In a move that would make even the most earnest Victorian reformer blush, South Korea’s Starbucks has announced it will close its stores for a company-wide history lesson. This follows a backlash over a promotion that featured a controversial figure—a man whose legacy, shall we say, requires more than a shot of espresso to sweeten. The decision, ostensibly to educate staff on the perils of historical reckoning, is a delicious irony that only our age of performative contrition could produce.
Let us untangle this farce. The promotion, which offered discounts to customers wearing a traditional Korean outfit associated with a pro-Japanese collaborator during the colonial period, has ignited the predictable firestorm. Collaborators, as any student of history knows, are complex figures: they are both condemned and, in quieter moments, understood as products of their circumstances. But nuance is the first casualty of the digital mob. Starbucks, ever the corporate shape-shifter, has now donned the robes of a seminary, forcing its baristas to sit through a lesson on ‘the meaning of tradition’. As if that can be taught in a single shift.
This episode is a mirror held up to our era’s obsession with historical purity. We demand that corporations, like medieval monasteries, be repositories of moral clarity. Yet we forget that Starbucks is a seller of overpriced lattes, not a guardian of national identity. The irony is thick enough to be brewed: the store that commodifies pumpkin spice and holiday cheer now tries to commodify historical penance. The closure for a history lesson is the ultimate branding exercise: it signals virtue without changing the underlying structures of consumption. Is the lesson going to address the fact that the company profits from cultural appropriation year-round? Will it teach that the very concept of ‘tradition’ is a modern invention, often used to police women’s clothing and nationalist sentiment? Unlikely.
What we are witnessing is intellectual decadence, dressed up as enlightenment. The great historian of the Fall of Rome, Gibbon, would have recognised this: a society so saturated with comfort that it turns to symbolic gestures instead of substantive reform. We demand that a coffee chain teach history, but we ensure that the history taught is a shallow, safe version—a sanitised myth that confirms our current biases. The real lesson is that we have outsourced moral education to corporations, and they have accepted, because it is profitable. The barista who learns that a hanbok-wearing collaborator was ‘bad’ will return to making Frappuccinos, no wiser about the structural forces that created both the collaborator and the controversy.
And let us not forget the national identity aspect. South Korea, a nation that rose from the ashes of war and dictatorship to become a cultural powerhouse, now finds itself trapped in a cycle of recrimination over symbols. The colonial period was traumatic; it left wounds that have not healed. But does closing a Starbucks for a day heal those wounds? No, it salves the conscience of the chattering classes while doing nothing for the families still affected by the legacy of collaboration. The real history lesson would be about economic structures, power, and the ambiguity of survival under occupation. But that lesson cannot be distilled into a company memo.
So we are left with a spectacle: the Grande of historical amnesia, served with a twist of self-righteousness. The next time you sip your latte, remember that you are partaking in a ritual of forgetting. The closure is a performance; the real work of understanding history happens in private, in debates, in classrooms, not in a coffee shop that wants to sell you a mug with your name spelled wrong. We have become a society of spectators, watching as corporations act out our moral crises. It is pathetic and rather sad. But it is also, undeniably, a sign of the times. The Fall of Rome was accompanied by bread and circuses; ours comes with espresso and history lessons.
