Less than two weeks before Starbucks is Watch I Don't Love You Yet Onlineset to close its 8,000 company-owned stores for an afternoon of racial-bias training, the company issued yet another apology for a racist incident that occurred in one of its California stores.
On Tuesday, at a Starbucks in La Cañada Flintridge, California, a Latino customer named Pedro reportedly had the racist slur, "BEANER," written on his coffee cup in place of his name.
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"It's an offensive word used towards Latinos," Pedro told NBC Philadelphia in an interview. He also explained he paid cash for his drinks and didn't feel the slur was written by accident because the barista called his name when his drinks were ready.
SEE ALSO: How can Starbucks ensure its racial-bias training actually helps a divided America?After Pedro's co-worker, Priscilla Hernandez, tweeted at Starbucks about the incident, Starbucks explained, "This is not the welcoming experience we aim to provide, and we have reached out to this customer to apologize and make this right."
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NBC also noted that Starbucks offered Pedro a $50 gift card after the incident. "I didn't accept it because it’s like an insult overall," he told the outlet.
Pedro met with a Starbucks district manager on Thursday morning who apologized and said the incident would be investigated, according to CNN.
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This is just the latest in a string of in-store upsets in which employees appear to be racially discriminating against customers.
On April 12, Philadelphia resident Melissa DePino shared a video of two black men being arrested in a Starbucks. Reports indicated a barista called the police on the men simply because they were sitting in the establishment and hadn't ordered anything.
A few days later another video emerged of a black man being denied access to a restroom in a southern California Starbucks sparked outrage.
The Starbucks employee training, which takes place on May 29, hopes to address this behavior and prevent future discrimination. It's being administered to nearly 175,000 workers and will include a curriculum developed with help from experts like Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Mashable reached out to Starbucks for comment.
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