Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson tossed a whole bunch of praise at Starbucks just several months after she called for a boycott of the popular coffee chain. In November 2025, Wilson, 43, joined a group of striking Starbucks workers outside the company’s former Reserve Roastery located in the neighborhood of Capitol Hill, located just to the east of the downtown area, leading them in chants of “fight back” against the brand.
“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,” Wilson said at the time. But then in June 2026, Wilson confessed that she had broken her boycott “a little while ago,” while paying a visit to the Pike Place Market, where Starbucks was first established 55 years ago.
“I ordered, I think it was a blueberry muffin latte,” she admitted during an interview with FOX 13 Seattle. When the reporter she was talking to pressed her on whether she still supported boycotting the company, Wilson sort of tap danced around the question and provided little detail about why she chose to order the drink.
“I guess I broke my boycott and yeah, but I, you know, I don’t know,” she stammered. “What do you want me to say about that?” The sudden abandonment of principle comes as Starbucks has started to shift its operations from Seattle, where it was created, to Nashville, Tennessee, where it is planning to open a new corporate office, according to the Daily Mail.
Wilson, who calls herself a democratic socialist, giggled after giving her answer, insisting that she still “absolutely” supports unions and workers. “I went to the store to talk to the workers there who are organizing a union,” she told the outlet. When she joined strikers in November, Wilson went on to say that baristas working for the company “deserved better than empty promises and corporate union bustings.”
“This is your hometown and mine,” the mayor said, which got a round of loud cheers. “Seattle’s making some changes right now, and I urge you to do the right thing. Because in Seattle, when workers’ rights are under attack, what do we do?” the then-mayor elect said to the crowd of striking employees. The crowd responded by shouting, “Stand up, fight back!”
In May, Wilson walked back her calls made on the picket line, saying, “Those comments were not productive in the sense that they caused more harm than good.” Starbucks’ former CEO Howard Schultz, who is still the company’s chairman emeritus, previously stated that Wilson had “chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner.”
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“Her socialist rhetoric vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue,” Schultz said. Starbucks opened its first location in Seattle in 1971 at the Pike Place Market, the very same location where Wilson broke her own boycott. The coffee giant now has a market cap of $109.3 billion with over 32,000 locations across 80 different countries.
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video