Starbucks has fired an employee who mocked a customer with a stutter – Huffington Post reports.
The customer stuttered his name when ordering a drink from their local Starbucks to find that the employee wrote his name on the cup as it was said.
The customer’s name was Sam. The employee wrote his name on the cup as “SSSAM”, mimicking his voice.
After they found out about the incident, Starbucks wrote: “We want our stores to serve as a welcoming place for everyone who visits and want to ensure our partners provide a positive experience.
“We have zero tolerance for discrimination and are addressing this immediately.”
With the affected customer’s friend posting the incident onto Facebook, and the post then going viral, Starbucks commented to add that the employee is no longer working at the store.
This isn’t the first time that Starbucks has been embroiled in a discrimination row though.
In May, the coffee chain closed its US stores for several hours for racial bias training after an employee called the police on two black men waiting for an acquaintance to arrive at one of their shops.
Reception to the training was mixed, despite the sessions costing £9million.
One employee told TIME that he felt the videos missed the mark and the training didn’t come in the right form.
They said: "It seems like a lot of talking from the videos and not enough discussion from us.”
Others said it didn’t do enough to ensure that further high-profile incidents didn’t happen again. With an employee being fired for discriminatory behaviour after these training sessions took place, it certainly seems that way.
There’s evidence to back this up. Researchers and social scientists have previously noted how a one-time education programme isn’t enough to tackle racial bias.
Frank Dobbin, a Harvard University sociology professor who studies inequality in the workplace and co-authored the Harvard Business Review analysis said: “Unfortunately, it doesn’t really seem to do much good on average for companies to offer diversity training because they say you can’t really change people’s inherent biases with a training session.”
Do you know of good anti-bias training? Have you experienced bias in the workplace? Tell us in the comments…
