Restless in Seattle

Ever since Starbucks announced earlier this spring its plans to establish a large corporate presence in Nashville it has been fun to watch how this is playing out in the company’s headquarters city Seattle.

 The Seattle side of this is compelling because Starbucks is such a venerable brand piece in the Emerald City’s civic corporate portfolio. Among its several Fortune 500 headquarters the behemoths Amazon, Microsoft, and Costco are a good deal larger, but Starbucks is the home-grown elder going back to its humble origins as a coffee wholesaler and retailer at the iconic Pike Place Market in the early 1970s. 

Starbucks isn’t leaving Seattle but it is asking a significant number of workers to move here. In mid-April its corporatespeak-monikered “chief partner officer” Sara Kelly told partners, which is to say employees, that while many support teams will remain where they are, some of the 2,000 jobs planned for Nashville will be relocated from Seattle. 

“It’s my lucky day I get to move to Nashville, that’s friggin’ awesome” has apparently not been the consensus reaction inside the firm. The Seattle Times reported that some don’t believe the company when it insists they are not abandoning Seattle. With others apparently blanching at the move’s cultural and political contrasts, Starbucks is having difficulty making the case to some workers who may prefer to give up their jobs rather than face exile to the Volunteer State. The pungently conservative New York Post frames it as “left-leaning workers repulsed by the prospect of living and working in the capital of deep-red Tennessee.”

But is it really all that big a deal to move from a blue splotch in a blue state to a blue dot in a red state? You’ll still be in a city, right? And just how much bluer is Seattle than Nashville, anyway?  Short answer: quite a bit. Longer answer: let’s compare city politics. 

State approves $30M for Starbucks’ Nashville location

In Nashville’s nonpartisan mayoral races we sometimes see a GOP-connected contender do well enough in the first round to finish in the top two and make the runoff. The Republican may then go down in flames (as happened in 2023) but at least we have Republicans who give it a legitimate go. 

In Seattle’s nonpartisan mayoral race last year, nobody on the red team even bothered to run. In the first round a democratic socialist beat a Democrat incumbent with the two of them combining for 92% of the vote. 

Beyond political math in city elections other differences abound. As a public service for Starbucks HQ “partners” pondering relocation to flyover country allow me to suggest here a few tidbits of what one might expect in a Seattle-to-Nashville move.

• You might think you already live in a place with one-party state government but you’ll be moving to a place with truly monocratic one-party rule. In the Washington state legislature Democrats have 60% of House seats and 59% of Senate seats. In Tennessee Republicans have 76% of the House and 82% of the Senate. 

• You’ll be moving to a place where that same one-party tyranny has no qualms about using it vengefully to silence dissent. Peeved that Tennessee Democrats got a little testy during a special session convened to redraw congressional districts to try to ensure that no Democrat can ever win a seat, the GOP House Speaker decided to throw most Democratic lawmakers off their committees, just for the hell of it. 

• You’ll be moving to a place where the dominant political party in state government was animated by the conviction that the 2026 legislative session should have as its centerpiece the White House fascist-in-chief Stephen Miller’s wish list of draconian immigration laws.

• You’ll be moving to a state that can boast what the Human Rights Campaign calls “Tennessee’s shameful, shocking lead among U.S. states in enacting anti-LGBTQ+ laws” over the last 10 years. 

• You’ll be moving to a city that cannot make itself more progressive than the state that surrounds it on issues like minimum wages and minority rights because state government routinely passes preemption laws that forbid it.

• You’ll be moving to a state where abortion is already completely illegal, yet GOP state lawmakers keep proposing measures to make it even more illegal. 

• You’ll be moving to a state with gun laws that feature permitless open carry, no background checks, no bans on firearm types, and no red flag laws. Washington state is the opposite on all of these. 

• You’ll be moving to a state that is dead last in per-pupil K-12 public education spending.

• You’ll be moving to one of the few states that have not expanded Medicaid, putting Tennessee in the bottom 10 of states in overall health care system performance.

• You’ll be moving to a state that is third in the nation in the amount of book banning (lagging only those bastions of cosmopolitanism Florida and Texas). That includes a recent decision by one county to remove “Roots” from its school libraries, and it’s not some random hick rural county: Knox County is the state’s third largest and home to its flagship university. 

• You are moving to a place dumb enough to gift $30 million in unnecessary taxpayer-funded corporate welfare to further line the coffers of a profitable firm that has already decided to expand here in order to save itself far more than this in favorable tax treatment. 

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pointed to Tennessee as a state “competing for capital and talent by simplifying regulation, reforming tax systems and investing in workforce development.” Sounds groovy on the surface but let’s face it: these are euphemisms for educational neglect, low wages, weak labor rights, and regressive taxation. 

A Seattle Times editorial last month written by an editorial board member who happens to be a Nashville native piles on, telling Starbucks workers that the cheaper housing and gasoline they may find here will come with weak public transit and strong legislative theocracy, not to mention relentless humidity and the risk of tornados. 

I imagine there are some pardners at Starbucks fed up with Seattle and chompin’ at the bit to rustle themselves up some Tennessee red-state paradise. But given the realities on the ground here, it seems hardly surprising that others being asked to move might be eyeing an off ramp instead.