Starbucks LGBTQ pride decorations banned in defiance of company policy

Starbucks workers claimed on Tuesday that stores in at least 21 states have placed an eyebrow-raising series of bans on this year’s Pride month decorations—an annual festivity so well-documented that it has spawned its own memes.

The claims were revealed in a Twitter thread posted by the workers’ union, Starbucks Workers United, asserting that since the start of June, bans on rainbow flags and other decor have been popping up in cafés nationwide. “This seems to be the first year the publicly ‘pro-LGBTQ+’ company has taken this kind of stance,” the union noted for context.

So far, workers have chimed in with various examples, although none of them establish that Starbucks has explicitly enacted a corporate-wide policy forbidding stores from hanging Pride decor. In one TikTok video, you see an Atlanta worker motioning at her store’s Pride flags, stowed in a bathroom bucket, and explaining that while they’ve gone up in previous years, workers this year have been told, “It’s unsafe—we don’t have a ladder to hang them up properly.”

Over in Madison, Wisconsin, the order for removal supposedly came straight from the district manager who, “despite the vast majority of the store’s workers being members of the LGBTQ+ community,” argued that Pride displays aren’t “welcoming for everyone,” local union organizers claimed.

Summing up the bans, Starbucks Workers United tweeted, “Taking a cue from Target, who bowed to anti-LGBTQ+ pressure and removed pride merchandise, corporate and district management are taking down the pride decorations that have become an annual tradition in stores.” The tweet attracted instant gloating from far-right provocateurs like Charlie Kirk and Rogan O’Handley, the latter of whom is better known on Twitter as @DC_Draino.

Starbucks told Fast Company that there is no ban on Pride decorations. “We unwaveringly support the LGBTQIA2+ community,” a representative said, calling claims to the contrary “false information” and then clarifying: “There has been no change to any policy on this matter, and we continue to encourage our store leaders to celebrate with their communities including for U.S. Pride month in June.”

The company reportedly spent Tuesday investigating the accounts posted on social media about decorations being yanked from stores. It’s possible, corporate believes, that some workers may have broken store display protocol. Sources said that staff in at least one store tried hanging an extremely large flag in the window despite a long-standing company policy against obscuring windows.

Yet Fast Company has viewed messages from store managers to their employees suggesting that policy changes did, in fact, occur this year on at least the regional level, and it appears that these bans are being enforced at a number of union stores. The Madison café where the district manager allegedly had decorations taken down voted to unionize on June 1. On Reddit, one barista claimed to have been fired after asking permission to hang a Pride flag, then telling the union once management said no.

In early June, a store manager in one Southern state wrote a note to workers confessing that, no, they wouldn’t be decorating the café this year for Pride and adding, almost apologetically, that it was a decision made by regional leaders so that every store would look uniform in 2023.

Fast Company viewed texts from a store manager in a different state informing staff that the “mid-Atlantic leadership team is leaning toward uniformity in store to create consistent experiences.” When one worker replied, “If they’re against Pride merch then I’m giving a heavy side eye,” the manager explained that this change “was posed to me in a different way,” namely that “we should refrain from these things because we would have to allow anyone to post/decorate with anything” if Pride decorations are allowed.

Those two stores happen to be located in regions of America where anti-LGBTQ sentiment is growing. Among the states where stores have reportedly banned Pride decor, the very red Southern states are heavily represented, as are states where bills targeting LGBTQ rights have courted controversy—like Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, plus Missouri and Indiana.

It isn’t impossible to believe that Starbucks management in some of these regions went rogue, in a sense, caving to fears of an anti-LGBTQ backlash to their stores’ usual Pride displays. In the same way that Starbucks holiday cups have whipsawed in their Christmas-ness—depending on how loudly Christians cried foul—Starbucks’s district leaders may have quietly reasoned that risking a Target- or Bud-Light-level backlash simply wasn’t worth it.

Tuesday afternoon, Starbucks was said to be planning to circulate a message reminding U.S. stores that Pride decorations are allowed, echoing messages sent internally in late May. But Starbucks Workers United said that despite the claims that policies haven’t changed, it called this “hard to believe that that’s the case,” thanks to “documented instances of this happening in over 20 states.” The group added: “In typical Starbucks fashion, the company seems to be (yet again) trying to punish union stores and then deny that they’re doing so.”

LGBTQ workers have proven to be some of the most stalwart backers of the Starbucks union effort, in part because many of them say Starbucks has waffled lately in its support for them, which historically has been high. Last year, trans workers told Fast Company that their own Starbucks advocates were warning them that their health benefits could be at risk in the coming year.