When California-born Daniel Lui went on a tour of a Seattle Starbucks roasting house, he hadn't planned on being outed as a Chinese spy - because he isn't one.
"If you want to steal our stuff for your store in China, go ahead, we're fine with that," an executive told him. "But you know what you can't get in China? Our training."
Ah yes, the classic 'assume that every Chinese person is a corporate spy' move. Well played, Starbucks exec.
Lui promptly wrote a 1-star Yelp review of the establishment, where he explained his weird, racist-but-mostly-just-stupid encounter. Starbucks apologized and gave Daniel a USD50 coffee voucher. Then, to really put the cream atop the frappuccino, he got a personal call from the executive himself.
"He actually 'fessed up to really thinking that we were from China and wanting to steal secrets," Lui told a San Francisco news station.
"I want to let you know that was still hurtful," he told the executive. "[It] made me really uncomfortable, but I want to extend forgiveness to you."
As if this weren't enough, it turns out that this incident took place just after Starbucks ended its weird #RaceTogether campaign, which had encouraged Starbucks employees to start conversations with customers about race relations in the US. Perhaps it ended a bit too soon.
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