Starbucks makes PR misfire, apologizes to U.S. Armenians

PanARMENIAN.Net - An attempt by U.S. coffee giant Starbucks to appeal to Los Angeles' sizable Armenian population has backfired after its coffee shops displayed posters depicting women dressed in traditional Armenian garb under the crescent and star of the Turkish flag, RFE/RL reports.

The posters were spotted this week in Los Angeles-area Starbucks locations, infuriating activists and social media users who called the image offensive in light of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Turkey in the early 20th century.

"Why is Starbucks selling coffee using an image of women, dressed in traditional Armenian costumes, celebrating a Turkish state that systematically victimized Armenian women during the Armenian Genocide, and that still denies this crime against all humanity?" the Armenian National Committee Of America (ANCA) wrote in a February 18 post on its Facebook page.

Scholars estimate that some 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman forces in what is now eastern Turkey between 1915 and 1918, while Turkey rejects the fact.

Social media users claimed to have seen the poster in several Starbucks locations in Los Angeles County, which is home to 446,000 people with full or partial Armenian ancestry, according to 2007 U.S. Census Bureau data cited by California-based scholar Shushan Karapetian.

As outrage swelled online and Starbucks customer service representatives fielded angry calls, the company posted an apology on the ANCA's Facebook page on February 18, promising to remove the offending photographs.

"Serving as a place for the community to connect is core to our business and we strive to be locally relevant in all of our stores," a Starbucks representative wrote in the post. "We missed the mark here and we apologize for upsetting our customers and the community."

The representative added that the artwork would be removed from a store in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills and that Starbucks is "working to make this right."

It was not immediately clear exactly how many shops displayed the photograph.

A Starbucks spokesperson told RFE/RL in a February 19 email that the company is "quickly looking into this to ensure this image is not in any other Starbucks locations."