April 19, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:36
4062 THE STARBUCKS CONTROVERSY
Starbucks recently came under fire after employees at a Philadelphia location called the police on two black men for loitering without making a purchase, leading to their arrest for trespassing. Stefan Molyneux breaks down the absurdity of the latest in a series of "racism" political correctness controversies.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Oh, world, I try not to get too eerie with you, but sometimes it's not particularly easy.
So, like many news media stories, particularly those about race, this is kind of an intelligence test, an empathy test, and kind of a test to find out if you've ever had to make the kinds of difficult decisions that people who operate in the free market constantly experience.
Have you ever been a boss?
Have you ever been responsible for payroll?
Have you ever been responsible for satisfying customers?
If not, and you can empathize with such things, I'm not sure why anyone would listen to you in particular.
So in Philadelphia, it's a fairly black town, of course, a fairly black neighborhood.
Then two black men, where two black men came in to a Starbucks.
And they sat down and then they said they wanted to use the washroom and they were there waiting for a friend and the Starbucks people said washrooms are for customers only.
So, you know, drop a couple of bucks on a coffee and you're good to go.
And they did not want to pay for coffee.
They wanted to use the washroom and I assume they wanted to sit there and wait for their friend.
So, Already we have a challenging situation.
See, if you're going to wait for a friend, then we would assume that you're going to stay at the Starbucks with a friend.
You don't say, let's meet at the Starbucks so we can go to the park or the library or whatever.
So if you're going to stay at the Starbucks, why not buy a coffee?
Now, if you're just coming to meet at the Starbucks and use it like it was a park or a library or some other public space, well, that's not what Starbucks is for.
Starbucks is a business, and it is in the business, of course, of making money, and therefore it cannot indulge That kind of unprofitable, in fact, anti-profitable activities.
So eventually, the Starbucks employee called the cops and said, we've got two men who are trespassing here.
They won't leave.
They won't, right? And so the cops came and said, you have to leave.
You've got to leave. You're trespassing now because you're not buying anything and you're not allowed to stay here and you certainly can't use the washroom.
That's the rule and so on, right? Starbucks, right?
It's their own private business, right?
They can set up the rules that they want.
And so the two men, the two black men, refused and eventually were arrested.
Now, they were then held.
Starbucks did not pursue charges and the men were released.
Because that's what happens when you have rules and you have laws like trespassing.
I don't know why people are shocked.
This is the nature of the state.
You know, every time you say, there ought to be a law, the government ought to, we got to have the government do this.
This is what happens. Guys in uniforms come up with guns and make you do what the law says.
It's not up to the cops.
They don't make the laws. They simply enforce the law.
So this kind of street adjudication doesn't really work, right?
You have to submit to the police, to the guys with the guns.
That is the nature of the state.
And it takes a lot of indoctrination to have people be surprised that when there's a law, say, against trespassing, which is being on somebody's property without his or her permission, If there's a law against it, people seem what?
Surprised? Shocked?
That people show up with guns and uniforms and make you obey the law?
That's the law! That's the state!
What a profoundly pathetic...
Show of what American education or education around the world is like.
That people are surprised.
There's a law against trespassing.
Well, what do you mean cops showed up and enforced the law?
It's like, that's the law!
If you don't understand that, how can you vote?
Well, of course, that's the whole point.
You're not supposed to understand that.
So you can vote for all sorts of egregious and silly things.
I couldn't help but think.
I shouldn't laugh. I shouldn't laugh. I couldn't help but think, though.
That it's not moral, but if you did want to make money, not moral, don't do it, but if you did want to make money, you'd short companies.
In other words, you would make money if the company stock price went down.
You'd short companies and then provoke some sort of racial incident.
So, the upshot of this has been, of course, a lot of hysteria.
Starbucks is going to close their stores for their employees to go through implicit bias training, and all of that is just pseudoscience.
It's like Freudian pauses. It's, you know, you see images, and then you see words, and if it takes you longer to associate some words with some races or less, I mean, it's all nonsense.
Even the people who design it say it doesn't translate into real-world decision-making, so...
It's a ritual.
It's a ritual like Hail Marys.
It's a ritual like monks flogging themselves with knotted ropes to punish themselves for thoughts of masturbation or something.
It's just a weird ritual that you go through to get back into the good graces of the evil gods known as political correctness.
So what does implicit bias training mean in this situation?
Starbucks has a rule. You can't use the washrooms if you're not a customer.
So is the purpose now that you don't enforce the rule in Philadelphia?
Is the purpose that you don't enforce the rule against blacks?
Is that a way of overcoming bias?
If you have separate rules for blacks than for whites?
It is, I mean, it's crazy.
It's because people can't think.
Now, the manager of the store no longer works at Starbucks.
Now, I don't know if he quit or she quit or was fired or whatever, but it seems kind of interesting to me.
I don't know how you can be fired, if she was fired, or he.
I don't know how the manager can be fired if the manager was enforcing Starbucks policy.
Starbucks policy being, you don't buy the coffee, you can't use the washer.
And... If the manager was enforcing that rule, which is what you have to do if you're the manager there, how can you lose your job or why would you quit?
Of course we know why they would quit because they don't want to be outed and pursued and hounded and get death threats and all the kind of stuff that happens when you get the laser beady eye of the mob on your hapless self who happen to fall afoul of particular social justice hysteria.
And this is kind of like when I was a kid, this is the kind of thing that you know, right?
Like when I was a kid, you want change.
You know, you want to go to the arcade.
I guess they do exist for kids and so on.
But you'd go to a convenience store and you'd say, can you give me change for a dollar?
And you know what the convenience store clerk would say?
We're not in the business of giving change.
You can go to the bank or you can buy something here.
So then you'd pick up a stick of gum or something like that or one of those weird little Swedish fishes and I didn't seem to have wrapping sometimes.
Oh, the things I put in my mouth.
But anyway, so this is the deal.
You can't just go and make change because if you're running a convenience store, you have a certain amount of change.
This is back before, you know, there were ATMs and visas all over the place.
So you have a certain amount of change which you calibrate for the day, and if you make change for a whole bunch of people, then you end up...
with too many bills and too few coins and then you can't make change for people and it's a big complicated mess so they ask you to buy something in order to give you the value of change so this is not that complicated I mean, everybody knows this, that some places,
like if you're out in the boonies, if you're out in the country, if you're at a place that's hard to get to for crazy people, like if you are pulling over at some truck stop on the highway and so on, there's not going to be a lot of homeless crazy people around like that.
So if you're kind of in a place where crazy people don't have access, then they don't usually have that same rule that says you have to buy something to To use the washroom.
And there's reasons for that. But everybody knows this.
Everybody knows this.
You want to use the washroom downtown in some place where there are crazy people around, then you have to buy something.
And we'll get into the why in a second, but that's the rule.
And so when people say, you have to leave, don't you just leave?
I mean, what a huge waste of time, money, effort, and energy.
If somebody doesn't want you to On his property, don't you get off the property?
If you're throwing a party and you invite your friends and then someone just wanders in off the street, don't you say, you're not invited to this party, you've got to go?
And if that person doesn't go, then...
Don't you have to call the cops?
I mean, I don't understand why this is so complicated, but then again, I've overcome a good deal at the indoctrination.
So the question is interesting.
It's an interesting question. So why is there this rule?
Which says if you don't have a coffee or you don't buy anything, then you can't use the bathrooms.
Because if you're running a business, you want as many people to come into your business as profitably possible, right?
So if you have a sort of open bathroom and, hey, come in and use the bathrooms, then a lot of people will come in.
And some portion of those people will then look at your coffees and your sweetcakes and...
Oh, that's ever so tempting, but I must say no, oat bars that Starbucks has.
Don't even get me started on K-Pops.
K-Pops are the devil.
But you want people to come into your store, your coffee shop, so why wouldn't you just say, yeah, anyone can use the washrooms?
Well, because you're a business.
Now, when you're a business, you don't have the luxury of self-referential, whack-jobby PC culture.
You actually have restrictions.
You have strictures.
You have to please your customers.
You have to save money.
You have to have happy employees.
You have to have good products.
You have to have a safe environment.
Like, you can't just, you notice the PC culture tends to cluster around people who don't actually have these kinds of strictures and restrictions.
So why don't you just throw It's not that hard to figure out.
Well, if you throw open your bathrooms to everyone, then your bathrooms are going to be occupied more frequently, right?
Now, if your bathrooms are occupied more frequently, then your actual customers...
Can't use them. Well, they've got to wait more time, which means that the customers end up dissatisfied.
If you open up the bathroom to everyone, the bathroom needs to be cleaned a lot more often, and that, of course, is added cost, it's added expense, and it's time taken from actually running the restaurant, right?
A washroom is overhead because you're not charging people for the washroom.
The washroom is paid for By a portion of the coffee price, like if there was no bathroom, then maybe the coffee would be a quarter, like 25% cheaper, or 20%, 25 cents cheaper.
I don't know what the, probably not a quarter.
It would be, sorry, that's confusing.
It would be, I'm not going to edit.
This would be, it would be 25 cents cheaper, let's say.
And that's taken out of the cost of the coffee to pay for the bathroom, right?
And to pay for the water and to pay for the soap and the cleaning and maintenance and all that kind of stuff.
And so if you throw open your bathrooms to everyone, then you have to raise the price of the coffee to pay for all of the additional supplies and cleaning and labor it takes to maintain the bathrooms.
So the price of your coffee might go up 10% or 15%.
Now, the place across the street, which doesn't open up its bathrooms for everyone, will have cheaper coffees, and therefore more people will go to that, right?
So, you understand, this is just free market restrictions.
And there's an anonymous barista who wrote on the Starbucks Gossip blog, quote, I am completely amazed by what people will do when given a few square feet of privacy.
Why do you want to have sex in a bathroom?
I think the toilet would be kind of a mood killer, right?
And listen, I'm not talking about these two men.
I'm talking about why the policy is in place to begin with.
Because people will, I can't even call it, have sex.
They will rut like piled-up sea urchins in a washroom.
They will do drugs in the washroom, and they may die in the washroom.
They may pass out. They may vomit in the washroom.
And that makes things really unpleasant for everyone.
Concerned. And the current employees and former Starbucks employees have reported that there are homeless people who will use the bathrooms as their own personal showers.
There's an anonymous New Yorker who calls himself Mr.
PP. Worst of my little pony ever.
He has vowed to masturbate to orgasm in every Starbucks bathroom in the city and rate orgasm.
The experience. Welp, yelp.
So it's nasty and it's unpleasant.
The people could leave needles in there.
I mean, you understand. It's a huge mess.
And what if you've opened it up to the public, there's a huge mess, there's needles, there's some...
Who knows, right? There's some drugs used.
And then that's your surprise visit from the health inspector.
And if the health inspector finds your bathroom not up to code, not up to scratch, not clean enough...
Then you can face fines and closures and legal problems and so on, right?
And the other thing, too, is that, I mean, I've worked in restaurants and other places quite a lot when I was in my youth as a teenager, and every now and then, you know, you draw the short straw and you have to go in and clean up some literally unholy exploding bowel mess, like where you don't even know what virus hit the person sideways, but you expect to find the head in a garbage bag.
And you've got to go and clean up that stuff.
Now, if that happens on a regular basis, people will quit because it's dangerous.
It is unpleasant.
It's revolting. And there's a part of you that says...
I have a degree in art history.
Here I am for the third time this week cleaning up homeless vomit.
And it's just like people will leave.
People will leave. Maybe there are legal liabilities for dangerous bathrooms.
I mean, you understand that people just don't have this luxury.
They actually have to make rational decisions about this kind of stuff.
Now, you've probably heard about the guy who then went into a Starbucks and...
Demanded a free coffee, reparations, racism, and so on.
Now, this was an activist.
But they gave him a free coffee, right?
So scream racism, get a free coffee.
Now, I find this repulsive and revolting and horrible.
Listen. Not what this guy did, right?
Because he's trying to illustrate a point, I think.
But using the word racism to get stuff, to get free stuff, to get promotions, to get job opportunities, to get free coffees, to get subsidized loans, like using the charge of racism to get free stuff, to get subsidized stuff is really, really horrifying and horrible.
There is real racism in the world.
And you should not, you should not use and manipulate a real human problem just to get free stuff.
That is hard. Like, there are people who really have cancer and really need money, but you don't fake it and make it up just to get free stuff.
That is absolutely horrible.
And so, the issue of racism, I mean, racism is one of these terms that you should reserve for people who are really, really obvious and racist.
And they occur for every race, and they occur for every ethnicity, and you should really, really hold it in your holster until you have a clear target which you can use.
Carpet bombing of racism, this prey and prey of racism.
I just call everyone racist and see who responds.
Well, generally, the only people who are going to respond in an appeasing fashion to the charges of racism are people who are sensitive to racism and don't want to be perceived as racist and already think that racism is bad and so on, right?
People like out-and-out proud racists will be like, you know...
Yeah, you know, you call a communist who's a communist, a communist, and he's like, I'm a communist, right?
I mean, he's going to say that's a good thing, right?
And there are people out there who think that their racism is good and moral and right and all that kind of stuff, and they won't be bothered by charges of racism any more than I'd be bothered by somebody calling me bald, right?
So don't use charges of racism...
To bully, to dominate, to squeeze people for resources.
Don't. Don't.
I mean, it's wrong because there are people who suffer from genuine racism and you don't want to hijack that for your own political agenda.
So it's just, it's kind of weird, but it's very illustrative, which is why I wanted to spend a few minutes on it today.
It's very illustrative. Because it is difficult.
Philadelphia is a crime-ridden city.
Sorry, another two-syllable phrase came to mind.
And it's way above the national average in terms of crime, and a particularly violent crime.
Of the 10 American cities with populations of more than a million residents, it has the highest violent crime rate.
And that is an issue that you simply have to deal with if you are a business or a resident in Philadelphia.
And there are jerks in the world.
There are violent people. There are irresponsible people.
There are addicts, drug addicts and sex addicts and so on.
There are people who will just do horrible things.
And one way of not eliminating but reducing that kind of despoilment or defilement of a bathroom is to say, buy a coffee.
I wish we lived in a society where everyone could use the bathrooms at all times.
If you go to South Korea, you go to Japan, and so on, and the public washrooms are...
I mean, you can eat sushi off them.
Don't, but I'm thinking you could.
And that is a particular, well, different kind of society where in Japan the police can't even find out, or can't even figure out what to do with their time anymore.
But that's not Philadelphia, and that's not lots of places in the West, and increasingly that's not even London, which...
Now seems to be one giant hellish game of Fruit Ninja.
That's sort of the main points I want to get across.
There are people in the world who have to deal with reality.
And they have to deal with customer satisfaction.
They have to deal with profitability.
They are responsible to shareholders.
They are responsible to their employees.
They are responsible to people higher up in the chain.
They have to deal with reality.
And if they seem incomprehensible to you, if their behaviors or their actions seem incomprehensible to you or terrible or horrible or bad...
I guess the only thing I can do is invite you to try and deal with reality, with restrictions, with limits, with having to balance things that is required in the free market.
And, you know, step up, step out to reality might not be a bad place to go to because, or be, because this kind of virtue signaling, this hysteria that go on, It is a signal that you don't actually have to work in the free market for a living.
There was a time when that used to be a pretty shameful thing.
