Everything but the Coffee
Everything but the Coffee
Learning about America from Starbucks
Bryant Simon
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2009 by Bryant Simon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simon, Bryant.
Everything but the coffee : learning about America from Starbucks / Bryant Simon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26106-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Coffee—United States. 2. Coffeehouses—United States. 3. Starbucks Coffee Company.
I. Title.
TX415.S523 2009
641.3'373—dc22 2009006142
Manufactured in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.
To my friends
Libby McRae and Bill Deverell
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introducing the Starbucks Moment
I. Real Coffee
II. Predictability the Individual Way
III. It Looks like a Third Place
IV. Self-Gifting and Retail Therapy
V. Hear Music for Everyday Explorers
VI. Not-So-Green Cups
VII. Sleeping Soundly in the Age of Globalization
Afterword
A Note on the Research
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I just keep finding myself with debts no honest man can pay. Luckily, no one seems to want to collect, but they deserve some acknowledgment, even though they would never ask. This wasn’t an easy book to write. A lot of the time I felt like I was chasing a moving target. Just when I had it in my sights, it was gone. I couldn’t have kept up this frustrating search without the help, kindness, advice, indulgence, patience, warmth, grace, and warm cups of coffee from friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family.
Just about everyone I know helped out on this book in some way. They listened to my Starbucks stories and told me their Starbucks stories. And lots of people I didn’t know took time to hang out at Starbucks with me or to write me an e-mail or talk to me over the phone about what they saw and what they knew about the company and its products. Their insights fill every page of this book. A few—like John Moore, Michelle Isroff, Greg Beck, Dave Norton, Symbol Lai, and Laura Paquet (who met with me on her anniversary)—deserve an extra shout-out. Tom Sugrue, Josh Cole, Steve Kantrowitz, Sharon Zukin, David Grazian, Beth Hale, Marisa Chapell, Keith Brown, Barry Altman, Beth Bailey, David Farber, Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, Heather Thompson, Moshe Sluhovsky, Sarah Igo, Susan Herbst, Elizabeth Royte, Paul Sutter, Beau Weston, Jonathan Morris, Bing Broderick, Michael Goldberg, Andy Lewis, Kathy Walsh, Craig Thompson, Lily Geismer, Malcolm Murfett, Ian Gordon, Michael Goldberg, Margo Borten, Mark Huddle, Charles Fishman, Peter Coclanis, Robert Devens, Cathy Staples, Anne Marshall, and Jimmy Giesen recommended books and articles and read and commented on chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, and fragments of this book. Diego Del Pozo and Jose Alvarez went with me on far-flung research trips and helped me to make sense of what I was hearing. Naomi Schneider at the University of California Press guided this book through its final stages, while Geri Thoma stayed with the project from start to end, and even in the rocky middle.
I needed all of this advice and encouragement. But I also needed the trust and faith of good friends like Stephanie McCurry, who never pretended things weren’t bad when they were bad. And like Libby McRae, who can’t be matched for her perfect pitch and loyalty. And like Bill Deverell, who I knew I could always, and then always again, count on. And like a new friend, Matt Wray, who helped me to see what I had and how to talk about it. And like Joe Lorenc, Jeanne Sokolak, Jon Ellen’s best friend, Jeffrey Lutzner, Jessica DeGroot, John Shanley, Rachel Shanley, and all of their kids, whom my kids call their cousins, because, as my kids say, “they really are.”
Never, not while writing this book or ever, did I need a light to get home. My family has never wavered in their support and their love. Not my brother and his family, Bradley, Sharon, Rebecca, and Max. Not my in-laws, Tom and Maria Reardon and Christina and Tom Grimes. And not my mom and dad, Bob and Susan Simon. It is hard to explain, and even harder to understand, just how true and steadfast they are in their love.
For me, this book had a soundtrack, the music that played in my head and out of my computer as I wrote. It was Springsteen, Marah, Miles Davis, the Smiths (that was the difficult middle part), and the late, great Snooks Eaglin, but mostly it was the Drive-By Truckers. To me, they make rock-and-roll sound the way it should sound—sad, hopeful, triumphant, unrepentant, and loud. In a slower song that came out during the last year that I was working on this book, one of Patterson Hood’s not-so-simple characters wonders about heaven and whether you take the vengeance of this world with you there. But then he thinks for a moment that maybe heaven is Saturday morning with his “two daughters and his beautiful wife.” I’m not sure about heaven, Mr. Patterson Hood, but I think I know what you mean. My two sweet, sweet boys and Ann Marie have given me—through all the drafts and false starts of this book—that quietly radiant, perfect gift of Saturday morning—that time when nothing spectacular is going on other than the play-by-play of an imaginary basketball game, the rustling of the newspaper, the groaning of the coffee pot, and the spinning of the dryer. Even more than the Truckers’ insistent rhythms and layers of guitars, it was this music, the warm tunes of Saturday morning, that pulled me through the cuts, rewrites, and missteps of this book. These songs are the answers to my prayers, my reason to believe, my faith. I live for Saturday morning and my two beautiful, funny, creative boys, Eli and Benjamin, and my kind, generous, smart, and, yes, beautiful wife, Ann Marie. Thanks so much to them for that gift, a gift I don’t mind chasing after, catching, and wrapping my arms around every day.
Introducing the Starbucks Moment
In January 2009, as the United States waited for a new president to take office and tried to make sense of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, Esquire published a short interview with Alice Cooper. “It used to be said: As GM goes, so goes America,” declared the early shock-rocker and voice behind the anthem “School’s Out.” “Now it’s: As Starbucks goes, so goes America.”1 Leave it to some-one from the cultural realm to detect this larger transformation in the American economy. During GM’s reign as the nation’s financial bell-wether, business in the United States revolved around production, employment, and consumption—making things, creating good jobs, and selling big-ticket items. While Starbucks would never matter as much as GM—it never generated as much income, employed as many people, or sustained as many related industries—it was equally emblematic. During the days that the nation moved in tandem with Starbucks and latte sales, the American economy turned almost entirely on buying alone, not the trio of product
ion, jobs, and purchasing. Through this epoch, buying drove the nation’s economic engine, and even more, it shaped the daily lives, identities, and emotions of the country’s citizenry.
During the years that America went as Starbucks went, a period spanning roughly 1992 to 2007, most business analysts remained tied to the past, wedded to a GM-era kind of thinking. At no time was this more evident than when Starbucks itself started to falter. As the coffee company’s stock price dropped and foot traffic in its stores fell in 2006, two years before the full onset of the “New Depression,” commentators on MSNBC and in the Wall Street Journal explained the changes by relying on traditional, straightforward economic logic. They did so again in 2008, and in 2009, when Starbucks announced that after a fifteen-year uninterrupted run of nonstop growth, it would close hundreds of U.S. stores and lay off thousands of employees. Pundits blamed Starbucks’ reversal of fortunes on the rising price of gasoline, competition from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, the mortgage crisis, and a new frugality bred by rising joblessness.2 But the experts had it largely wrong, in terms of both the timing and the causes of Starbucks’ decline. That’s because they repeatedly fell back on culturally uninformed, old school economic reasoning to explain Starbucks’ slip. More than they might be willing to admit, they expected buying decisions to revolve around utility, cost, and the physical qualities of a product, but, as Starbucks’ spectacular success had demonstrated, buying in post-GM, postindustrial America turned on more than price or functionality. During the twenty years before the latest Wall Street crash, as the economy went the way of Starbucks, buying became more than ever before not just a way for people to fulfill basic needs but an expression of longing, a source of entertainment, a strategy for mood management, and a form of symbolic communication about class and social standing. The value of a particular good, therefore, depended on how well it met this broad range of needs, not on the physical qualities of the good itself.
In this book, I explore how Starbucks served as the apotheosis for the exploding meanings of buying in our possibly fading consumer-saturated culture. To do this, I tell the story of the rise and fall of what I call the Starbucks moment. By “fall,” though, I don’t mean to suggest that Starbucks suddenly disappeared toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, but that by this time it had lost the central place it once occupied in our culture. During the Starbucks moment, the company popped up in airports and malls, in parking lots and on street corners everywhere, on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook pages, and in Shrek 2 and Meet the Parents and episodes of The Simpsons and Sex and the City. Forty-four million of us each week willingly, even eagerly, paid a time and money premium for what Starbucks sold. This had little to do with coffee and everything to do with style and status, identity and aspiration, the environment and foreign affairs—with the desires of every-day life for a broad cross section of Americans. Although Starbucks spread across the globe in the Starbucks moment, this is a study of Starbucks in the United States and of why so many in this country used and embraced the brand.
Starbucks’ success in the United States pointed, for starters, to the ever-expanding meanings of buying in America. That expansiveness, as this books shows, explains why the coffee was worth it. For a fifteen-year stretch from 1992, when the company first went public, to 2007, when its profits started to flag for the first time, Starbucks delivered much more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better. Studying Starbucks, therefore, tells us what millions of Americans, in the last days before Lehman Brothers imploded, cared enough about to pay extra to get.
Starbucks’ hold on many in the United States grew out of another more fundamental and far-reaching transformation: the nearly whole-sale replacement of civic society by a rapacious consumer society. Under the post-Reagan era, Milton Friedman–inspired free-market political economy of neoliberal, deregulated capitalism, brand-induced consumption oozed into every aspect of daily life. Yet hefty doses of buying, advertising, and marketing certainly weren’t new to America in 1995 or 2005.3 Neither was the branding of everything from fun runs to urinal covers to rock concerts. Nor was the commodification of consumers’ deepest anxieties, desires, and aspirations all that new. It wasn’t even that Americans suffered, in business writer Lucas Conley’s telling phrase, from “obsessive branding disorder.”4 What’s new, and what makes our world both more alienating and more susceptible to the seductions of buying, is the withering of nonmarket relationships and the public institutions that in the past had pushed back against the market and brands to challenge them for people’s allegiances and identities.5
The pullback of community, the state, and other binding agents allowed brands like Starbucks to sell more goods and garner greater profits by reaching deeper into our lives and consciousness and claiming spaces that civic institutions, including the government, had occupied in the past. But while Starbucks occasionally talked and acted like an NGO or a political party, it never existed for the larger good; it worked for Wall Street and for shareholders. Everything from the posters about health care for workers to the brown java jackets that promise to save the planet to the oversized drinks that conjure up notions of extravagance is there to get us to buy more. Yet by making claims to serve the larger good, the corporate players made it even harder for our already hampered civic institutions to reclaim legitimacy as vital actors in domestic reform and foreign policy. This corporate takeover of state functions carried with it costs well beyond the Starbucks price premium. We might consume Starbucks, but as we do, Starbucks consumes part of us—part of our environment, our culture, and even our politics.
Obviously this is not the first book about Starbucks. In the past few years, journalists have pointed to the “Starbucks effect” and detailed how we have all been “Starbucked.” Business writers have marveled at the entrepreneurial savvy of the company’s rock star CEO, Howard Schultz, and scoured the marketplace looking for the next Starbucks. One left-leaning author “wrestled” with Starbucks, while a former adman explained how the company “saved his life.” All of these books, though, point to Starbucks’ remarkable exceptionalism.6 And the company has, no doubt, had a broad and lasting impact on American life. It turned millions from Alaska to Alabama on to whole bean coffee and espresso-based drinks, mainstreamed the coffeehouse, and taught legions of people to pay three and four dollars for what they once got for only a dollar. It helped to gentrify neighborhoods and gave many people places to meet and restrooms to use when out on a run. And it became for many over the last fifteen years the most popular everyday form of luxury.
While highlighting the company’s strong impact on daily life in the United States, my book sees Starbucks and its success as more fundamentally typical—typical of how business and branding work and how we, as consumers, navigate the waters of our civically challenged world. If Starbucks went out of business tomorrow or five years after that, we could still learn from the company’s success and its stumbles. We would better understand how consumption and culture, the public and the private interact in our society because Starbucks epitomizes and typifies how Americans encounter the marketplace and each other. It is Starbucks’ ordinariness, this book argues, that matters. The company’s headline-grabbing fame and profitability sprang from broad-based social changes experienced by tens of millions of Americans and from the spread of buying into nearly every corner of daily life, abetted by the steady and alarming shrinking of the public sphere. In a sense, Starbucks is us, the product of large powerful social forces combined with millions of mundane and prosaic choices. But if it is us, that’s something we need to think hard about. Is this who we want to be and how we want to live?
• • •
Even now, following the Wall Street collapse of 2009, the broad American middle class still lives in a postneed world.7 Most have foo
d, plenty of clean, drinkable water, and roofs over their heads. The bulk of our spending, then, is devoted to things that we don’t really need to survive. But that doesn’t mean our marketplace decisions are irrational or only about showing off. We want happiness, connections, and the respect and admiration of our peers. While some have turned to faith or the hope for change or the security of family to satisfy these wants, most of us almost without thinking still opt for the market to fulfill our most pressing needs. Serving business at the critical juncture where consumer desires and the push for profit meet is what New York Times columnist Rob Walker has called the consumer persuasion industry.8 Made up of marketers, branders, advertisers, and the occasional psychologist and sociologist, this powerful and cunning economic bloc studies us to cater to our wishes and get us to buy the things they sell by making us think we need them and promising us that the goods they peddle will make us feel all right, have more fun, and look better.
From the influential, European-based, and Marxist-influenced Frankfurt school onward, many who study buying see consumers as dupes of the system, deliberately distracted from group consciousness and political engagement by the false promises of shopping and material abundance. But we are far more complicated in our behavior.9 As the consumer outcry against the well-financed and hyperadvertised “new Coke” campaign in 1985 demonstrated, we don’t just gobble things up because a Madison Avenue huckster (or a jeans-wearing brander in a retrofitted Seattle warehouse) whispers in our ears and yanks at our purse strings.10 We weigh our options and buy things because we think that we need them or that they will make our lives better or will close the gap between how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Yet while we aren’t blindly led to car lots or vending machines or coffee shops, it might not in the end really matter. Without vibrant public institutions to counterbalance the consumer persuaders and their products, we remain, hostages—or default devotees—of the market. Many of us put our faith in consumption, in the absence of anything else, to deliver us from tedium, sadness, and even sin.
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