It's time for the Chick-fil-a haters and anti-Wendy's brigade to turn their sights toward Starbucks.
One of the most consistent criticisms directed at the political left is that most of what they do is virtue signaling rather than taking change-inducing action. "Symbolism over substance," if you will. They post black fists on their Instagram stories to show how much they support the fight for racial equality. They shame you when you accidentally recycle rather than compost your pulp-based salad tray. And most topical for this piece, they decide to manifest their support for the LGBT+ community by insisting they will never eat at Chick-fil-a. (I'm not saying I believe this criticism is valid...but those are the accusations the right makes.)
Generally I put virtue signaling of this sort into the "pretty worthless but harmless" category. At the end of the day, someone who decides to stop eating at Chick-fil-a to show their support for the LGBT+ community is hardly helping the cause but they're at least doing something to express their beliefs.
What I find more irritating is when people start virtue signaling really inconsistently, meaning when people say and act like they feel very strongly about one particular issue but then seem like they couldn't care less about an analogous issue. When this happens, it starts to feel more like a person has blacklisted Chick-fil-a because it gives them some kind of street cred in left-leaning Reddit forums, not because that person is making a decision based on a set of closely held values.
What I'm getting toward is this: we're quickly approaching a point where anyone who has been boycotting Chick-fil-a for its bigoted stances on LGBT+ rights or has been boycotting Wendy's for their exploitative farming practices also needs to begin boycotting Starbucks. And I find the lack of a clear, widespread boycott to be pretty surprising.
In the last few months, Starbucks has proven itself to be anything but the beacon of liberal values and ethos that it previously tried to portray itself as. The company is in an all-out assault against the recent unionization efforts of its employees, with reports even indicating that Starbucks may be going as far as to shut down some locations specifically as retaliation for unionization efforts. High-ranking store employees who help organize unions are being placed on indefinite leave and in some cases supposedly fired. The National Labor Relations Board has received nearly 200 complaints since last August accusing Starbucks of breaking federal labor laws. Literally all signs indicate Starbucks is the antichrist of labor rights, and Howard Schultz seems very intent on making sure this remains the status quo.
So where is the protest? Where is the boycott? Is Starbucks coffee really that indispensable? To me, if the left is going to keep boycotting places that significantly infringe upon their left-leaning belief systems, then right now Starbucks should be sitting directly next to Chick-fil-a and Wendy's in the naughty corner. You can't just pick and choose boycotts based on which ones are least inconvenient for you.
My call-to-action to all those on the left is this: prove that your values are more important than your lattes. Boycott Starbucks. And if you don't, I might start wondering whether or not there are strong values guiding these boycotts at all or if it's all just a function of which hashtags are trending.
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