The Ethics of Loitering

There has been a lot of ink over the past few weeks about the Starbucks incident where some overanxious store employee called the police because a couple of people were waiting for an associate to arrive before they purchased anything. Once again, I don’t think there is any controversy in this particular case; the employee appears to have acted because the people waiting in their store happened to be African-American, while ignoring the fact that many of their customers who aren’t people of color do this all the time. Starbucks responded by closing all of their stores to retrain the staff, and issuing orders to let anyone hang around the store for as long as they want to whether they order anything or not – which makes me wonder how many more of these incidents have happened recently. But regardless of what happened in this specific case, I thought that the company’s response brings up a larger question…

One could argue that as a place of public accommodation, Starbucks has an obligation to extend service to anyone who isn’t actively violating any laws, and that one of the services they offer is a place in which to sit and enjoy your coffee. One could also argue that chasing away people who may be about to place an order is bad for business, and chasing away people because one of the employees has an unreasonable fear of one or more specific demographic groups is bad for the entire company’s reputation and brand image. In that sense, the company’s response and the new standing orders make perfect sense. Anyone who has ever worked in a food service, customer service, or other “public facing” job already knows that there is another side to the story, however…

Sadly, there are people in any society who will abuse anything any product, service, or resource to which they can gain access. If the personnel in a Starbucks store are not allowed to ask anyone to leave for any reason, we can almost guarantee that someone will make inappropriate use of their premises, more likely sooner than later. That might mean relatively harmless things like people using the seating area for an office they don’t pay rent on, or helping themselves to condiments and paper products without buying anything, or it could mean serious problems like homeless people using the store to sleep in, drug users shooting up in the restrooms, or stalkers spending all day watching one or more employees before trying to follow them home…

Any of these latter cases is going to be virtually as bad for business as the conditions that precipitated the company’s policy change, with the added issues of OSHA violations and hostile and offensive working environment suits being a near-certainty. No one, least of all me, is going to suggest that any company should tolerate open or even implied bigotry among its employees, but anyone who doesn’t realize how much harder these measures have made an already difficult job category has never worked a public-facing job in a tough neighborhood. All of which leads me to the question:

Do we, as businesspeople, have an obligation to accept loitering, trespassing, or other inappropriate use of our facilities because a non-zero number of visitors will be offended by anything other than free and unlimited usage of the property? Realistically, some people are going to take offense no matter how carefully we attempt to meet all of their needs and no matter how hard we try to make them feel welcome. By the same token, some of our employees are going to have some discriminatory beliefs no matter how hard we try to screen them out, or how carefully we attempt to train them to keep those opinions to themselves during business hours. Where do we draw the line between trying to never offend anybody (which is impossible) and trying to maintain a perfectly clean, safe, professional working and eating/drinking environment (which is also impossible)?

It’s worth thinking about…