Starbucks is such an odd company to me. I was in college from 1997-2001, and it was becoming ubiquitous then. They seemed to be ultra-progressive. A friend of mine was very proud to work there because of some sort of prestige (and I just thought, 'how is this different than fast food?') and because they gave her health insurance for a part-time job.

'Coffee culture' was beginning to take off nationally and I didn't really understand the idea of parking it in a little coffee shop for six hours and writing on a laptop or whatever—why not write at home and drink coffee at home?

Then I realized their coffee is burnt and IMO difficult to drink, and then I realized what people call coffee at Starbucks is really a melted 800-calorie milkshake with a thimble of burnt coffee in it.

My organization has hosted a few conferences in Seattle at the convention center, and the first thing the personnel do there is take conference hosts on a tour od the convention center and tell us that 'transients' (homeless people) live in the center, have the right to be there, should be respected by us and our attendees, and that no one should be rude to them and if anyone calls the police to report them for any reason, the police won't come.

Having experienced that, I understand that this spirit of Seattle probably has been imbued in Starbucks's operations since it was founded.

But the company has changed so much from large-scale values-based mom-and-pop coffee shops to a huge corporate conglomerate with poor-quality beverages and total disagreement with the progressive business culture it was first to make popular—the health insurance and other benefits to coworkers are gone, the business is anti-unions, stores have made national headlines for refusing service to minorities, putting the brand more in line with Hobby Lobby than anything. I'm kind of surprised they don't make their employees use tasers on homeless people at this point, they are so diametrically opposed to the original philosophies of the company.

As someone above said, to expect a coffee shop to harbor homeless people seems absurd, but the only reason homeless people flock there is because decades ago, Starbucks presented itself as a different kind of place that respected all comers and had an egalitarian mindset.

Ah, well, it's just pure American capitalism, greed, corporate entropy. No one should expect different.

The idea of success in America is a small mom-and-pop values-based business getting venture capital from billionaires and franchising into warehouses that use rolling robots to deliver Doritos, insulin and toilet paper in bulk with free delivery!