Starbucks will no longer require people to pay for something before being allowed to use the bathroom, the company announced this week.
The change in the company’s bathroom policy comes after the arrest of two black men who had been refused permission to use the washroom of a Starbucks coffee shop in Philadelphia.
“We don’t want to become a public bathroom, but we’re going to make the right decision 100 percent of the time and give people the key,” Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz said at a speaking event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, May 10.
“We don’t want anyone at Starbucks to feel as if we are not giving access to you to the bathroom because you are ‘less than.’ We want you to be ‘more than,'” he said.
Schultz said prior rules around requiring a purchase before using the bathroom were a “loose policy” largely left up to individual franchisees to enforce.
Last Friday, Starbucks Canada announced it was following suit with its American counterpart and would close its stores nationwide for one afternoon on June 11 so that employees could undergo implicit bias training.
