Last week we reported that San Francisco’s Philz Coffee would be removing all Pride flags from their cafes. The directive came from CEO Mahesh Sadarangani, stating that the private equity-owned coffee chain was making the move to work “toward creating a more consistent, inclusive experience across all our stores.”
The mandate went over about as well as you would expect it to, including a petition signed by nearly 7,800 individuals requesting that Philz be able to keep displaying Pride flags, with many threatening to boycott if they weren’t. And now, Philz is reversing course and has announced that Pride flags are allowed to stay up.
It has been a tumultuous week and a half for Philz execs, to say the least. After the initial ban on April 9th, the backlash from both employees and the public was swift and near unanimous. It led to an internal memo issued late last week from Sadarangani, where he doubled down on the new policy. It was a basically an “I’m sorry you got mad” note. But, according to The Independent, after mounting pressure Philz ultimately relented.
“Every Pride flag that is up stays up, and any Pride flag that was previously removed can be put back up,” the company said in a statement. Sadarangani also issued a public apology for the misstep. “I made a mistake, and I am sincerely sorry. To our team members, to our customers, and to the LGBTQIA+ community that has been with us since the very beginning, the confusion and hurt we caused around our new policy for Pride flags failed you.”
The CEO states that he made the decision after sitting down with San Francisco Pride leaders Suzanne Ford and Jupiter Peraza. Ford, the executive director of San Francisco Pride said of the meeting that “Mahesh sat with our community members, heard their perspective and apologized, not as a formality but as a person who got it wrong and wanted to make it right. That matters.”
And it is not just the Pride flags that are able to stay up. The reversal appears to also affect the coffee chain’s plans to homogenize the appearance of each cafe. In the memo, the company states that going forward they will “feature locally created artwork shaped by the voices of Team Members and the neighborhoods they serve, a living expression of the diverse communities Philz is proud to be part of.”
Thus it appears that the big brains in corporate smartly chose not to stop actively eroding the community support that the brand spent the better part of three decades in the Bay Area trying to build up. I mean, it’s still a part of a soulless private equity machine that nullified all common stock while offering bonuses and pay outs to executives, but at least there are Pride flags.
Anyway, apropos of nothing, here’s the Sprudge Maps list of cafes in San Francisco. And be on the lookout for a piping hot new San Francisco cafe guide in the coming weeks.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
