Pour one out for Missouri prosecutors!
A year ago, the state sued Starbucks for failing to hire enough white, male baristas, forcing consumers “to pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services that could be provided for less had Starbucks employed the most qualified workers.” Implicit in this is the assumption that you need a flat white dude to make a flat white. Or, more specifically, that medium-roast managers are less qualified than their blonde peers — something for which no evidence was presented.
But the effort to grind Starbucks over the company’s DEI policies fell flat last week when a federal judge tossed the legally undrinkable swill. Looks like the state’s top prosecutor ought to worry more about the quality of her lawyering than the race of the brew master.
Bitter Beans
It all started so well! Andy Bailey, who was then Missouri’s attorney general, was desperate to catch President Trump’s attention. He’d been passed over to lead the Justice Department in favor of Pam Bondi. But he still had high hopes, and so he used his position as state AG to file a bunch of culture war trollsuits.
In February, he sued the ubiquitous coffee company alleging that it unlawfully discriminated against white men. The complaint pointed to Starbucks’ 2021 Global Environmental & Social Impact Report, which laid out aspirational goals for women, LGBTQ+ employees, and BIPOC in management and executive roles. AG Bailey insisted that this had cost the citizens of Missouri dearly, although he was a little cloudy on exactly how lesbians in management raised the price of a venti.
Nor did the complaint point to any individual Missouri resident who’d been harmed by Starbucks’ policies — no white dude who lost out on his big promotion because of “invidious” DEI, no executive who had his bonus cut based on failure to put enough Latinos in management. Instead, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the “234 job openings in Missouri, ranging from barista to store manager to district manager” and insisted that “Starbucks’ policies harm the many Missourians whom [sic] work, or would like to work, at Starbucks, but have been, are being, or will be discriminated against as future victims on the basis of their race, sex, or inclusion in other protected groups.”
Bailey also sweetened the pot with a gratuitous attack on the term “LatinX.”
And it worked!
Well, not in court. But Bailey did manage to get Trump’s attention long enough to get himself made deputy director of the FBI. All he had to do was babysit Dan Bongino for a few months until the podcaster got bored and wandered back to his studio. If Bailey keeps his head down, maybe he’ll be running the FBI when Kash Patel finally manages to wear out his welcome!
No Filter
Meanwhile back in Missouri, Bailey’s successor Catherine Hanaway was having a lot less fun as the Starbucks case percolated through the court system.
In October, Senior Judge John Ross ordered the state to fix all the broken links in its pleading instanter.
“Plaintiff’s complaint is heavily reliant on language that purports to be quoted from various reports and documents authored by Defendant or otherwise describing Defendant’s policies, practices, and strategic objectives,” he sniffed, noting that “it has come to the Court’s attention that the majority of the links to these electronic documents are no longer functional.”
And then he French pressed the state’s case into oblivion for failure to state any plausible theory of standing or legal claim for relief.
“Plaintiff failed to allege that any actual Missouri residents applied for an open position in Missouri and were rejected, were passed over for promotion, were disciplined or demoted unfairly, or tried and failed to take advantage of any other benefit of employment with Defendant because of a protected characteristic,” he wrote incredulously, noting that, if such victims of discrimination exist, they are perfectly free to sue on their own accounts.
He also noted that Missouri supplied exactly zero evidence connecting the “allegedly unqualified employees who were hired based on ‘non-merit considerations’” to the “presumed skew in prices, wait times, and product quality.”
And Judge Ross wasn’t done!
“Even if Plaintiff did have standing to pursue the claims of individual citizens, Plaintiff’s claims are still doomed,” he continued, noting that the Missouri Attorney General “lacks statutory authority to bring claims under Title VII, Section 1981, or the [Missouri Human Rights Act].”
In short, this case was incompetently pled and defective both procedurally and substantively. It’s functionally a press release that allowed Bailey to congratulate himself for protecting his constituents “from a company that actively engages in systemic race and sex discrimination” and then waste a lot of court resources cleaning up his home brew slop.
It was a cup of frothy indignation, and now it’s just backwash. But … Andy Bailey got his promotion, so assume that the FBI will be raiding a Starbucks near you soon.
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Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
