Study: Starbucks Foot Traffic Down 6.8% After "All Homeless Bums Are Welcome to Shoot Up In Our Bathrooms" Policy

Woke/broke: The cycle accelerates.

Foot traffic was most reduced at Starbucks located close to a homeless shelter, and less reduced the further the store was placed from a homeless shelter.

Academics from the University of Texas at Dallas Jindal School of Management and Boston College Carroll School of Management, in collaboration with SafeGraph, released a comprehensive research study that revealed Starbucks visits declined 6.8%, relative to nearby restaurants and cafes, after the company changed to an open bathroom policy.

...

Key Findings from the study:

The decline was 84% larger for stores near homeless shelters

The policy also led to fewer citations for public urination nearby store locations, but had no effect on other similar public order crimes

Individuals visiting a Starbucks reduced the amount of time they spent in the store by 4.2%

More affluent customers reduced their visits more, but black and white customers were equally deterred

The study indicates the potential loss in sales when a store goes from providing for customers only, to credible potential customers, to those with no prospect of being customers. More importantly, allocating these resources to non-paying members of the public can have outsized effects on sales by deterring paying customers. The cost is actually lost sales, not just the possible additional staffing costs to keep the bathrooms clean.

Comics Matter had an interesting point, comparing the loss of business at Starbucks and the flops of Terminator and Charlie's Angels: #Woke companies keep chasing "phantom customers" while alienating actual customers.

In the case of Starbucks, they're letting homeless bums sit in the limited number of chairs and thus deterring paying customers from entering.

In Hollywood, and at #Woke Marvel Comics, they're alienating the audience they actually have but which they openly despise -- older men with traditional notions of "male gender roles," often white -- in order to market all of their books to the audience they wish they could have, non-white girls and women and members of the LGBT alphabet soup.

Did the makers of Terminator: Dark Fate think that the usual audience for a Terminator movie would enjoy a heavy-handed racial revenge murder fantasy featuring a Hispanic Terminator killing scores of ICE agents and Border Patrol officers?

They couldn't have though that -- but they thought the phantom audience of #Woke young minorities would love it.

And most girls and women and most members of the LGBT alphabet soup do not like stories which are mostly about combat.

They're intentionally trolling and outright insulting the actual customer base, in order to curry favor with a broke-ass sad-losers-on-Twitter phantom customer base.

A phantom customer base that never becomes real.

The actual audience for this fare departs, and the phantom audience never comes to replace it.

But they do get Retweets from #Woke racists and sexists on Twitter -- which, unfortunately, are not a valuable commodity which can be exchanged for cash.

But they continue to prioritize their businesses towards accumulating huge piles of meaningless Twitter "You Go Girl" affirmations while deprioritizing actual sales to actual customers.

And then they wonder why they're losing money and market share.

But hey -- one day, those Twitter retweets are going to be worth their weight in gold.

(Spoiler: electronic messages have no weight at all, or a subatomic weight if you count electrons, and therefore their weight in gold is either zero or practically zero. I mean, electrons have so little mass that they're routinely assumed to be zero even when calculating the weight of mere protons and neutrons in a single atomic nucleus. But enjoy your hoard of Twitter Affirmation Wealth, gals!)

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:48 PM

| Access Comments