Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Lots of people were anti-something in the 1960s. Revolt electrified the streets of San Francisco and the rest of the nation when Baldwin started to make his Petrini’s runs. Revolt against Jim Crow. Revolt against war and imperialism. Revolt against neo-Victorian notions of sexuality. Revolt against environmental degradation. Revolt against keeping up with the Joneses and the madcap buying of suburbia. And revolt against the mass-produced, prepackaged, freeze-dried, space-age foods of Kellogg’s and McDonald’s.

  As Baldwin grew up in the 1950s, American food became more processed and standardized. At just about every turn, convenience and predictability trumped taste and naturalness as TV dinners, Cool Whip, Minute Rice, and instant coffee crowded supermarket shelves. Pockets of resistance to the bland standardization and industrialization of the American palate sprung up here and there as women and men rebelled against one-size, one-taste-fits-all foods delivered without any human contact. They said no to canned Folgers, crystalline Tang, and frozen dinners from Swanson. Like Baldwin, they cooked their meals and made their drinks with the freshest, least uniform, closest-to-the-original-source ingredients available.

  For some, picking the right coffee and getting the right cut of meat were culinary equivalents to burning draft cards and putting flowers in National Guardsmen’s gun barrels. Many took their rebellious cues from the countercultural bible, the Whole Earth Catalogue. Part how-to guide, part manifesto, the best-selling book told readers:

  Everything’s connected to everything.

  Everything’s got to go somewhere.

  There’s no such thing as a free lunch.4

  That included food. Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse, the legendary Bay Area bistro showcasing foods made from fresh, locally produced ingredients, immersed herself in Berkeley politics—the free speech movement, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture. She insisted, a contemporary remembered, “that the way we eat is political,” telling her cohort, “It’s not enough to liberate yourself politically, to liberate yourself sexually—you have to liberate all the senses.” Eating healthy, natural foods and savoring their unique tastes, she proclaimed, amounted to a “socially progressive act.”5

  Jerry Baldwin never saw his food adventures as expressly political acts or as a radical critique of society, except maybe of the supermarket. Even though he started his culinary explorations in the same era that Ken Kesey staged his acid tests and napalm dropped on Vietnamese villages, he was in some ways what David Kamp, the author of The United States of Arugula (a smart and funny book on how organic whole-wheat bread replaced Wonder Bread from Palm Beach to Peoria), has called a “post-hippie foodie,” a depoliticized culture explorer.6 Not satisfied with the tastes America offered, these well-informed and educated consumers went in search of a more natural product, yet they didn’t question the larger economic structure that delivered the goods. Still, that didn’t mean Baldwin and other posthippie foodies weren’t rebels of a sort. They rejected the insipid artifice of mainstream American diets. They searched out foods and tastes that were more genuine, more savory, spicier, and harder to get. Unlike the most ardent of the counterculture, however, Baldwin didn’t reject the market or consumption as a way to express longing for authenticity. In other words, while he fashioned a strong critique of the mainstream, he didn’t challenge the central role that buying played in identity making. Later, when he went into business, he sought to sell the authentic without letting the selling corrupt the very the idea of authenticity.

  Authenticity is difficult to define. It is not so much a thing as a feeling or the search for that feeling. People interested in the real, and seeking the real in the marketplace, look for products that seem more textured and less mass produced. They want things that are locally made and closer to nature or to their original source, and as untainted as possible by commerce and the naked ambition to get rich.7 Of course, this kind of thinking contains all sorts of contradictions. There are obvious tensions created by buyers rummaging through branded stores owned by multinational corporations looking for crafty items or things untouched by the market with their implied localness. Yet these contradictions don’t mean there isn’t a rough continuum when it comes to authenticity. Some products are more genuine and closer to their origins than others. The tacos at a Mexican restaurant in East LA look and taste more like Mexican tacos (Mexico being one of the original sources for the taco) than the ones at the midmarket chain Baja Fresh. Baja Fresh tacos, though, look and taste more like “real” tacos than the ones at Taco Bell. Or, to take an example from Baldwin’s era, the folk music of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and even Bob Dylan was closer to the sound and spirit of Woody Guthrie, the presumed holder of the authentic, than the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul, and Mary.8

  • • •

  By 1970, Baldwin had moved to Seattle and started teaching English in a trade school. He met two other posthippie foodies there, history teacher Zev Siegl and communications design company partner Gordon Bowker. Each was restless and wanted to do something different, and they were all dissatisfied with what they saw as the plastic, inauthentic nature of American culture. They talked about making films, starting a classical radio station, and putting out folk records. But they kept coming back to food and the idea of opening a wine store or a shop filled with chef-quality baking equipment. Then they came up with coffee. “Only,” as Baldwin joked, “we didn’t know anything about coffee.” But they knew they wanted something that reflected their emerging food values. They knew they wanted to run something closer to a corner grocery store than a restaurant, and they knew how to study like a graduate student exploring a dissertation topic. They read books on coffee and visited coffee roasters, the few that existed at the time, from New York to Vancouver. Baldwin told me they found their model, in terms of tastes and rebellion against artifice, down the coast, at Peet’s in Berkeley.

  Alfred Peet’s father roasted coffee in his native Holland. Before coming to the Bay Area in 1955 at the age of thirty-five, Peet had worked in the tea and coffee business in Europe and Asia for more than a decade. He couldn’t believe what Americans drank. Why, he wondered, were people in the richest country in the world willing to settle for weak Folgers coffee made from stale, preground beans? In 1966, he decided to open a shop with a roaster right inside at the intersection of Vine and Walnut streets in Berkeley. He sold only high-quality, dark-roasted, smoky, and oily Arabica beans. Like a cranky teacher, he taught—sometimes in a scolding tone— customers to appreciate the tastes of different coffees and how to make their own quality brews at home. He showed them how to grind the beans and pour the water slowly through a small filter—the way good drip coffee got made in those days. He told them how to store the beans and heat the milk.9 “When you walked into Peet’s,” Baldwin recalled, you heard that “Dutch accent, and the place smelled great . . .. No question,” he added, “this was authentic . . .. We pretty much modeled ourselves on Peet’s.” The very first Starbucks even sold Peet’s beans. When Starbucks started to roast its own beans, it also featured dark, smoky roasts, what one coffee guy called the “West Coast” style.

  I asked Baldwin why he and his partners put that first store in Pike Place Market—known these days as a downtown tourist attraction where brawny guys in flannel shirts chuck whole salmons back and forth while visitors snap pictures. “That was where you shopped for food, if you were serious about food,” he explained. “Buying it directly from vendors—that was about authenticity.”

  Once Baldwin and his partners had the place and the setting, they needed a name. For a while, he told me, they threw around nautical-themed monikers, like Cutty’s Coffee or Cargo House, trying to tie the company to Seattle and the idea of the beans coming from oceans away. But Baldwin said they really wanted a surname for the company that would lend it a kind of family aura, even an authentic tradition like Peet’s or Petrini’s. Yet when they put their names together, Baldwin, Bowker, and Siegl, the combination sounded to them like a downtown law firm, definitely
not the natural, purer vibe they wanted. A friend in the marketing business told them that words that begin with st stand out. During a brainstorming session, Siegl blurted out “Starbo,” after looking at a map and seeing the name of a mining camp on nearby Mount Rainier. Then, he called out “Starbucks.” They all nodded their heads. They liked the sound of it—easy to say and pronounce, but still kind of weighty and significant. Not long after, Baldwin recalled, they remembered that Starbucks served as Captain Ahab’s first mate in Herman Melville’s seafaring classic, Moby-Dick. That made the name sound even better, even less processed.10

  In its original manifesto, Baldwin told me, Starbucks claimed, “This is where you get the best coffee and tea.” Just like Peet’s, Baldwin said, “We wanted to be complete and good.” Not long after they opened, they started to roast their own beans, only in small batches, and sold them as quickly as possible to make sure they remained robust and vibrant. With freshness in mind, they constantly experimented with different kinds of bags and ways to store the coffee. For home use, they carried top-of-the-line, hard-to-find glass coffee pots shaped like oversized beakers with wooden grips and leather ties, narrower at the top so they could fit a plastic, cone-shaped drip filter. Essentially, this first store operated like a food store. This was an important distinction to Baldwin. He made it again and again when we talked over the phone. “We were in the food business,” he asserted. “We were only open from ten to six. That’s it.” Sure, they had other stuff, but the focus remained on the coffee. Big bins filled with beans that pulled out to forty-five-degree angles covered one of the store walls. Guys in aprons scooped the coffee out, weighed it, and put it in brown bags. But what they did most of all was talk—talk about the roasts, tastes, and origins of the bean. “We did a lot of educating,” Baldwin told me. “Coffee education was crucial.” Starbucks employees— foodie friends of Baldwin, Bowker, and Siegl—also took people through the steps of making coffee at home. Like the staff at Peet’s, they essentially sold coffee knowledge. You paid a premium to get a bit of what they knew. Servers taught customers how to grind beans, how much coffee to use, and the right water temperature for the perfect cup. Coffee brewed in the store came only in porcelain cups and only with half-and-half, no skim milk. In those days, they gave it away, trying to get people to learn about single-origin coffees and try new blends. When I asked Baldwin about this approach, he explained, “At first, we didn’t really serve coffee as a revenue source. We didn’t want anything to take away from the emphasis on whole bean coffee.”

  Surprising even Baldwin, the Pike Place Market store was a hit right off the bat. Historian Jeff Sanders studies what we might call “posthippie capitalism” in Seattle. The first Starbucks, he explained to me, attracted seventies-era urban pioneers. Only loosely aligned with Alice Waters and her gang of countercultural culinary activists, this group consisted of lawyers, architects, professors, and city workers—early creative class types—with “a desire for authentic and informed consumption.” Like Baldwin, they weren’t radicals. Yet they still belonged to a small troupe of foodies who performed their identity and wanted to distinguish themselves from others through their choices about where they lived and what they ate, and they became the core of Starbucks’ initial audience.

  In those days, Starbucks remained a small business. That was because most people, even the better-off, stuck to the supermarket, picking convenience over taste, ease over naturalness, and showing off their status through how much they spent rather than the quality of what they purchased and the know-how it took to appreciate specialty items. Starbucks’ loyal early customers dissented against this popular status-seeking model of buying more and bigger. They were the forerunners for what would become in a decade or so a class-driven mass market for the seemingly real and apparently natural.11 Baldwin, however, knew that in the 1970s his market was still a niche market. “We weren’t going for the main-stream,” he told me more than once.

  HOWARD SCHULTZ, VEBLEN, AND THE LESS REAL

  Howard Schultz came from a different place than Jerry Baldwin. He grew up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn’s Canarsie section. This was the kind of second-generation immigrant neighborhood that pops up in Philip Roth novels and Woody Allen movies. By then, fathers might have driven to work or taken the train, but mothers lingered on front stoops, and kids played stickball and kick the can in the streets. The corner store sold black licorice for a penny and a chance at the daily number for fifty cents. On High Holy Days, everyone got dressed up and headed to shul. Unlike some of the families in Roth’s and Allen’s tales, Schultz’s family did not climb the ladder of postwar prosperity. For much of the 1950s—the boom of the boom years—Schultz’s father drove a diaper truck and worked a string of other blue-collar jobs. The family of five crammed themselves into a two-bedroom apartment in the nearly all-white Bayview Public Housing complex. As neighbors loaded their couches and easy chairs onto the backs of U-Hauls and headed to the suburbs, the Schultzes stayed behind. One summer young Howard did escape the public housing complex, but when he learned that the camp he was at catered to poor kids, he didn’t go back. Howard’s father’s relative lack of success, Schultz admits, left him occasionally embarrassed but more often wanting something more.

  Sports—that classic leveler of class distinctions—delivered Schultz from Brooklyn. During his senior year of high school, the University of Western Michigan awarded the six-foot, broad-shouldered quarterback a football scholarship. After cracking his jaw in an early practice, he didn’t take many college snaps, but he did get a degree and then a job with IBM. He had found his métier. More than most people, Schultz believed in himself and believed that others would listen to him and follow what he said. That made him a natural salesman and business success. At Big Blue, he quickly advanced through the corporate order. Pay hikes and bonuses followed, and with them an apartment in Manhattan and summer weekends in the Hamptons. Following several promotions at IBM, he landed a job with the Swedish conglomerate Perstorp. Although he had yet to reach his thirtieth birthday, the company put him in charge of setting up a U.S. branch of its Hammarplast homewares division.

  A few years into the job, Schultz was poring over the company’s sales sheets, and something stood out to him. A tiny Seattle firm he had never heard of was buying more plastic cones that fit on thermos tops than the department store giant Macy’s. Schultz decided to check things out for himself with a visit to the Pacific Northwest. The trip turned into something of a conversion experience—at least according to Schultz. As he approached the Pike Place Market Starbucks store, a violinist played Mozart. “A heady aroma of coffee,” he writes, “reached out and drew me in.” The setting captivated him. “I loved the market at once. . . . It’s so handcrafted, so authentic, so Old World.”12

  On the plane going back east, Schultz told himself he had to work for Starbucks and help the company expand. At first, Baldwin and his partners resisted. They didn’t want to get bigger, nor did they have the money to pay a marketing guy. Perhaps doing so seemed too inauthentic to them. Eventually, however, Schultz did talk his way into the company. In 1982, he took a pay cut and moved to Seattle. From day one, he pushed for expansion. More stores. More outlets. More, more, more. Maybe as a bonus or as a way to get a break from Schultz’s big dreams, the company sent him on a business to trip to Milan in 1983. Schultz had never been to Italy, and he had never tasted Italian espresso.

  Schultz came back from Italy, the story goes, convinced that an authentic Italian coffee bar serving real espresso could work in the United States. Baldwin wasn’t so sure. Again, he didn’t want to go into the restaurant business. Schultz kept pushing. “Howard was really into the idea of selling drinks by the cup,” Baldwin told me. And he isn’t someone who takes no for an answer. Finally, Baldwin (by then Siegl had sold his interest in the company) gave him the corner of the 4th and Spring streets Starbucks store for his espresso machine.

  “The response,” writes Schultz, “was overwhelming.” Wit
hin a couple of months, he estimated that business tripled at the location as the store churned out eight hundred drinks a day. Customers came up to Schultz, he recalled, “to share their enthusiasm.” Baldwin still wasn’t sold on the idea; he didn’t want anything to dilute the coffeeness of his company—the idea of educating customers about the taste of whole bean coffee. Drinks, he worried, might do that.13

  Convinced of his vision, Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 and opened Il Giornale, named after an Italian newspaper. The store was an attempt, almost note for note, to re-create the Italian espresso bar. Schultz dressed up his servers in black pants, white shirts, and black bow ties. He played opera in the background. And he sold Italian coffee drinks only. The espresso came in tiny porcelain cups resting on small saucers. Cappuccino came with whole milk, no skim, and in short six-to eight-ounce servings. The store did well, and Schultz opened another and then another. With each one, he explained, the “primary mission was to be authentic.” We didn’t want, he elaborated in his memoir, “to dilute the integrity of the espresso and the Italian coffee bar experience.”14

  Like Baldwin, Schultz clearly understood the appeal of authenticity and the potential of marketing antimarket, countercultural values. While he invoked the real and talked about it, it never, however, became his guiding principle. It was always more of a performance for him. That’s because Schultz had little interest in niche markets or protests against blandness. Unlike Baldwin, he didn’t want out of mainstream— he wanted in. That impulse, however, only revealed itself over time.