… is a coffee house where some parent isn’t there with their damn screaming kids.
. . . for all the reasons you list, plus just the change of scenery from the usual four walls of my apt. or the library. Still four walls, but a different four. Even so, as I recall, that coffeehouse did have little signs on all the tables “encouraging” customers not to abuse the system, e.g., park there all day using space and bandwidth without buying anything. Even think they “suggested” (but never to my knowledge tried to enforce) a time limit for a reasonable maximum time to stay without buying something else (couple hours? something like that). But these were just reminders of what the vast majority of folks already understand as reasonable, not rigid policies enforced as such.
But, yeah, think your perception of Megyn’s agenda and motivation is spot-on. Rubbing elbows with the hoi-polloi is not to be imagined or tolerated. And to the Megyns of the world, money is the standard discriminant function for distinguishing the hoi-polloi from the right sort (at least when it isn’t race).
I agree. Have never thought of coffee houses as a place where buying something is optional. The cup of coffee or the muffin is the rent for using the table and the wifi. I think what’s different when you’re white is you’re trusted to eventually buy something and would have to push it really far before anyone questioned your intentions whereas a person of color is more likely to be questioned sooner.
There’s research on this. People (of all colors) tend to relate most to people who look like themselves. We have empathy for those who appear to be of our own tribe. It’s a bias we have to learn to notice because it’s deeply baked in.
I’m a white Jewish convert to Islam. One of the things I love about going to a mosque is that the good ones are places that are truly color blind. Of course being a white person of eastern European heritage, I generally stand out and there are mosques where I’ve felt like a minority — which is kind of cool too because I get to understand what it feels like.
Being Jewish is so easy in the U.S. these days. Wasn’t as easy when I was a child. For whatever reason, everyone loves Jews now. We’re seen as totally white (which wasn’t always true). My dark skinned Muslim friends have a much more challenging time.
If you want to experience white privilege, cross the border into Canada by yourself wearing a kufi on your head and then come back a few hours later. Try again the next time while traveling with dark skinned friends. My God! Alone I can tell them I’m going to a mosque, I’m returning from a mosque — whatever. With dark skinned friends, even with kufis off, we’re far more likely to be stopped and spend twenty minutes chilling inside while the car is searched.
The incident that led starbucks to close all its company stores for diversity training today supports your point very well. Does ANYONE think if those two guys waiting for their friend to get there before ordering anything had been white that the manager would have called the police and gotten them arrested (at least I think the report was that they were actually arrested, though not certain on that point)?
As for the bias towards empathy for those we perceive to be of our own tribe, there’s solid evolutionary theory, at least, that our predecessor species’ banding together cooperatively (the root of tribalism) enhanced survival and thus was a key driver to their evolution eventually resulting in homo sapiens sapiens. So, yeah, “deeply baked in” indeed. So deeply it seems hard to believe it doesn’t have strong and extensive genetic components to it.
Arrested and spent several hours in a jail cell until the DA got around to deciding not to prosecute for trespassing. Crazy imposition on their lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/19/starbucks-black-men-feared-for-lives-philadelphia
. . . elsewhere since I wrote it.
. . . people of . . . erm . . . discriminating tastes! [ba-dump-bump]
Someone please help me reconcile these two particular Conservative Free Market Economic equations that are apparently both true:
Private Business + Refusing Service Cause Right Wing Beliefs = GLORIOUS FREE MARKET PRINCIPLES AT WORK! SO SUCK IT YOU WHINY LIBERALS!!!
(ex. Hobby Lobby, Wedding Cake bakeries, etc.)
But
Private Business + Doing Anything Contrary to Right Wing Beliefs = POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN AMOK! YOU EVIL LIBERALS HATE AMERICA SO MUCH!
(ex. Starbucks, Disney, NRA boycotters, etc.)
The latter just proves this is all more ridiculous fascist right wing double think, but the former equation is frequently white washed (pun intended) and treated as a serious economic and legal argument in the mainstream media and the courts.
Good points! Thanks for that.
Yes, if it’s some ultra-conservative “Christiany” person who doesn’t want to serve teh Gheys because “I’m so Christian,” or some Mormon or Christiany run Bidness that doesn’t want to provide some or all medical services to teh wimminz, it’s ALL GOOD. Let the Free Market be FREEEEE!
But a corporation who says: it’s ok if anyone sits around in my store and uses the bathroom without buying anything, including (gasp! shriek! vomit! horrors!) the putatively homeless, it’s All: how DARE you do this terrible horrid Libtarded Polictically Correct THING??? MY RIGHTS as a conservative are now officially being trampled on!!11!!
What a bunch of ugly ugly ugly not-really-Christians people.
Think this is the corporate response to the red states LGBT bathroom laws. They do not want to be in the space where they have to train their employees to sell coffee and also train them to detect LGBT so they can deny use of the bathroom. This is the real reason for conservative ire.
Tue, but let us not forget, this all started because two gainfully employed, standard dressed, African America men wanted to wait for the person they we meeting with before ordering coffee.
They were customers-in-waiting, not people looking to manipulate a company’s service policy.
How does anyone really know if someone is homeless anyway??
Yeah, sure, sometimes it seems obvious, but more often than not, you might not even realize that the person sitting next to you doesn’t have a home to go to.
What horrible excuses for life-forms conservatives are. If they cannot find some way to be truly nasty to someone they perceive as “less than” or “not as good as” themselves, they cannot abide it.
Apparently they must manufacture some way to be horrible life-forms every single day, no matter how far they have to reeeeaaaccch to do it.
UGH.
I’m a decent white person. Bigots discomfort me. And I hate it when undeserving rich people get corporate welfare for free.
I want to talk to the manager.
The crux of this issue is the lack — in number and diversity — of non-commercial public spaces. This was one of the main issues of the Occupy movement. It wasn’t just public parks that people reclaimed; it was the focus on the lack of basic resources, like restroom facilities, for the public. Nowhere have I seen the media discuss why there’s no alternative to going to Starbucks for a free bathroom, or look to other Western countries for a comparison.
I confess to being surprised that Starbucks decided to formally be America’s public restroom. If they can do that and protect their bottom line, more power to them. I don’t think many non-franchise coffee shops, with limited seating and staff, could manage that. But even Starbucks will have to rely on people observing unwritten mores for this policy to work. Conservatives have a lot of recent experience shredding unwritten mores. What they’re afraid of is that everyone will do what they do.
. . . the go-to option when in need of a hassle-free “public” restroom without obligation or pressure to buy something.
I’d think of it before a coffee shop, anyway.
I’m so tired of caring what someone like Megyn Kelly thinks about anything.
I’ve never seen homeless people (yeah, with their grocery carts loaded with stuff outside) not buy anything while in a Starbucks. They aren’t there for the wifi cuz they don’t have computers. They go to the library for that. They’re there for the coffee.
Nice essay, BooMan. Enjoyed it.
“The new Starbucks policy, which I haven’t parsed, could conceivably make staff overly reluctant to kick people out who really should be kicked out.”
Asking someone to leave isn’t what brought this on. Calling the cops on someone who wasn’t making a purchase is.
Megyn Kelly?!? Her ratings are so crappy at NBC that she decided to drop the act and be the racist she always was? Calling Captain Renault!
I never had the idea that coffee houses were places where people – or even just white people – could hang out for long periods without making a purchase. Staying a long time on a single coffee purchase – sure, but no purchase at all? Maybe I just missed the boat, but seems if this were a common and known policy, we would see a lot of people hanging out without buying a single item. Even among the homeless, students writing, and teenagers – groups probably more interested in the space than the merchandise – I have never seen this. There are a few exceptions: if I am an extreme regular and know the owners well, sure. If it is on campus – probably. Those places are usually subsidized and considered partly a student service. But I’ve lived in some of the world’s great coffeeshop cities and I am someone who hangs out in them: I don’t buy that it is or was commonly accepted for white people to hang out for long periods without making a purchase. At Starbucks, it is now, because the matter has been forced, not because it always was so.
This is a good point:
Got me thinking “did booman imply that?” So I checked. This seems the relevant bit, but not entirely clear on the point of whether booman did/does this without making any purchase at all:
I actually see the two “uses” mentioned as quite different. Depending on urgency of the need, hell, yeah, I’ll use a bathroom in most any establishment without making a purchase, no qualms. But then it’s in-and-out, not otherwise using the business’s resources or causing them any extra operating expense. (I actually view a business’s attitude about this as an indicator of basic corporate humanity, decency, good corporate citizenship, etc. Strict “customers only” bathroom policies seem barbaric to me. I would not willingly provide revenue to an enterprise with such an attitude.)
Camping out for any significant length of time using their wifi (or even just occupying space) seems very different to me. For that, I’d feel obligated to buy something. (Full disclosure: When I’ve traveled requiring semi-regular layovers at SEATAC, I initially bought something at a Tullys in the airport and got their wifi password. On subsequent trips when I didn’t need anything to eat or drink, I’d just find the nearest public waiting area seat with an outlet and access their wifi with the same password. Does that make me a hypocrite? My rationalization is this equates to bathroom use: their wifi signal was there in the airport ether, whether I logged on to it or not.)
What booman said was:
” For example, Megyn Kelly is upset that Starbucks will now formally allow people to sit in their stores even if they are not paying customers, and that they will allow anyone who enters to use the bathroom without confirming that they intend to buy anything. As a white person, I have always considered this a feature of the very concept of a coffee house, whether it’s some privately run affair in New Haven across the street from Yale’s campus or it’s a corporate franchise at the local mall.” (emphasis added)
This in this context clearly refers to sitting in their stores without being a paying customer and using the bathroom without confirming an intent to purchase. I’ll agree that you can often get away with in and out in the bathroom. They don’t want you to have an accident or get mad, so they’ll let you use it in good faith and if you cut out, what are they going to do, kick you out when you’re leaving anyway? Even at that, though, a lot of places require you to get keys or code suggesting that they do intend to restrict access.