Naive me... I had assumed Starbucks - with its high-minded CEO who has received an award for "ethics in business" from Notre Dame and its general do-gooder, post-hippie ethos - was on the more progressive side of corporations and that they would never (heaven forfend!) engage in practices like segregation.
Yet they do. Sexual segregation. According to a fascinating front page article in the LAT today by Megan Stack, the Starbucks in Saudi Arabia have a small women's only section accessed through a back door. The full bore Starbucks that we all know and sort of love is for men only. And Stack knows of what she speaks. She spent months walking around that medieval center of psychopathic misogyny in a black abaya.[...]
Starbucks and the others are enabling the system by allowing one half of Saudi society to live modern or semi-modern lives while treating the other half like chattel.
Starbucks has no problem with subjugating women as long as it's profitable.
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