Starbucks -- safe for white people

Is it not curious that it is socially acceptable for middle-class white people to work at Starbucks and its competitors, but at no other fast food places? This was rather clear yesterday morning at RDU at around 7am. Starbucks was run like a tight ship, a bunch of attentive young white people processing order efficiently, expeditiously, and courteously.

Iced joe in hand, I went to the breakfast place down the way to get a biscuit. There, a couple of hispanic people and a black guy were minding the store, doing a perfectly fine job. In front of me, however, was the prototypical angry white man (AWM), fresh off the back 9. He ordered scrambled eggs with country ham, no biscuit or other carb. I got it, a recidivist Atkins diet guy. However, the hispanic guy wasn't quite following him for a second. So AWM snapped at him. Having once lashed out, he moved down to the beverage area, where he asked the black guy for an iced tea. It looked like a 20 or 24 oz cup to me, which in my estimate is pretty big. AWM, though, commented that "I wanted a large iced tea," but when he got no response he acquiesced and paid the bill.

So what is it, then, about Starbucks? Do they pay better and have better benefits?(I think there's a measure of truth to that) Does the fact that it's a premium product with Euro-sizing (tall-grande-vente, if I have at long last mastered it) confer prestige on the task of serving it? Would AWMs heap scorn on servers of color if given the opportunity? Is it the absence of grease that makes the labor more seemly? It's a mystery to me, I must confess.