Have We Reached a Turn Against Wokism?

As noted here yesterday, the Washington Post decided to boot out an entitled Millennial, which comes in the same week that San Francisco voters booted out a woke prosecutor, and we know that Netflix has told its own staff that anyone who doesn’t like offerings like Dave Chapelle or Ricky Gervais might want to seek employment elsewhere (and then cancelled a planned children’s show based on the “work” of Ibram X. Kendi).

But perhaps the clearest sign yet that the world is finally waking up and turning against rote wokery comes from  . . . Starbucks.  Remember how Starbucks ostentatiously opened its bathrooms to the general public after a racial incident caused Starbucks to close down for a whole day of racial sensitivity training back in 2018? Well:

Starbucks’s C.E.O. Howard Schultz: ‘I don’t know if we can keep our bathrooms open.’

Starbucks’s chief executive, Howard Schultz, says the company is considering ending its open bathroom policy.

Speaking on Thursday at The Times’s DealBook D.C. policy forum, Mr. Schultz said the coffee giant might no longer allow people who were not customers to use their stores’ bathrooms. The move would reverse a policy Starbucks instituted in 2018 in the wake of the arrest of two Black men in one of its Philadelphia stores. The two men had been reported to the police by a Starbucks employee after they were denied use of the store’s bathroom and asked to leave. They hadn’t made a purchase.

At the time, Starbucks announced that “any customer is welcome to use Starbucks spaces, including our restrooms, cafes and patios, regardless of whether they make a purchase.”

But on Thursday Mr. Schultz said that a growing mental health problem was making it difficult for his company’s employees to manage its stores under the current policies. Mr. Schultz said that the decision was an “issue of just safety” and that he thought Starbucks might have to put policies in place that limit the number of non-customers who come into its stores.

“We have to harden our stores and provide safety for our people,” Mr. Schultz said. “I don’t know if we can keep our bathrooms open.”

So reality intrudes again, even in the era of Secular Saint George Floyd.

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