Did Howard Schultz tell anti-gay marriage supporters “we don’t want your business”?

Old rumours have resurfaced that claim Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced in a shareholder meeting that people who only support traditional marriage, i.e. do not support gay marriage, are not welcome in Starbucks stores.

Rumours claim Schultz has announced that he “doesn’t want your business” when it comes to those who only support traditional marriage.

When it comes to baseless hearsay that just refuses to go away, this is certainly right up there.

It simply isn’t true, and is, at best, an extreme distortion of what he really said and of what happened in “that” shareholder meeting.

In 2012, during state-level efforts to legalise gay marriage, Schultz – along with other high profile companies – came out in support of gay marriage. Of course, being based in America – with a high number of traditional Christians – the announcement was met with both praise but also a lot of criticism.

In 2013, during a shareholder meeting, one shareholder Tom Strobhar questioned what he deemed to be a poor first quarter of the year, asserting that this may have been down to Schultz’s support of gay marriage.

Schultz responded by both reaffirming his position in support of gay marriage, and asserting that shareholders had been given a 38% return over the last 12 months. His full response, which can be read below, resulted in two rounds of applause from those present.

Not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38% shareholder return over the last year. I don’t know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38% over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity. Of all kinds.

If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38% you got last year, it’s a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much.

See the video of the response here.

Nothing in Schultz’s response could possibly be construed to mean that those against gay marriage were not welcome in any Starbucks store, simply that Starbucks official company position was in favour of gay marriage. A stance also shared by companies like Microsoft and Amazon, as well as countless others.

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Yet rumours that claim otherwise continue to circulate. The rumour was particularly prolific in 2013 with Christian blogs, and in 2015 after a Supreme Court decision to legalise gay marriage across the country, the rumour was given a new lease of life, as well as being reported in fake news “satire” websites like AmericanNews.com

It’s simply not true.