Starbucks #RaceTogether Campaign Backfires (2015)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

It's April 3rd. In 2015, Starbucks announces that it is bringing its "Race Together" initiative to a close, after it was relentlessly mocked and critced online and in stores.

Jody, Niki, and Kellie look back at the very-Obama-era effort by the coffee chain to spark conversations about racial inequality by having their baristas write #racetogether on customer's cups. Customers were not feeling it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day, a history podcast from Radiotopia.
0:07.0	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.7	Let's go to the spring of 2015, 10 years ago when racial harmony in this country was at an all-time
0:17.6	high, both personal and structural inequalities were solved, all because of one
0:22.4	plucky Seattle coffee chain.
0:24.8	All right, look, folks, I'm going to try and avoid too much snark in this episode, which is going
0:28.6	to be a little tough because, yes, we are revisiting the days of Starbucks and their
0:32.6	Race Together campaign.
0:34.6	Do you remember this, Starbucks encouraging their baristas to write the phrase
0:37.9	race together on coffee cups in the hopes of sparking conversations across the racial divide
0:43.1	in their stores. Safe to say, this effort did not go exactly as planned. It was announced
0:48.8	to great fanfare but was quickly roasted harder than a bag of Starbucks coffee beans. So here
0:54.1	to discuss. You didn't like that
0:55.8	one? I thought you would like that one. It was actually really good, but I think you can't be
0:59.9	encouraged. Fair enough. Here to discuss the very short-lived race together effort are, as always,
1:06.5	Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter-Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody. Hey there.
1:12.7	Had you kind of memory hold this in the same way that I had? This is weirdly at the top of my brain.
1:19.3	I think about this all the time because it's such like, it's iconic, especially when Starbucks
1:26.3	recently decided they were going to go back to writing on the cups.
1:29.7	And I was like, oh, that has not worked for you historically.
1:34.0	Yeah.
1:34.4	Yeah.
	...

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