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Starbucks stores across South Korea will shutter for half a day next week for staff to attend a history lesson following a disastrous promotional campaign that evoked a deadly 1980 crackdown, the coffee giant said Monday.
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The chairman of Shinsegae Group, which operates Starbucks under a licensing agreement, and other senior executives will sit for a similar lesson two days later.
Starbucks Korea, with more than 2,000 stores nationwide, found itself embroiled in public uproar last month when it ran a “Tank Day” promotion evoking a deadly military crackdown on a 1980 pro-democracy uprising.
The day of the reusable cup promotion, 18 May, coincided with the 46th anniversary of the Gwangju uprising in which 165 civilians were killed, according to the official toll, though many believe the real figure to be much higher.
South Korea is the company’s third largest market after the United States and China.
Shinsegae Group fired its Korea chief executive the very day news of the scandal broke, and apologised.
On Monday, the company said its chairman Chung Yong-jin “is set to undergo training alongside the CEOs of each affiliate” on Wednesday next week.
Two days earlier, all employees at Starbucks Korea stores will “receive education in historical awareness and social sensitivity through watching videos.”
Stores countrywide will shutter at 3:00 pm for three hours of training and will not reopen, the first such simultaneous closure since Starbucks opened in South Korea in 1999.
The only exclusion will be for a handful of outlets at airports, a Shinsegae representative told the AFP news agency.
The group said it had identified a series of negligent acts leading up to the promotion, including officials signing off without checking the design file.
There had also been no legal review.
Koo Jeong-woo, a professor at Sungkyunkwan University who will lead part of the training, told AFP he plans to explain the “meaning of social sensitivity” among other topics.
The controversy, which sparked protests in Seoul and Gwangju, sparked a “sharp decline in sales” in the early days of the scandal, according to the operator.
President Lee Jae Myung had expressed outrage “by this inhumane and disgraceful conduct” on X amid the backlash.
Additional sources • AFP
