![\"Protesters](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2b021dd9919547d0649f5fbb606ad36b.jpeg\")
Pedro PARDO \/ AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n Pedro PARDO \/ AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n
On June 22, Starbucks closed all 2,160 of its South Korean stores early.<\/p>\n
The closure was part of the company\u2019s damage control over a marketing debacle that ended with Starbucks Korea CEO Son Jeong-hyun fired and even booked as a criminal suspect (1) by police.<\/p>\n
Must Read <\/p>\n
It all started on May 18, when Starbucks Korea announced a marketing campaign for its new tumblers. Starbucks tumblers are popular enough to have inspired their own collector market (2).<\/p>\n
The marketing campaign dubbed May 18 as \u201cTank Day.\u201d Unfortunately, May 18 was already a notable date for South Koreans: It\u2019s the anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, where hundreds to thousands of pro-democracy protestors were killed by military forces using tanks and helicopters (3).<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, the marketing copy seemed to directly reference police violence against protestors with the tagline \u201cthwack on the desk.\u201d In 1987, police initially claimed that student protestor Park Jong Chul died from shock when a policeman\u2019s fist \u201chit the desk with a thwack (1).\u201d<\/p>\n
In actuality, Park had been tortured to death \u2014 something police admitted to later (4).<\/p>\n
Understandably, many South Koreans were upset. Card payment volumes at Starbucks stores fell by 26% in one week and people started taking videos of them destroying Starbucks tumblers in protest.<\/p>\n
Starbucks did not respond to Moneywise\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what Starbucks<\/a> executives say led to the marketing campaign being greenlit, along with other cautionary tales of what happens when a company doesn\u2019t do enough research into a new market.<\/p>\n Starbucks is joining a rising trend of blaming bad behavior on AI <\/p>\n Shinsegae Group, a conglomerate that owns a majority stake in Starbucks Korea, said the marketing misstep was not on purpose. It also says the Starbucks Korea marketing team chose the \u201cthwack on the desk\u201d slogan after consulting AI.<\/p>\n Starbucks Korea isn\u2019t the first company that has pointed to AI when trying to place the blame. Companies have increasingly been blaming AI for mass layoffs (5) \u2014 even when AI adoption doesn\u2019t tell the whole story.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains,\u201d Oxford Internet Institute assistant professor Fabian Stephany told CNBC. \u201cIt\u2019s to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long term perspective and instead of saying \u201cwe miscalculated this two, three years ago, they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying \u2018it\u2019s because of AI though.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Story continues <\/p>\n Companies might find it helpful to blame AI<\/a> for everything from layoffs to cultural missteps because that lets complaints fall into a \u201cresponsibility gap.\u201d<\/p>\n Responsibility gaps were first discussed in a 2004 article in Ethics and Information Technology. (6) The article says that, when autonomous learning machines act in ways that their creators could not have predicted, the creators can\u2019t be held responsible for its actions.<\/p>\n At the same time, the machine isn\u2019t a human being: it cannot personally be held responsible for its actions. That creates a responsibility gap, where no one can be held responsible for a specific harm.<\/p>\n With the advent of generative AI, responsibility gaps have been appearing more often. In one example, Stanford Medical Center failed to prioritize vaccinating its frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, instead prioritizing giving vaccines to a group that included administrators and remote workers (7). Leadership said the mistake was due to \u201cvery complex algorithms.\u201d<\/p>\n Read More: Here are 5 fixed costs Americans constantly overpay for. How many are sabotaging your budget?<\/a><\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the only time global companies have made cultural missteps <\/p>\n Even before AI, companies were making costly mistakes thanks to not understanding the culture of a market they were expanding into.<\/p>\n A common type of error is accidentally naming a product or service something offensive. For example, when Ikea marketed its products in Thailand, some of its products had Swedish names that had false cognates with sexual connotations in Thai (8).<\/p>\n Other examples include Coors \u2014 which had a slogan that, translated to Spanish, sounded like a slang phrase for diarrhea \u2014 and Ford, who found out that \u201cpinto\u201d has an inappropriate meaning in Brazilian Portuguese only after it started marketing the Ford Pinto there.<\/p>\n These types of mistakes can be embarrassing for a company. They can also affect how people see the company for years down the line.<\/p>\n But companies can also make more foundational mistakes when expanding to new markets. For example, Target failed to capture the Canadian market partially because Canadian customers weren\u2019t as invested in doing all of their shopping in one place (9).<\/p>\n And Home Depot failed in China because it relied too heavily on the American \u201cDIY\u201d model, not taking time to understand what would appeal to its Chinese customers (10).<\/p>\n You May Also Like <\/p>\n Join 250,000+ readers and get Moneywise\u2019s best stories and exclusive interviews first \u2014 clear insights curated and delivered weekly. Subscribe now.<\/a><\/p>\n Article Sources <\/p>\n We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Guardian (1<\/a>); Eater (2<\/a>); Britannica (3<\/a>); The New York Times (4<\/a>); CNBC (5<\/a>); Springer Nature (6<\/a>); National Center for Biotechnology Information (7<\/a>); Inc. (8<\/a>), (9<\/a>), (10<\/a>)<\/p>\n This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com<\/a> under the title: Starbucks closed all 2,160 South Korean stores early after an AI-backed campaign accidentally referenced a tragedy<\/a><\/p>\n This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. 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