If you want to hang out or use the restroom at Starbucks, you’re going to have to buy something.
Starbucks on Monday said it was reversing a policy that invited everyone into its stores. A new code of conduct – which will be posted in all company-owned North American stores – also bans discrimination or harassment, consumption of outside alcohol, smoking, vaping, drug use and panhandling.
Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson said the new rules are designed to help prioritize paying customers. Anderson said most other retailers already have similar rules.
I know you’re just circlejerking here so discussion is probably pointless, but there are many ways to serve the community and providing a quiet, nicely ambient place (aspirational goals, only met sometimes in reality) to sit or work for a few hours, for the price of a $3 coffee is one. I live in New York and for just over the price of a subway ride I can get wifi, a desk to work, outlets and a decently comfortable chair, and a restroom, and I can hang out there a while.
Serving the homeless in public places is notoriously difficult to get right, as most state and local governments experience demonstrates. Why we’d expect a cafe company to do a good job as well as meet its other goals is confusing.
If seating isn’t at capacity, it doesn’t cost them anything additional to let someone sit down a bit to warm up.
That’s true only if homeless people make zero noise, do not act or behave eccentrically, do not bother other customers, do not have offensive odors, immediately cede their seat to a customer who arrives, somehow don’t make through their presence prospective customers believe the shop is too crowded, etc. Do you think even actual customers who are not mentally disturbed or addicted can fulfill this bar you’ve set by saying “costs nothing”?
Warming is a canard, every street homeless person can get warm at a church or shelter. In NYC you can 311 a city department and they’ll go offer the person a ride to a shelter anywhere in the city in a van. Their average time is <1 hour. They can walk into any library in the city.
I encounter homeless every day and resent dumb online joke, these are individuals who have serious problems and, as stated, there is a reason even public services find it hard to serve these populations.
There’s also a reason neither you nor I regularly invite street homeless into our homes.
If you don’t like megacorp there are 1000 better ways you can argue it than saying “they should let homeless in to hang out”. Choosing the argument that you have chosen, just sounds ridiculous.