Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson told residents last year to stop buying Starbucks. Then she walked into the Pike Place Market location and ordered a blueberry muffin latte.
Wilson made the admission during an interview with FOX 13 Seattle co-anchor Hana Kim, published Wednesday, when she was asked whether she still supports a boycott of the coffee giant headquartered in her own city. Her answer was less than definitive.
The mayor had stood on a barista picket line last year and declared, in words reported by The Seattle Times: "I am not buying Starbucks, and you should not either." That was a sitting mayor of a major American city publicly urging her own constituents to boycott one of the city's largest and most iconic employers. Now she admits she couldn't even follow her own advice long enough to keep a straight face about it.
Wilson did not try to hide the contradiction. She leaned into it, awkwardly.
"I had the pleasure of visiting the Pike Place Market Starbucks a little while ago, and I ordered, I think it was a blueberry muffin latte that was like a staff creation."
Then came the punchline, delivered with what Fox News Digital described as a laugh:
"I guess I broke my boycott."
When Kim pressed Wilson on whether she still believes others should boycott the company, the mayor offered no clear answer. "And yeah, but I, you know, I don't know. What do you want me to say about that?" she said. She added only: "I absolutely support unions."
Kim noted the question had come up from the crowd but said they would move on. Fox News Digital reached out to Wilson for comment on the matter. No response from her office was reported.
The mayor's boycott call was not merely symbolic posturing. It landed against a backdrop of real economic consequences for Seattle. Starbucks confirmed in March that it will close five additional stores in the city. That followed several closures in 2025, including the Starbucks Reserve Roastery on Capitol Hill, a flagship location that once served as a showcase for the brand's premium ambitions.
Meanwhile, the company has been directing its growth dollars elsewhere. In April, Starbucks announced it is investing $100 million and bringing 2,000 new jobs to Nashville for a new Southeast corporate office. The contrast is hard to miss: Nashville gets the investment, Seattle gets the pink slips and shuttered storefronts.
KOMO News reported on May 11 that Starbucks was laying off 61 employees at its corporate headquarters due to a technology department reorganization. The layoffs add to a pattern of the company pulling back from the city it built, and the city whose political leadership has treated it as an adversary rather than an asset.
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has not been quiet about the direction Seattle's leadership is taking. In a recent op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, Schultz took direct aim at Wilson's approach to business.
"Seattle's mayor, Katie Wilson, has chosen to cast business as a foil rather than a partner."
Schultz went further, accusing Wilson of pushing what he called "socialist rhetoric" that "vilifies employers, even while she continues to rely on them for revenue." He also charged that she has encouraged residents who disagree with her policies to leave the city.
That accusation aligns with a detail captured in an image caption from a Seattle University Conversations event on April 14, 2026, where Wilson reportedly laughed and waved goodbye to millionaires who want to leave Washington state. Whether intended as a joke or a policy statement, the gesture fits a pattern: a mayor who seems more comfortable antagonizing the people who fund her city's tax base than working with them.
The tendency of progressive political figures to attack their own allies when it suits a narrative, and then quietly reverse course, is a recurring theme in American politics. It echoes the kind of performative partisanship seen when liberal media figures target prominent conservative women for their political choices while ignoring contradictions on their own side.
Wilson recently acknowledged that her comments "caused more harm than good." That is a rare concession, but it raises an obvious follow-up question: if she knows the boycott call was harmful, why won't she say plainly that she no longer supports it?
The answer, most likely, is political. Wilson's base includes organized labor and progressive activists who view Starbucks as a symbol of corporate resistance to unionization. Walking back the boycott cleanly would cost her with that constituency. So instead, she orders a latte, laughs about it on camera, and dodges the question.
The real cost of this kind of leadership falls on the workers and small business owners who depend on a healthy local economy. When a mayor publicly tells people to stop patronizing one of the city's biggest employers, a company that still has its corporate headquarters in Seattle, she is not just making a political statement. She is telling investors, executives, and entrepreneurs that the city's elected leadership views them with suspicion.
Starbucks has responded accordingly. Five more stores closing. Sixty-one more layoffs at headquarters. A hundred million dollars flowing to Tennessee instead of staying in Washington. Those are not abstractions. Those are jobs, paychecks, and storefronts disappearing from a city that already struggles with homelessness, public safety, and a shrinking commercial tax base.
Wilson's broken boycott is a small story on its surface, a politician caught doing the thing she told everyone else not to do. But it captures something larger about the way progressive city leaders govern.
They pick fights with the private sector for ideological points. They stand on picket lines for the cameras. They use the language of solidarity and justice to position themselves against the employers who generate the revenue their budgets depend on. And then, when the cameras are off, they walk into Pike Place Market and order a specialty latte.
The workers who lose their shifts when stores close don't have the luxury of laughing it off. The taxpayers who watch investment dollars flow to Nashville don't get to shrug and say, "What do you want me to say about that?"
Seattle deserves a mayor who understands that you cannot build a city by tearing down the companies that built it. What it has instead is a mayor who can't even commit to her own boycott long enough to finish the press cycle.