Starbucks became one of the most recognizable corporate targets of the 1999 Battle of Seattle. Twenty-seven years later, as the coffee giant prepares to close about 250 North American stores, one former Wall Street skeptic of those protesters is wondering whether they understood something he did not. Anthony Scaramucci, the financier and former Trump White House communications director, wrote in a Fortune book excerpt published Tuesday that he had watched the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization from Manhattan with "disdain," regarding protesters as naive opponents of the economic future.
His assessment today is considerably different: "In 1999, I was wrong. The Seattle protesters were right." Two days after the excerpt appeared, Starbucks said it would close approximately 250 North American coffeehouses where the company said it could no longer provide its desired customer experience or see "a path to acceptable financial performance." Since Seattle, Starbucks has expanded dramatically. But 27 years later, the company is closing hundreds of locations while trying to make its remaining stores feel more like neighborhood coffeehouses.
That makes Scaramucci’s change of heart especially striking: some of the qualities that helped make Starbucks a symbol of globalization in 1999—standardization, enormous scale and relentless expansion, among others—are now the very qualities the company is trying to soften as it seeks to recover a more local, intimate feel. Starbucks became a target in Seattle because it represented the kind of fast-expanding multinational brand many protesters associated with globalization. The demonstrations were overwhelmingly broader than the vandalism that dominated some coverage: as many as 20,000 people joined protests involving labor unions, environmentalists and students, while a much smaller group smashed windows and damaged corporate storefronts.
Even among the demonstrators, opposition to globalization did not necessarily mean opposition to business itself. One activist told Democracy Now! that campaigners wanted Starbucks to sell fair-trade coffee and Gap to stop relying on sweatshop labor, for example. Their argument, in that case, was that global corporations should operate differently.
Starbucks’ subsequent success did not settle that argument. The company became far larger, but many of the protesters’ concerns were about how globalization distributed its gains and costs, not whether companies such as Starbucks could grow. That is the part of the argument Scaramucci now says he got wrong: he saw the protesters as enemies of economic progress, while he now believes they were warning about consequences Wall Street was too quick to dismiss.
Scaramucci’s change of heart is surprising because the view he held in 1999 was hardly unusual on Wall Street or in Washington. At the Seattle summit, President Bill Clinton defended open trade as a way to expand markets and benefit ordinary workers, even as he acknowledged concerns about labor standards and the environment. Scaramucci says he bought into that same optimism.
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