Starbucks Korea will take the unprecedented step of closing all stores early on June 22 to conduct history training for its entire workforce following a botched promotional event that triggered a customer boycott.
Starbucks locations across South Korea will halt operations at 3:00 p.m. local time next Monday for mandatory education on history and social sensitivity, parent company Shinsegae Group said. Chairman Chung Yongjin and other executives and managers will undergo the same training separately.
The move follows last month’s “Tank Day” campaign, which offered discounts on its Tank tumbler series but triggered backlash for referencing 1980’s highly-sensitive Gwangju massacre — when South Korea’s then-military junta deployed soldiers in tanks to suppress a protest in the city, killing hundreds of people.
The event sparked harsh criticism from customers and politicians, including President Lee Jae Myung. Shinsegae’s Chung issued a public apology and fired Starbucks Korea’s chief executive officer as top executives reported substantial declines in revenue.
The upcoming closure marks the first time since Starbucks entered South Korea in 1999 that the company has shut down all storefronts early for a corporate mandate.
“It demonstrates how seriously we take this marketing incident, and it reflects our commitment to ensuring it never happens again,” Shinsegae said in a statement. The training is aimed at preventing future mistakes by bridging the gap between corporate messaging and public sentiment, and will touch on modern Korean history and how corporate activities intersect with sensitive social themes like gender, labour, human rights and hate speech, it said.
Starbucks Korea is also overhauling its internal decision-making process to fix what it described as a flawed approval chain that allowed the “Tank Day” campaign to go public. It plans to implement a “social sensitivity checklist” developed with external experts, and tighten screening by adopting cross-departmental sign-offs from legal and quality control teams.
South Korea is Starbucks’ largest market outside of the US and China.
Shinsegae’s supermarket chain E-Mart owns a 67.5% stake in the local business, with the remainder owned by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.
