Can Sweetgreen Keep Its Reputation While Chopping Up Customers’ Rights?
Fast-growing salad restaurant chain Sweetgreen really wants you to know how progressive they are. From their focus on local and ethical produce suppliers, their (ahead of the curve) compostable bowls, and a stated dedication to paying fair wages, Sweetgreen has gotten plenty of publicity as a forward-facing, ethical company. Co-founders and CEOs Nicolas Jammet, Jonathan Neman, and Nathaniel Ru constantly emphasize how all their choices are meant to increase convenience for their customers. However, Sweetgreen recently undertook a change to their policies that will detrimentally affect consumers — and will only increase convenience for the company itself.
Sweetgreen contacted users of their app to let them know that they would be changing their Terms of Use Agreement, effective February 19, 2019. In the middle of that brief email, they announced the new Terms of Use would include a forced arbitration clause. This means that if you, for example, experience harassment from a Sweetgreen employee while picking up your Harvest Bowl, you can’t go to court: the issue will be handled by an arbitrator of Sweetgreen’s choosing, on their terms.
Deep in the fine print, Sweetgreen clarified that you can opt out of arbitration, so long as you contact them within 30 days of becoming subject to the clause, via letter or email. However, that assumes that customers will actually be aware that they’ve become subject to it. Of course, Sweetgreen states that nearly 50% of their orders now come in through their app or website — so presumably, by sending this update to users of the app, most Sweetgreen customers would be informed, right? But that presumption rests on too many moving pieces to actually be fair to their customers.
Plenty of us have received an email from a service with updates to their terms and conditions and breezed past. Sweetgreen is likely banking on the hope that most readers won’t dive any deeper into investigating the changes, let alone be able to understand the consequences. Sweetgreen doesn’t specify the opt-out option in the email, only in the written language of the Terms of Use Agreement itself. It seems safe to assume that they’re similarly hoping that goes unnoticed.
Even if 50% of customers are really accessible via the app, what about the other 50% of brick-and-mortar customers? Is Sweetgreen going to start hanging signs about their new arbitration rule in the windows of their minimalist storefronts? And if they don’t, how will its customers possibly know how they’ve just forfeited the right to take Sweetgreen to court?
If you do contact them to opt out of their forced arbitration clause, you might not be able to get through. Some people emailed about opting out and reported receiving a bounce-back email; others never heard back.
Sweetgreen’s new policies don’t stop at forced arbitration. They also include a class action ban, making it impossible for individuals to band together and sue Sweetgreen collectively, even though class actions are an efficient way for multiple people to seek justice for harm done. And if you do pursue individual arbitration, Sweetgreen included a liability cap, meaning that no matter what happens, Sweetgreen will only be liable to compensate you for, at most, the amount you spent at Sweetgreen in the previous year. So if you only went to Sweetgreen the one time that something went wrong, and spent $12 on that Harvest Bowl, at best, Sweetgreen would compensate you $12.
Forced arbitration is a tactic that inherently privileges the priorities of the corporation over creating an equal platform for consumers. It’s hypocritical of Sweetgreen to tout itself as the most ethical option for food when they are participating in a practice that seeks to silence consumers and give total leverage to the company. While their other tactics to be at the forefront of sustainable business are laudable, it doesn’t excuse making a choice that will make it impossible for someone who, for example, ends up with a food they’re allergic to in their grain bowl, or has their personal information compromised by a bug in the Sweetgreen app, to get justice.
Sweetgreen is hardly the first company to hide anti-consumer measures under a message of convenience, forward thinking, and progressivism. In the wake of the #MeToo movement’s call-out of forced arbitration as a strategy for companies to deny survivors of sexual harassment in the workplace access to justice, a recent piece called out the Human Rights Campaign for listing organizations, such as Google, on their list of most LGBTQ-friendly places to work, despite those same companies participating in forced arbitration practices. Or just take the sudden rash of electric scooters, increasingly popular in big cities, which are instituting forced arbitration policies in the face of dozens of injuries stemming from poorly maintained scooters. While the electric scooters are considered good news for the environment and a viable alternative to public transportation, the companies behind them, such as Bird and Lime, are jeopardizing rider safety and demanding that any solutions be found on their terms.
You cannot claim to be consumer-focused if you rely on practices that restrict the rights of your consumers. For all the good news about Sweetgreen, forced arbitration will become bad news for their customers unless something changes fast. Sweetgreen’s Twitter feed is promoting their new hashtag, #SmallActsBigChange, to support the positive moves that the company is trying to make, whether in terms of the sustainability of their food or in providing free meals to government workers during the shutdown. Sweetgreen should be commended for their, well, sweeter acts — but held accountable for the small-seeming acts that will make a big change for customers. Tweet @sweetgreen with #SmallActsBigChange to let them know that even if they think their new arbitration clause isn’t a big deal, the impact it will have on consumers is no small thing.
