Two black men were arrested at a Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) store in Philadelphia on Apr. 12. The arrest was captured on a cellphone camera.

This sparked a nationwide protest.

But if you Google the event today, you will have to page through several pages of results before you find it. That’s because Starbucks has engineered what appears to be a happy ending.

The two men got a symbolic $1 each, an offer to finish their degrees free online, and a $200,000 public school program from the city for young entrepreneurs.

The key to making it happen was the personal touch. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson met with Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson. He promised “continuing listening and dialogue between the parties and specific action and opportunity,” according to a Starbucks press statement.

Solve the Problem

It also helped that SBUX announced on Apr. 17, just five days after the incident, that it would close its 8,000 U.S. stores on the afternoon of May 29 for racial bias training.

This mirrors something former CEO Howard Schultz did a decade ago, closing all U.S. locations for an afternoon, at the bottom of a recession, to stage an all-hands meeting.

It is also a great lesson in crisis management. Cauterize the wound, limit the damage and avoid risks for the future. Starbucks recognized it has become a virtual town square, a privately owned public place, and acted accordingly.

So far, however, the stock hasn’t reacted. It remains down almost 6% from where it stood on the day the incident happened.

Investors were disappointed in the company’s Apr. 26 earnings report, which showed same-store sales up only 2%, but net revenues up 14% year over year, to $6 billion.

It looked, to the casual investor, that Starbucks is slowing down.

Remember China?

But Starbucks is not slowing down. It’s accelerating.

Starbucks is opening a store every 15 hours in China. It expects to have 5,000 of them there by 2021. Same-store sales in China are growing twice as fast as they are in the rest of the chain.

Starbucks China CEO Belinda Wong joined the company in 2000, after helping formulate strategies for the entry of McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) into the market. McDonald’s was eventually able to re-franchise a network of over 2,000 restaurants for $3 billion.

Starbucks owns its own stores, a strategy most in the fast-casual business now shun, but that means it gets every dollar spent there onto its balance sheet. It also means it takes full responsibility for problems in its stores, so its fast action in Philadelphia will have positive repercussions worldwide.

Buy Starbucks Stock

At its May 3 opening price of about $56.70 per share, Starbucks is selling at a price-to-earnings ratio of about 18, well below the average stock in the S&P 500. That’s also about 20 times its operating cash flow, which came in at $4.1 billion for its most recent fiscal year.

For the first half of its current fiscal year, however, Starbucks has nearly matched that figure, with $2.29 billion of second quarter cash flow atop the first quarter’s $1.83 billion.

Compared to other companies, in other words, Starbucks is a bargain. Its financial results are increasingly tied to the fast-growing China consumer market, rather than the slow-growing U.S. market. Its management has proven itself adept in a crisis. It’s not one size fits all because it has competent local managers, not just Americans trying to run everything.

While other companies are decelerating, China means Starbucks is accelerating. This should make the stock a buy, and you have until its next quarterly report in July to get in.

Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of the historical mystery romance, The Reluctant Detective Travels in Time, available now at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing, he owned no shares in companies mentioned in this story.