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Schultz, has given the tens of millions of the coffee chain’s US customers a choice- Either Coffee or Colt.
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Howard Schultz/Getty
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Last week’s horrendous shooting incident in Washington D.C once again opened up the endless debate on gun laws which has haunted America for many years.
Without inviting it the Starbucks coffee bar chain, numbering more than 7000 outlets across the United States, has become a center for controversy, with its often out spoken CEO Howard Schultz been interpreted as being in favor of the gun laws. Laws which allow anyone eligible to carry a weapon, ostensibly for their own defense.
While a large number of U.S. restaurants and shops made a stance on the subject and made a clear-cut policy disallowing customers from carrying any form of firearms on their premises. However Schultz set a policy for Starbucks which was interpreted by many of them ostensibly “bowing down” to local gun laws, which permitted license holders to bring their firearms into stores in many U.S. states.
As a result, the coffee bar chain found themselves been increasingly regarded as a key figure stormy debate over gun rights.
As recently as last month, gun-rights advocates went as far as organizing a national “Starbucks Appreciation Day” at multiple Starbucks locations nationwide, even including. Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were shot dead in cold blood by an obviously deranged gunman at an elementary school last December.
Many people sitting on the fence interpreted the fact that Starbucks such an event as Appreciation Day went by without any form of protest from Howard Schultz or any other member the Starbucks management has led many members of the public to believe that the company was not interested in being drawn any deeper into the contentious political debate.
After the infamous appreciation day, Schultz pointed out those events “disingenuously portray Starbucks as a champion of ‘open carry, ’ going on to clarify that the company do not want these events to occur in and around their stores.
In an effort to make it clear that Starbucks no longer wants to “sit on the fence” regarding the practice of carrying of loaded firearms in public, Schultz announced in an open letter issued on Tuesday, just a few hours after the tragic events in Washington DC at the U.S. Navy Yard that added a further 12 victims to the ever-growing list of gunshot victims, the members of the public should not come into a Starbucks branch whilst carrying a weapon.
Even after this week’s tragic events, Starbucks have still resisted issuing an outright ban on guns in its coffee shops, hoping to provide “responsible gun owners a chance to respect its request.”
Industry analysts have speculated Schultz has hung off from that placing an outright ban on firearms in Starbucks for fear of creating hypothetical situations in which employees would need to confront customers who came into one of the stores bearing a weapon.
Howard Schultz however did hasten to point that he is not worried if the company stood to going to lose customers over the situation. “I feel like I’ve made the best decision in the interest of our company.” Schultz wound up.
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