Politics

Seattle Mayor Backtracking on Call for Starbucks Boycott

By Mike Harper · May 21, 2026

In November 2025, nine days after winning the Seattle mayoral election, Katie Wilson stood on a Starbucks picket line alongside striking baristas and delivered a declaration that drew cheers from the crowd.

“That is why I am proud to join them on their picket line and proud to say loud and clear — I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either.”

This week, she told The New York Times that those comments “caused more harm than good.”

Wilson’s reversal, reported Wednesday, comes as Starbucks has announced plans to move approximately 2,000 corporate jobs to a new Nashville office while laying off staff in Seattle — the city where the company was founded, where it has been headquartered for more than 50 years, and whose identity is inseparable from the brand that made the $7 latte a global consumer habit. Whether the mayor’s November picket line appearance contributed to Starbucks’s Nashville expansion is a question that cannot be answered with certainty. What can be answered is that Wilson is now saying she handled it wrong.

The walk-back is notable in its specificity. She did not say the boycott call was misunderstood, or that it was taken out of context, or that critics were being unfair. She said the comments were not productive and that they “caused more harm than good.” That is an admission about consequence, not framing.

The reversal lands in a week already complicated by Wilson’s political standing in Seattle. KIRO Radio host Gee Scott, who is not a conservative commentator, said publicly that a conversation about labor relations with Starbucks “should have happened indoors” — and that the mayor’s public boycott call “should have never happened.” City Councilmember Rob Saka, who praised Wilson’s “energy” and enthusiasm for “change” when she won last November, told the New York Times this month he is “gravely concerned” about the business climate her policies are creating. Saka specifically cited Starbucks’s Nashville announcement as evidence that the concerns are no longer theoretical.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who previously called Seattle a “city that has lost its spirit,” has reportedly told associates that city leadership has made it increasingly difficult to justify maintaining Seattle’s corporate footprint at its historical scale. The company has not announced any plan to leave Seattle entirely, and its Seattle corporate presence remains substantial. But the direction of the announcements — more jobs to Nashville, fewer in Seattle — has been consistent since Wilson took office in January.

The broader political context is a Washington state millionaire’s income tax that takes effect in 2028, which Wilson supported. Her April comment — “I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if — the ones that leave, like, bye” — went viral with more than four million views and became the defining image of her approach to the business community.

Wilson is now, in the same week, walking back the Starbucks boycott call while also presiding over a city that is watching Starbucks, Boeing, and Amazon collectively reduce their Seattle presence. The political theory — that progressive taxation and public support for labor drives better outcomes than corporate accommodation — is being tested against the actual behavior of the corporations it was designed to pressure.

Whether the walk-back represents a genuine recalibration or a tactical adjustment before a difficult budget year will become clearer in the months ahead. What’s clear right now is that the mayor who stood on a picket line and told Seattle not to buy Starbucks is now telling the paper of record that she shouldn’t have.