Avenger of the Week | Roz Brewer

Next month, current Starbucks COO Roz Brewer will take the helm of Walgreens Boots Alliance, the parent company of Walgreens pharmacy chain, becoming the only Black woman CEO among the Fortune 500 companies. The international drugstore chain is the latest major consumer brand to tap Brewer, who is known as a strong advocate for gender and racial equality and innovation in customer service.

Photo credit: Fortune Live Media [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr

Brewer was previously CEO of Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart, and she also worked at Kimberly-Clark for 22 years, joining the consumer goods company in 1984 as a research scientist and rising through the management ranks to become Global President of the company.

Born in Detroit, Brewer graduated from a technical high school and majored in chemistry at Spelman College, an historically Black women’s college in Atlanta. A former member of the Starbucks board, she now serves on the boards of both Amazon and Spelman College.

Two highly publicized events best demonstrate her commitment to equality.

In 2018, she faced a major crisis when two 23-year-old Black men waiting for their business partner at a Starbucks in Philadelphia were arrested after an employee called the police because they hadn’t ordered anything. The video of their arrest was widely circulated and sparked accusations of discrimination. Brewer said she was sickened by video of the incident and immediately thought of her own 23-year-old son, who is also a Starbucks customer.

Brewer and Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson  met with the men to apologize personally, condemning the actions and promising further response. They shut down all Starbucks nationally for four hours the next month to conduct training against racial bias, later adding a dozen other diversity training programs. The company also settled with the two men that had been arrested and offered to pay their tuition for an online degree, a benefit that is available to all Starbucks employees. The company changed their policy, welcoming people to come to their stores whether they buy anything or not.

The quick handling of the incident and the introduction of proactive policies has been praised as a model for what to do when something goes wrong, which is to apologize, make it right, and work hard to prevent a recurrence.

When Brewer was CEO of Sam’s Club in 2015, she gave an interview in which she said she demanded diversity from her team, and noted that she planned to talk to a supplier about diversity after a meeting, to which the company sent an executive team of all white men.  She was criticized as “racist”, and there were threats of a boycott against Sam’s Club. The head of parent company Walmart McMillon stood by her and said that she was reiterating Sam’s Club beliefs that diversity and inclusion make for a stronger business, an ideal he supports.

We salute our Avenger of the Week Roz Brewer for speaking out and taking action against gender and racial discrimination in the workplace.

Go, Roz Brewer!

Roz Brewer is the new CEO of @Walgreens, the only Black woman CEO leading a Fortune 500 AND she’s taken practical action against racial discrimination in the workplace, making her the @GenderAvenger #AvengerOfTheWeek! What a force. #GenderAvenger https://www.genderavenger.com/blog/avenger-of-the-week-roz-brewer