Starbucks board member: "We've got to make this right"
NEW YORK -- Starbucks is trying to "do everything we possibly can to create the environment that is important to our brand and everything we aspire to be as a company and as a country," board member and CBS News contributor Mellody Hobson said Tuesday.
Starbucks announced on Tuesday that it would be shutting down all company stores nationwide on the afternoon of May 29 to conduct racial bias training after a video went viral last week of a Philadelphia Starbucks employee calling the police on two black men.
"We've got to make this right," Hobson said, noting that Starbucks will likely lose money by closing their doors.
Nick Setyan, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, earlier told CBS News a Starbucks location in the U.S. averages $4,400 a day in sales. With afternoon being the slowest time, each store could lose between $650 and $880, Setyan said. That's about $7 million across all 8,000 company-owned stores in the U.S.
The incident led to allegations of racial bias and calls to boycott Starbucks on social media. Protesters on Monday shut down multiple Starbucks in Philadelphia. Separately, a black man said he was denied access to a Starbucks bathroom in Los Angeles even though a white man who hadn't bought anything was given the code.
Hobson said when she saw the video, she was "sick about it."
"I knew that was not the company that I was on the board of of all these years," Hobson said.
Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson has met twice with the two men who were arrested and apologized. Hobson said that from what she has heard, it was a "genuinely good meeting." She said in the first meeting, the two men came accompanied by a lawyer, but then they met with Johnson with "just the three of them." Additionally, Hobson said Johnson said the two men had "great ambitions in real estate" and Johnson offered to mentor them.
