[Maru]

This story has a lot of emotional bias surrounding it, so I'll just cut to the chase. The lady who took the video is only just a bit overzealous. I read her twitter account and she's fully on board with making this into a political matter... Twitter is known for smear campaigns and this is not the exception, as she and others are intent on going after Starbucks and posting the business cards of the shop employees in order to encourage a witch hunt... Other people were on there posting they're cutting up gift cards, deleting apps, boycotting simply because Starbucks weren't quick enough to call it racial profiling, because they wanted a little time to investigate what actually happened and get all the facts first... that seems reasonable. Twitter's reaction? Not so much.

I see two sides to the reaction. One side wants to defend the shop staff no matter because there must be "some reason" these people were singled out and asked to leave... and the other side wants to get behind the underdog, because there's the emotional element to it, and because there's just "no good reason" they were removed from the shop...

What's true for both sides, is people are choosing to side with whichever they feel is the "good guy", i.e. whatever makes them feel good... in other words, we're playing judge, jury and executioner without all the facts... in either case, both conclusions are emotionally biased and we're not mind readers.

My thought, it's horrible bad customer service to call the police on someone who had only been in your shop for 15 minutes for "trespassing". Especially when coffee shops are common public meeting areas. Is it unreasonable to meet a client for example, in a public location, where other people often congregate and have small interviews and consultations? Or to exchange money? Or to meet a stranger for the first time? Was it racial profiling? Quite possibly. Can we know for sure? No. Maybe the manager woke up on the wrong side of the bed, went on a power trip that day after they didn't get their way... the patron's attitude may have very well been very rude, but how much of that rudeness was overly unreasonable? Or rather, how uncommon really is a sh***y customer? Many people hate being told they can't use the bathroom if they're not paying customers. And staff always hate when customers come in and be complete d*cks. Still ridiculous to get the police involved when there was no obvious safety issue or any sort of altercation. So I think the mgr/staff may have bit off more than they could chew by calling the police, as they escalated a situation that could've easily been resolved with a compromise...

Ask yourself what would be reasonable for you. If you were only in a shop for 15 minutes, and you asked to use the bathroom while waiting for a friend, and you were refused and told to buy something or leave. You'd probably be pretty unhappy. Especially if you really had to pee.... but maybe you didn't feel like just leaving and wanted to make a point of it. Maybe the manager sees this and decides to go on a power trip and so the police are called because you dared to tell them in their shop where they should shove it and it becomes a battle of egos... this absolutely does happen in customer service and so I can see this also being a possibility. The low wage employee and the customer both thinking they have the upper hand in that battle and both deciding to stick it to one another. So rather than leave, the customers stick around to make a point...

99% of the time, it's not worth fighting the customer on a policy that could be relaxed. It's not worth the headache, it's not worth potentially escalating it and it's certainly not worth your job... so the fact that they go so far to fight the customer anyway and call the police instead, that makes me think the customer service at that Starbucks is total crap or that particular staff member are very unprofessional. Only because there's no other reason being given why the police were called. Did they break property? Did they scream at other customers? Oh they're just upset? So what? The staff could easily make an exception in that case to allow them RR access to deescalate the situation... and then soon they would be on their way and no longer a problem.

The police shouldn't be called in to solve such petty disputes. They could've handled it without the police being called... is my opinion.