Don't Rejoice Over Starbucks' Closing Doors

Starbucks is closing 600 stores in the US and 61 in Australia, and anti-capitalists everywhere are thrilled. Never mind 12,600 losing their jobs: It’s “a small price to pay if it means being able to walk one’s labradoodle … without having to see or smell a Starbucks,” Brendan O’Neill writes in Spiked, decrying the “socialism of fools,” more obsessed with symbols than people.

In O’Neill’s mind, tossing thousands of baristas and office types out on the street to preserve the bottom line is the worst crime Starbucks has perpetrated. But today’s “knee-jerk anti-capitalists” aren’t concerned with the exploitation of workers. They instead despise the corporation’s ubiquity and global reach—virtues even old Karl Marx might have liked. (More Starbucks stories.)