Wake up and Smell the Bums

It’s not often a news headline makes me laugh out loud. It happened today. I went to Drudge and saw this: “SCHULTZ OUT AT STARBUCKS.”

Come on, man. What did you think was going to happen? You turned your stores into homeless shelters, and the homeless are not pleasant. They just aren’t.

On TV, every homeless person is a regular guy or gal who woke up one morning with no job and somehow ended up on the street in two or three days in spite of doing everything right. In the real world, nearly all homeless people are addicts, criminals, and/or mentally ill. They are generally unemployable. Many of them are violent and/or disruptive. Also, a large percentage of them smell incredibly bad.

It’s fine to be close to dirty homeless people when you’re doing sidewalk evangelism or social work, but dang, you don’t want them rubbing up against you with that distinctive months-old-feces-and-urine smell city dwellers know so well, while you’re trying to eat.

No one wants to have a relaxing discussion of the differences in the aroma notes of Kona and Ethiopian while sitting in a room where it smells like someone just deep-fried a diaper.

What of nonpaying “guests” who don’t smell or make trouble? Well, ask yourself this: “Do I really want to pay 5 dollars for coffee and then stand while someone who isn’t a customer sits and charges his phone at a socket I need?”

I’m not trying to pick on the homeless. They need ministry and thoughtful charity. They are not to be discarded. But they are what they are, and there are certain places where their presence, with the problems it brings, is intolerable.

In case you live in a dark, deep hole, Starbucks got crucified recently because a store manager called the cops on two young men who wouldn’t spend money and refused to leave. In the real world, this is called “trespassing” and “loitering.” No one can afford to run a business where random people fill seats intended for paying customers. But the men in the story were black, and somehow, our very confused public took up for them.

Starbucks apologized, set up some kind of feel-good charity in their names, and made every employee sit through insulting sensitivity training. Howard Schultz, the chairman of the board, directed managers to allow people to come in and hang out whether or not they spent money.

The big problem with this policy, obviously, is that Schultz could tell employees what to do, but he couldn’t order customers around. He was not able to force his customers to buy extremely overpriced and overrated coffee under the new conditions, and every intelligent person in management realized this.

This is an extension of the fundamental problem with leftism: you can’t force reality to cooperate.

It feels nice to tell people “yes” all the time, but there are consequences. If there weren’t, no one would ever say no. It takes backbone to be a conservative and remind people that some cuddly, fluffy ideas just won’t fly. Everyone can’t have a guaranteed minimum income. Restaurants can’t survive while paying burger flippers $15 per hour. Landlords can’t afford to maintain $10000 rent-controlled apartments that rent for $75. You can’t make hipsters and yuppies drink coffee next to transients and panhandlers.

I have been waiting for the Starbucks pustule to burst. It had to happen. You just can’t run a business like this. Even soup kitchens have to run certain people off.

It’s surprising that Starbucks fired Schultz instead of having him change his policy, but maybe they had lost confidence in him. Or maybe he was too proud to back down.

All over America, freeloaders must be frowning, or at least they will be later in the day when discarded newspapers trickle down to them. I guarantee you, there are thousands of people who were making elaborate plans to move into Starbucks during the daylight hours. Some of them are already ensconced there, like government employees, taking up room and contributing nothing. You know they are. Human nature is always predictable.

Imagine what a visit to Starbucks must be like in New York City right now. Ordinarily, Manhattan bums have to stand outside and glare and scream at you and expose themselves through thick, smell-proof windows as you eat. Now they’re sitting at tables with people, bumming right in their faces.

It would have been funny if Occupy Wall Street had moved into a Starbucks. Maybe they did. Imagine all those faux-liberal investors and bankers, trying to sip lattes surrounded by the Borderline Personality Drum Ensemble.

It’s too bad the policy didn’t get a fair shake, and by “fair shake,” I mean a good chance to turn Starbucks customers off of leftism permanently. After a month or two of Schultz’s Folly, a second Trump term would have been much more likely. Reality would have converted thousands. You know what they say: “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.”

It’s too bad we can’t have complete leftism for 6 months, just to make people sick of it. It would be a great experience, but it wouldn’t work, because you can’t get rid of leftism when you’re tired of it. Leftism is authoritarianism, and authoritarianism is ruthless about preserving itself. Gulags, killing fields, tiny free speech areas, university speech codes…they have all sorts of draconian tools to fend off rejection.

Liberty is much easier to get rid of than leftism, because free people can vote their liberty away.

I wonder what kind of details we’ll be hearing in the future. Probably none, unless there are leaks. Schultz is surely getting compensation, which he doesn’t want to endanger, and Starbucks definitely doesn’t want him to sue. Everyone involved will probably clam up. One hopes a Bradley Manning will appear.

The Schultz loitering policy is definitely what got him canned. Count on that. You don’t drop a costly hydrogen bomb of mismanagement on thousands of subordinates and then leave your job shortly thereafter unless there’s a connection. The sudden termination of your long and illustrious career is not an indication that you have happy shareholders.

Look for a quiet redefinition of the policy in weeks to come. It has already started; adjustments appeared while Schultz was still in power. By fall, Starbucks will be doing what it used to do a year ago or five years ago. They’ll run freeloaders off. I very much doubt they’ll make a sudden loud announcement. They don’t want to bring the snowflakes down on their heads.

Life is so crazy these days. I wonder what will happen next.