Starbucks’s Howard Schultz Customizes His Presidential Bid: I Quit

Howard Schultz won’t be your commander in frappu-chief

Rich guy and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz will not be the next American president: the ex-CEO of the coffee giant officially shut down his presidential campaign today. Schultz started looking into a presidential run as an independent candidate at the start of 2019, prompting widespread concern among Democrats that he would split the vote, allowing Donald Trump to comfortably win re-election in 2020. Schultz was campaigning as a centrist candidate, lamenting the fact that prominent Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders weren’t being nice enough to rich people (or “people of means”) like Schultz, and that he would be the best person to protect all Americans really rich people. by making sure they wouldn’t have to pay more taxes.

Schultz himself was adamant that he did not want Trump to be re-elected, yet continued for months until he suspended his campaign for health reasons in the summer (but still refused to officially call it off). The reason he gave for finally ending his campaign today is that he doesn’t want Trump to win again — exactly what everybody else was saying back in January. Sadly, we all had to wait around for months while he reached this extraordinarily obvious conclusion on his own, with the help of a few polls demonstrating that nobody liked him anyway.

And in other news...

• A useful essay on why the fast food industry is the canary in the coal mine for the impending issue of robots stealing your jobs (in short: fast food has high turnover, so companies want to replace the human bodies with robots). [Gizmodo]
• Meat magnate Tyson Foods is now betting that you’ll want to throw some fake shrimp on the barbie. [CNBC]
• Elizabeth Warren is here to let you know that the movement to ban plastic straws is a distraction from more serious climate change-related issues. [Vox]
• Restaurant owners do not love the large blue “Order online” button that Google has started adding alongside restaurant listings on its site. [New Food Economy]
• Jaden Smith’s “eco-friendly” water company Just Water just got valued at $100 million, which his not bad for a product you can often get from a tap for free. [FastCompany]
• KFC China is now making nuggets that contain notoriously stinky fruit durian. [Radii China]
• Starbucks is set to start offering mental health benefits to employees. [Yahoo]
• Toronto’s first Chick-fil-A (the only in Canada) is off to a rough start, and it hasn’t even opened yet: a mouse was spotted on its premises, drawing health inspectors, while protests are planned for opening day. [CTV]
• Have a soothing Friday palate-cleanser with this video of British robots — and future job eliminators — packing groceries. [Tech Insider]

• All AM Intel coverage [E]