Starbucks employee fired after mocking stuttering customer

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Updated 3:01 pm CDT, Thursday, July 5, 2018

NEW YORK (AP) — Starbucks says an employee in Philadelphia has been fired after reportedly mocking a customer with a stutter.

The coffee chain says the behavior did not reflect the experience customers should have and the employee is no longer with Starbucks.

Experts say one training session won't be enough to solve the coffee chain's problems.

A person on Facebook posted Sunday that his friend stuttered when giving his name, and that the barista made light of it verbally and then spelled the name with extra letters. The customer with the stutter emailed Starbucks and was offered $5 as an apology, according to the post. Starbucks said Thursday that was not the ideal response, and that it has since apologized to fired after reportedly mocking a customer with a stutter.



Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Starbucks-philadelphia-stutter-customer-mocking-13051289.php

[Cirque du So-What]

1. 'Experts say one training session won't be enough to solve the coffee chain's problems.'

100 training sessions won't be enough to solve society's problems.

[rurallib]

2. Nice touch that $5 offer

that must have really drove home the message that Starbuck's thinks the person is a total idiot.
What a slap in the face.

[samir.g]

3. Starbucks is a shithole

Especially in philly.

[Demsrule86]

8. No it is not...they are paying for Trans operations now...with their insurance...they give insurance

and tuition...there are always bad apples....fire their asses.

[appalachiablue]

4. Inexcusable, rotten behavior; maybe the ex employee learned smthg.

the hard way. Possibly not, with the way some people act.

What is it with Philly Starbucks?

[groundloop]

5. Someone else who mocked a person with a disability needs to be fired - IMPEACH 45 !!!!!!

Just because that bastard who's currently occupying the White House did the exact same thing other cold-hearted losers think it's ok to do the same thing.

[dalton99a]

6. Piece of shit should be identified

[Judi Lynn]

7. Starbucks worker fired after mocking stuttering customer

Starbucks worker fired after mocking stuttering customer
By Associated Press July 5, 2018 | 5:15pm


Starbucks says an employee in Philadelphia has been fired after reportedly mocking a customer with a stutter.

The coffee chain says the behavior did not reflect the experience customers should have and the employee is no longer with Starbucks.

A person on Facebook posted Sunday that his friend stuttered when giving his name, and that the barista made light of it verbally and then spelled the name with extra letters. The customer with the stutter emailed Starbucks and was offered $5 as an apology, according to the post. Starbucks said Thursday that was not the ideal response, and that it has since apologized to the person directly.

In May, Starbucks held anti-racial bias training for thousands of US employees after a worker at another Philadelphia store called police on two black men waiting for a friend. The incident was a major embarrassment.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/05/starbucks-worker-fired-after-mocking-stuttering-customer/




Tan Lekwijit
July 1 at 8:17 PM ·
(Updates: Starbucks has commented on this post and reached out to Sam)

Starbucks has deleted my post from their page, so here’s again the story:

My friend Sam who is a stutterer stuttered on his name when ordering a coffee at Starbucks. The barista said, “Okay, S-s-s-sam.” When he received his coffee, he was shocked to see that his name on the cup was written as “SSSAM”, which was disrespectful. Later that day, he wrote an email to Starbucks Customer Service and got a pretty standardized email saying they were sorry that he “felt disrespectful [sic]” for the way they wrote his name and offered him $5. Clearly, Starbucks missed the point. It was about how you treat people with speech impairments, not how you write names.

I am writing this not because I want to get anybody into trouble, but because I want to raise awareness among the employees. There are many people with speech disorders who are in a worse position than my friend’s and struggle with self-esteem and self-confidence. Getting this kind of treatment from people, especially service employees, only scars them—and I beg Starbucks employees to have this in mind.

(For context, he went to a Philadelphia Starbucks on 34th and Walnut on June 27th.)



https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10211856306618514&set=a.1635934973683.157666.1095965201&type=3

[forgotmylogin]

9. To the people angered at the $5 offer:

I agree that's outrageous, and this isn't meant as an excuse, but many large corporations run a multi-level complaints department. The people who read the initial incoming emails typically serve as a sieve for "nuisance" complaints and probably *only* have the authorization to offer a $5 coupon. 99% of the time this is enough to placate customers with simple grievances (the bathroom was dirty, my order took forever) from tying up the veteran complaint department workers who do handle the serious stuff like this.

The first tier should be trained that incidents of diversity or rudeness of this caliber should be escalated *without* offering the coupon, which I'm sure many of them are reflexively doing as an apologetic gesture even though they are escalated. Alternately they might be *required* to offer the coupon simply as a matter of procedure in every case because a free coffee is enough to make 99% of customer complaints go away and reduces the "handle time" of the CSRs that the company has to pay them for (they're not paying them less, they're making it easy for them not to spend a long time on every incident with a customized response which is expensive). In a third case, it's possible many of the initial emails *are not even read* and may be manually or auto-responded to with auto text offering the coupon. Sometimes the low-level complaints responders who work the email review it and may only have an automatic disposition choice of "This is not a valid complaint/This is a valid complaint/This is a valid complaint +offer a coupon."

In any case, that is of course COMPLETELY tone deaf, but (having 10+ years of Customer Service experience) isn't something I'd be surprised to see as a policy in a corporate email/call center.