Post twists words of Starbucks CEO on marriage

CLAIM: The CEO of Starbucks said, “If you support traditional marriage, don’t buy our coffee.”

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The company confirmed that the attribution is false. The purported quote has circulated online for years and appears to be a distortion of a remark that leader Howard Schultz made at a 2013 shareholders meeting, when he said that shareholders who disagree with the company’s support of same-sex marriage are welcome to invest in another company.

THE FACTS: Social media users are resurrecting a false claim that the CEO of the coffee shop chain said that customers who support “traditional marriage” should take their business elsewhere.

“The CEO of Starbucks just said, ‘If you support traditional marriage, don’t buy our coffee.’ I accept those terms,” reads a tweet screenshot circulating on Facebook.

But there’s no evidence that Schultz — who has a long history with Starbucks and returned last year to lead the company as CEO on an interim basis — ever made that remark.

Instead, the quote has been recycled throughout the years and appears to be a misrepresentation of a well-documented remark Schultz made in 2013 concerning the company’s support for marriage equality.

During a shareholders meeting, Schultz explained that supporting same-sex marriage “is not an economic decision. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company and we want to embrace diversity.”

He went on to suggest that shareholders who disagreed were welcome to invest elsewhere.

“If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38% you got last year, it’s a free country — you can sell your shares at Starbucks and buy shares” elsewhere, Schultz added.

Starbucks also confirmed in an email statement to the AP that the quote circulating online concerning customers’ views is false.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.