Early this week Rolling Stone wrote an article discussing Starbucks' decision to cancel their initiative program, "Race Together."
Starbucks and USA Today began an initiative to start "push for a much-needed national discussion." It consisted having their baristas write "#RaceTogether" on the customer's cups in hopes to start a conversation about race.
Starbucks' customers and social media users shut that down pretty quickly, though. The scrawling was met with some pretty fierce backlash, which even led the company's VP of Communications Corey duBrowa to delete his Twitter account.
Users began to mock the hashtag... as social medias users do. The hashtag definitely worked in their favor, though. Also, what a boring and barely thought out "campaign name."
The company promises that the campaign was completely innocent and their "intentions are pure." Starbucks' seemed pretty confused and shocked about the negative response. They essentially apologized, but it seemed a little empty.
Personally, I think the campaign was pretty lame and useless, but I don't believe they meant any harm by it. It's a little condescending for the their tagline to be a "push for a much-needed national discussion." I'm pretty sure that for over a year there has been numerous conversations about the sever issue of race discrimination.
Does Starbucks not follow the news? Seriously, come on.
It's a little tacky that a beverage company tried to make profit off of such a serious issue and call it an "initiative." Lame.
Starbucks should really just stick to creating delicious, over-priced drinks.
Oh, and happy birthday to the oh-so-tasty Starbucks frappuccino!
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