Bucking Starbucks’ Star

Common sense would perhaps dictate that a company sporting a managerial culture of pathological lying as the default way of dealing with stakeholders must inevitably go under at some point. Kant’s categorical imperative insists that mendacity is unethical, for it violates the non-contradictory law of reason. What would the Prussian Kant say, however, to the good Germans who lied to NAZI Jew-hunters about hiding the enemies of the state? As laudable as such lies are, unsavory business managers seem instinctually wired to take advantage of the slippery slope by ignoring the rationale of avoiding extreme harm. What begins as a trickle can become a deluge. Perhaps that is what happened at Starbucks.

In late October, 2022, the director of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board “accused Starbucks of threatening to withhold benefits and wage increases from workers if they unionized; selectively enforcing work policies against union supporters; disciplining or firing workers who were activists; and failing to bargain in good faith.”[1] Starbucks had closed a store in Ithaca, New York. The lack of good faith can be seen in the Congressional testimony of Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ CEO, in 2023. He sanctimoniously “admitted” that people he had spoken with could erroneously infer intimidation. In other words, it’s on the other guy. Such toxic pomposity easily belies a mere patina of portrayed honesty.  

NLRB officials claimed in 2022, The “company has repeatedly broken the law by firing pro-union employees, cutting their hours and offering pay hikes and other benefits to those who decline to unionize.”[2] Least the company’s management’s denials of these claims be believed, fast-forward to April, 2023, when it was revealed that the company had lied that negative publicity and a related strike played no role in the company’s decision to permanently close another store in Ithaca.

The story begins back in April, 2022, when Starbucks’ public-relations firm notified its client that employees “went on strike due to repeated grease trap spills that caused an unsafe environment and lack of action from management.”[3] The lack of action regarding a known safety hazard at a store that the company had written had the “strongest real estate trade position in this area” such that “any relocation would be inferior” points to a single-minded and expedient orientation to money.[4] Such a mentality is ripe for pro-union votes. A managerial culture of mendacity just adds fuel to the flames.

Andrew Trull, a company spokesman, claimed, “Media attention had no bearing on our decision to close the store.”[5] In an internal email, however, Denise Nelsen, senior vice president of U.S. operations, wrote, “We have to solve these condition issues because we also keep getting media on the store condition there.”[6] A direct contradiction! In symbolic logic, A and not-A cannot both be true. A barista at the store at the time said regarding the closing of the lucrative store, “It was retaliation for the strike we went on because we were being forced to work in unsafe conditions. They didn’t care [before]. They cared all of a sudden now when we’re making national news.”[7] Admittedly, negative publicity can hurt the bottom-line. I venture to say nonetheless that the instinctual urge to retaliate, which Nietzsche claimed is out of control in the weak who seek to dominate, trumps the otherwise-hegemonic money-orientation in Starbucks’ managerial culture. The propensity to fabricate rather than tell the truth serves both the power-aggrandizing and economizing motives, especially when they are extreme urges out of control (i.e., not mastered, or channeled by the individual).  

The culture of mendacity in Starbucks’ managerial cadre reaches even the store-manager level. I know this from personal experience. At a Starbucks’ store in April, 2023, a store manager pointed to the last remaining seat. “It’s right below an air-duct that blows cold air.” I had been there in January. “We can adjust that for you,” the manager lied. “I though the temperature of stores is centrally controlled,” I countered. “Yes, it is; it reduces our carbon footprint.” He gave no outward sign that he had just contradicted himself, which can be construed as a lie on top of a lie. Perhaps he was assuming that customers are idiots and would not be likely to put two and two together. Well, I did, but I was polite enough not to tell him that I knew that he had just lied to me. Instead, I went after the accuracy of his claim that centralized control is environmentally friendly. “Well, I have lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where your stores are generally known to feel like refrigerators even when it is 116F degrees. I’d say that’s a pretty big footprint, wouldn’t you?” He stood there silent, like an idiot. The dumb shoes were on a different foot.

Meanwhile, employees of that store kept to their script—that they like their store manager so they would not vote to unionize. When on one occasion I overheard a shift-manager say that the company’s management had lied about giving the employees an additional day off, he was silent when I asked him if he still liked the management so much he would not vote to strike. He pretended like I had not overheard him, which itself is a kind of a lie. Even the employees, who are in no sense of the word “partners” as the company’s head management pretends and publicizes, lie to customers.

Lastly, when I was living in Arizona, I went to a Starbucks in area of Tempe north of the Salt River, which the city of Tempe lies is a lake even though it looks like any other river. Six police employees on their break on the 4^th of July will wandering around the customer area between tables. I approached a Starbucks employee to complain, as I was not used to looking up from my laptop and seeing so many guns passing by at close-range. She refused to act. Then when the group of guns were blocking the counter where drinks are available, I reapproached her and she finally decided to do something. She politely asked the police to hang out away from the bar. She was met with bloated egos, one of which, with his back to the customer area, kept turning his head to give us suspicious looks.

My thought was: if the guy feels such distrust for the public, perhaps he and his coworkers would feel more comfortable spending their breaks somewhere more comfortable. Somewhere more out of the way rather than front and center. This would also spare us, the taxpayers, from being subject to even the tacit intimidation of seeing bullet-proof vests and guns at such close range as we enjoy our coffee. No, I was not over-caffeinated, though maybe the police were, given all their pacing around the tables. Not that the police employees would have recognized their hyperactive state; after all, fish cannot see the water that they breathe, for they are always in it. I contend that such a blindness is conducive to literally and figuratively taking liberties, whether through intimidation or outright lashing out. 

I do contend that liberty includes freedom of the innocent from intimidation. It can be quite difficult to perceive, yet unconsciously it is surely felt. Notice, for instance, the policeman intently looking at me as I took the picture shown here. Is taking a picture suspicious enough to warrant such rapt attention as a hunting dog might have upon seeing a rabbit? As the youth of today would say, the guy needs to chill. Not that I would have walked over to him after taking the photo and say, Hey dude, just chill out a bit, huh? You're on your break. He would have sternly dismissed such an accusation and turned on me (hence proving my point for me) even though it was, after all, a holiday. July 4th, Freedom from Intimidation Day in the U.S.A. By the twenty-first century, the British Red Coats had all but been forgotten, even, I suspect, in Boston Massachusetts. In Arizona, the Red Coats are homegrown.

Fortunately for all concerned, the police huddle-formation soon broke up and the disgruntled cops left the store. I discovered only days later that the head of their local union had been broadcasting that Starbucks had demanded that the police leave the store, which was a lie. The egos were two degrees of separation from realizing that my complaint had some validity, and they felt the need to retaliate against the company just for being asked to move out of the way. Interestingly, the barista had refused to ask the police to stop wandering through the tight-knit customer area yet decided to act when the police were near her.

Laura Ingram of Fox News had decided that I must be a criminal. For its part, Starbucks sent in a vice president, who directly or indirectly told The New York Times that I must be “anxious” and that police of any number whatsoever are welcome in any Starbucks store. Considering the retaliation against employees, or “partners,” who have held strikes or sought to unionize, it is interesting that the vice president capitulated to the local police union—even scapegoating a customer in doing so. I wonder how many customers trust the company and its management; any such trust would surely not be deserved.

The esteemed Starbucks experience, which the company advertised at the time, apparently includes being thrown under the bus (i.e., sacrificed) for making a request that might upset the company’s cosy relationship with fellow power-aggrandizers. Mendacious birds of prey often fly together, for they understand each other, just as alcoholics and drug addicts do. Using people, whether for retaliation or more money, violates Kant’s moral imperative that rational beings (including us, even as we irrationally over-populate and, in doing so, risk even our own extinction) treat other such beings not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. Kant was insistent and adamant: Telling lies violates this moral requirement of what it means ultimately to be human—to partake in rational nature.

Furthermore, as Nietzsche emphasizes in his Genealogy of Morals, an unmastered and excessive instinctual urge of resentment, especially of the strong, and indeed of the ensuing retaliation too, is a mark of being weak. The strong are advised to keep their distance from the new birds of prey. Hence, job-seekers should avoid toxic managerial cultures if possible, and at the very least be on the lookout for the telltale signs—the red flags. A pattern of telling lies is such a flag, hence it is significant when a direct contradiction can be exposed. (Potential) customers should take notice too, though the want of local alternatives can make it difficult, practically speaking, to avoid the chain. Unfettered choices require a competitive market, which as the activities of companies such as Standard Oil, Walmart, and Facebook demonstrate, can be difficult to be maintained even in a republic.

See the booklet: "Bucking Starbucks' Star."

See the essay: "Starbucks Capitulates to an Overzealous Police Union in Spite of In-Store Intimidation."

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 1. Dave Jamieson, “Starbucks Broke Law By Closing Unionized Store In Ithaca, Labor Officials Say,” Huffington Post, November 1, 2022.
 2. Ibid.
 3. Dave Jamieson, “A Starbucks Closed Abruptly—And Its Workers Say It Was Retaliation,” The Huffington Post, April 29, 2023.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Rousseau on Inequalities in Society: An Instance of Kantian Enlightenment?

Kant defines enlightenment as “man's emergence from his inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.”[1] By making public use, Kant means “that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public.”[2] By sufficient freedom, Kant means that ideas that threaten the power of the guardians of institutional or societal rules are not excluded.

Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher famous for his duty-based ethics.

For example, an enlightened Roman Catholic priest would publish ideas questioning and even criticizing Church dogma when he is acting as a scholar, even though he would fulfill his duty in his conduct as a priest by defending those very teachings. A priest could thus go public as a heretic as long as he does so on his own time as a scholar and member of society, and an enlightened bishop would tolerate the scholar’s freedom to think and publish outside the box.

Rousseau would object to Kant’s prescription for how to become enlightened and Kant would object in turn to Rousseau's preference for the state of nature over society and the associated expansion of reasoning. Does Rousseau fit Kant's concept of enlightenment even though Kant would object to some of Rousseau's ideas?

Rousseau was a “heretic” of sorts. Writing to people living in societies, he was critical of the very existence of society itself, and thus of the power of its guardians. In his essay on inequality, he contends that the unnecessary, or artificial, sources of inequality stem from humans living in society rather than in the state of nature. “Every inequality of institution must increase the natural inequalities of the human species.”[3] Accordingly, “the origin of society and of the laws, which increased the fetters of the weak, and the strength of the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed for ever [sic] the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable title; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labour, servitude, and misery.”[4] By thinking freely and publishing the results, the citizen of Geneva aimed a lethal arrow at not only human society, but also its guardians. Rather than coming from the guidance of guardians, his ideas on the impact of them, as well as the defended institutions, properties, and laws arose from his own reasoning. He was free thinker, enlightened in Kant’s sense of the word.

This is not to say that the content of Rousseau’s essay on inequality conforms to Kant’s prescriptions for how more people or a people can become enlightened. For example, Kant laments that the constrained use of reason that had become second nature to the vast majority of people in his day who astonishingly were “virtually incapable for the time being of freeing their use of reason.”[5] According to Rousseau, however, the increased use of reason stimulated by living in a society instead of in the state of nature engenders self-love, and therefore pride, jealousy, and increased as well as technologically more severe warfare. Antipodal to society itself, “it is reason that makes man shrink into himself; it is reason that makes him keep aloof from everything that can trouble or afflict him; it is philosophy that destroys his connections with other men.”[6] Living in society is self-contradictory with respect to the impacts of the expanding and more complex reasoning.[7]

In short, the Prussian professor claims in his essay that a greater use of reason is part of becoming enlightened, whereas the citizen of Geneva advocates in his essay a reduction in the use of reason to that level and simplicity that is natural for human beings (i.e., in the state of nature). That Rousseau's published ideas on reason conflict with the significance of reasoning in becoming enlightened does not mean, however, that Rousseau's reasoning about reason in the state of nature versus in society is not an instance of enlightenment. That is, Rousseau's own use of reason can fit Kant's definition of enlightenment rather than the lesser reasoning that Rousseau prescribes. Put another way, Rousseau was a philosopher who claims in his essay that philosophy destroys a philosopher's social connections.

As a professor of philosophy at a university, Kant undoubtedly defended and protected the discipline institutionally; that is, old Kant was a guardian of some things not present in the state of nature—namely, professorships in philosophy, the discipline of philosophy, and philosophizing itself. Rousseau's published ideas critical of the artificial sort, or excess, of reasoning that is the root, trunk, and branches of philosophizing thus evinces freedom of public thought beyond the guidance of institutional guardians such as Kant; the philosophical establishment (e.g.,  tenured professors) would have been inclined to discredit or even ban Rousseau's threatening ideas. In writing published texts in philosophy, Rousseau was doing the very thing that he argues in his essay should not be done; he was doing Kantian enlightened public thinking.

Furthermore, Kant claims that people “will of their own accord gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately adopted to keep them in it.”[8] A society’s guardians determine and defend such measures. Although Rousseau too is critical of the artificial measures and their societally rather than naturally powerful enforcers, he advocates a return to the state of nature (including barbarism) rather than moving toward an enlightened society.

Therefore, Rousseau would oppose Kant’s advocacy of an enlightened prince who considers it his duty in religious matters not to prescribe anything to his people as a means of encouraging more people to become enlightened. Under his rule, “ecclesiastical dignitaries, notwithstanding their official duties, may in their capacity as scholars freely and publicly submit to the judgment of the world their verdicts and opinions, even if these deviate from orthodox doctrine.”[9] To Rousseau, who is less concerned in his essay on inequality about the religious domain than is Kant in his essay on enlightenment, the various forms of government, including monarchy, “owe their origin to the various degrees of inequality between the members, at the time they first coalesced into a political body.”[10] The solution to the increased societally-based inequalities is to return to the state of nature, rather than to count on an “enlightened” prince, who is actually compromised by power and position (i.e., inequality). So Rousseau criticizes a governmental means by which a people can become enlightened in a Kantian sense, but in doing so, he demonstrates that his freedom of public thought was not constrained or guided by a prince.

Therefore, Kant would have to obey his own reason in counting Rousseau among the enlightened as per Kant's own definition, even while rejecting and perhaps even attacking Rousseau's ideas that would detract from such enlightenment if put into effect. To the extent that Kant himself was not enlightened, he would hardly have been able, at least for the time being, to tolerate such ideas even as he would have had to admit that Rousseau was enlightened. Put another way, being both an institutional guardian and a philosopher, Kant would have been in a tight corner. Generally speaking, we can conclude that enlightenment exists uneasily with the lack thereof in a society, especially if the lack pertains to the guardians. Accordingly, I suspect that a society is at ease only if the vast majority of people, including most or even all of the guardians, are enlightened.

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[1] Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (World ebook Library).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kant, An Answer.

[6] Rousseau, Discourse.

[7] Interestingly, Kant’s first version of his categorical imperative, a criterion useful for assessing whether a given act is ethical, logical contradiction in a maxim being universalized such that it holds for everyone indicates that the act is immoral even if performed by one person rather than everyone. We are rational beings, so a logical contradiction means bad news. Therefore, does the logical contradiction in universalizing an increased use of reason in society to everyone resulting in everyone impeding society itself mean that living in society is unethical? Perhaps Kant would say that society would have to be impossible rather than merely impeded for there to be a logical contraction.

[8] Kant, An Answer.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Rousseau, Discourse.