Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Middle-class teens, as Seattle journalist Julia Sommerfeld found out in 2003, “never associated coffee with truck drivers in seedy diners or salesmen with bad breath.” To them, Starbucks, with its cool lights and comfy chairs, stood for coffee. The new generation associated the company with hot chocolates and postshopping Saturday afternoons out with Mom and Dad. And with celebrities. Ben Affleck, Madonna, Jessica Alba, Britney, and the Olsen twins don’t seem to go anywhere without an oversized cup of Starbucks. Perhaps more than others, teens emulate the adults they admire. “Sometimes carrying around a cup of coffee helps complete a look,” high school senior Jessica Frederick told Sommerfeld, adding, “It can give you that sophisticated, urban, intellectual look.” While teens work hard to create a “very trendy” appearance, few can or want to drink straight-up, high-octane coffee.45

  “It will stunt your growth,” Ella Garay told me when she was thirteen, explaining why she didn’t order coffee drinks at Starbucks, even though at the time she went to one of the company’s Brooklyn outlets most days after school. She and her friends started out with hot chocolate, then moved on to Frappuccinos (without espresso shots and then with them), and after that to Vanilla Lattes (caffeinated or decaf ).

  One twenty-two-year-old shared with me his coffee story. As with Ella, he told me that it started with hot chocolates “before high school.” By the time he reached his junior year, he went to Starbucks most days to get a Mocha Frappuccino. But in college, he explained, he “graduated”— his word—to regular coffee with cream and sugar. Sometimes he likes to relive his high-school days with a Frappuccino. Mostly, however, he thinks “that’s a kid’s drink.”

  Frappuccinos and their icy and milky cousins helped to propel Starbucks’ explosive growth in the last years of the 1990s and the first days of the new century. The company pushed these big-ticket drinks in signs, posters, Web notices, and seasonal promotions. By its own admission, Starbucks does lots of sampling. In the hundreds of hours I logged at Starbucks, I saw employees walking around stores offering customers straight-up coffee out of a French press only occasionally and less so as time passed. Often, though, I saw baristas handing out samples of the latest Frappuccinos and other milky concoctions. These are the drinks that extended the coffee day and the coffee season and that brought legions of non–coffee people into the stores and turned them into steady customers and out-on-the-streets word-of-mouth, cup-in-hand advertisers. Not surprisingly, they are the company’s highest-priced items as well.

  Frappuccinos also helped Starbucks to move into Europe and Asia. In the last five years, the company has opened more than sixty new stores in Spain alone. The key to its success there is that it doesn’t really compete with traditional cafés. Spaniards aren’t going to Starbucks to get hooked up for their daily caffeine fix or hear the neighborhood gossip. They head to the American coffee shop for special occasions, as part of a shopping spree, for a Friday night splurge (in terms of both money and calories), and as a Saturday evening date place. And what they get at Starbucks are Caramel Macchiatos and Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos—items that the corner café with tapas and pickled eggs doesn’t carry.46

  • • •

  Stateside, however, the Frappuccino revolution proved almost too successful. For the first time in its history, in July 2006, Starbucks let down Wall Street. Same-store sales—figures used to calculate total sales of all items at outlets opened for thirteen months or longer—grew that month by only 4 percent (obviously this represents that other moment before the New Depression’s onslaught), a couple of points below projections. Starbucks executives blamed the disappointing figures on the twin forces of Frappuccinos and the weather. For days on end that month, temperatures on the East Coast hovered around one hundred degrees. Trying to find a way to deal with the heat, customers ordered all kinds of iced coffees and Frappuccinos. Because these drinks take longer to make, Starbucks officials told reporters, lines stretched longer than usual.47 Frustrated customers—presumably functional buyers looking only to get a fix of caffeine—walked out and moved on to the next coffee dispenser. But Frappuccinos pose an even bigger threat to the company. As Howard Schultz recognized from the start and then restated in a 2007 leaked memo to the firm’s then-CEO, Jim Donald, blended drinks raised questions about the company’s coffee authenticity.48 With their straws, see-through cups, and crayon-colored appearance, they didn’t look like authentic coffee. They looked instead, as too artificial, too contrived, too sweet and frothy, too ersatz, to be authentic. Even teenagers recognize this quality when they talk about graduating to “real” coffee.

  The more Starbucks became a Frappuccino company pushing high-profit milk-and-sugar drinks made from automated machines, the more it advertised—that is, insisted—on its coffee credentials. Beginning in the 1990s, the wall art in stores seemed to act like a subliminal message. The home office dotted its murals with half-hidden pictures of French presses and quotes written in squiggly, barely readable cursive about coffee’s fragrance and aroma. In-store posters after the turn of the twenty-first century talked about the exotic places the beans came from. Other signs showcased espresso and cappuccino—true coffee drinks with unquestionable European lineage. And the brochures behind the milk bar went on and on about the company’s search for the highest-quality coffee beans and its use of clean, filtered water in the brewing process.

  In recent years as the company has turned its coffeeness inside out, I have noticed even more coffee pictures, coffee bags, and coffee machines in the stores. During the countless hours I have spent watching people drink grande lattes and venti Frappuccinos, I have never seen anyone, not a single person, not even during the holiday rush, buy one of those expensive machines. In another message about status and realness, these aren’t Mr. Coffee machines—those are far too ordinary for Starbucks. I have seen a few people buy French presses and discounted four-and eight-cup drip coffee makers. Every once in a while, I notice customers picking up a pound or two of coffee, but this usually happens at suburban locations. At Starbucks in busy airports and on college campuses, customers don’t purchase beans, let alone coffee-making stuff. Why would they? But still the stuff is there. Why? My theory is that the sleek machines and the bags of whole bean coffee from East Timor are props, like so much at Starbucks. That way Starbucks can still say that it is in the coffee business—that it knows quality and that it will share this knowledge with us for a price. This is coffee authenticity through insistence.

  The insistence grew louder and louder as the company’s fortunes dipped. Even as it opened six new stores a day, many with drive-throughs, Starbucks continued to call itself a neighborhood coffee shop. Just in time for the 2007 holiday season, the company introduced a new $599 “behind the bar” quality espresso maker developed in tandem with luxury carmaker BMW.49 When the news got worse in 2008, Howard Schultz announced his return to the company as CEO. (He had been working as the chairman, really the chief idea guy.) To mark his return to the helm, he started out a “Dear Partners” letter (the company’s name for its employees) by saying, “As I sit down to write this note (6:30 a.m. Sunday morning) I am enjoying a spectacular cup of Sumatra, brewed my favorite way—in a French Press.”50 A week later, the company announced in a press release that it would close every single U.S. store for a few hours, at a slow time of the day, to retrain employees “in creating the perfect shot [and] steaming the milk.”51

  In the middle of the slide, Starbucks tried to use its own history to revive its authenticity. In the spring of 2008, not long after the company famously lost a blind taste test to McDonald’s coffee, it brought back a slightly covered-up version of the original woodcut logo to sell its new coffee. The Pike Place Blend, a “roasted fresh, ground fresh, brewed fresh” coffee, relied on thirty-seven years of company know-how, Starbucks insisted.52 Reviewers, however, didn’t see much of the past in the new blend. “It tastes awful,” spat Fox News’s David Asman. “It’s like a watered-down version of the old brew, which
was strong and rich and left a wonderful coffee flavor in your mouth.” To Time magazine’s James Poniewozik, it tasted like a cross between coffee from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. That was no accident. The medium-roast coffee, Poniewozik noted, contained nothing “risky or distinctive . . . [or] objectionable.” So while Starbucks moved sharply away from its smoky, dark-roasted past toward the tastes of the broad middle class, it still insisted that it had come up with a “coffee for people who love coffee.”53

  Insistence can work, but it also represents something of an admission of failure. It suggests that things aren’t working exactly the way they should. In Starbucks’ case, insistence hasn’t convinced everyone of the company’s continued authenticity or hold on coffee knowledge.

  • • •

  My neighbor is a trim, well-traveled, jacket-and-jeans-wearing Ivy League professor with a salt-and-pepper beard. In many ways, he is a classic creative class type, who explains himself to others through his sensible car tattooed with bumper stickers for Obama and green causes, his copy of the New York Times waiting on his front step every morning, and his coffee choices. One day at a party we started to talk about Starbucks.

  “I used to go in every day and get a cappuccino. The guy behind the counter—what do they call him? The barista. Well, he knew how to do it. Now it’s different. None of them know how to steam the milk the right way.”

  Even though he mistook a Starbucks cappuccino for a “classic cap,” indicating the power of Starbucks at its height, he clearly had lost faith in the company. He no longer saw it as a font of coffee knowledge—a key source of authenticity. Still searching for that feel and for the social payoff that went with it, he had moved on to an independent shop. Better coffee and they knew what they were doing, he told me.

  An Israeli-born, European-educated friend of mine called me not long after I had spoken with my neighbor. “I’ve got it,” he announced, as he told me how he had just finished standing in line for his usual double espresso at a Long Beach, California, Starbucks. “Everyone got Frappuccinos and lattes with vanilla and other stuff.” Analyzing the company’s success, he concluded that Starbucks “doesn’t sell coffee, it sells milk and sugar.” Those “pink-and-white drinks,” he scoffed, “should come with little paper umbrellas.” That hardly sounded like authentic coffee, and that is part of Starbucks’ problem.54

  Starting in 2005, attacks on Starbucks’ authenticity and legitimacy came from all directions. Writing about Portland coffee shops, a reporter (not his sources) compared the Seattle company to Hallmark, Radio Shack, and McDonald’s, hardly bastions of authenticity or elevated status.55 Contributors to Urbandictionary.com echoed what my neighbor and friend and the Pacific Northwest reporter had observed. “The best place to find the worst coffee,” wrote one, adding that Starbucks was where you could expect to find the queen of plastic, Paris Hilton. “A shitty coffee shop,” said another, “for people who don’t really enjoy coffee.” One part-time sociologist made an even more damning indictment: “Calling yourself a coffee nerd while drinking Starbucks is like calling yourself a beer nerd while drinking Budweiser.”56

  Nick Cho, the guy who made me my ultra-authentic cappuccino, calls himself a “coffee geek,” not a “coffee nerd.” Taking on this title is a way for him to say he is all about the coffee. Starbucks, in many ways, initially identified and then marketed the demand for what Nick sold. He will tell you that straight up, saying the Seattle giant turned consumers on to whole bean, European-style coffees. And it taught them to pay more than a dollar for a cup of coffee. But really it made habit-forming authenticity easy to get and have. For a long run, people gained status and looked better off and better informed by buying Starbucks beans and drinks. But then, as the firm multiplied and then multiplied again and operations trumped coffee, Nick and others like him stepped in and offered more natural, less processed, closer-to-their-origin products— products whose initial demand had been tapped into and widely marketed by Starbucks. These competitors, in other words, pushed the authenticity bar beyond Starbucks and took a segment of the market with them. Consumers who really cared about coffee—or wanted to look like they cared and knew about coffee—went to places like Nick’s Murky Coffee, where employees make a point of talking about coffee taste profiles and roasting the beans in small batches, sometimes right in the store. The counter people at Murky—and others like it, such as Stumptown in Portland and Intelligentsia in Chicago—aren’t perpetually cheery or always asking for your name. But they do know something about coffee, and they do make the drinks in front of you, not by pushing a button.57

  Mike Perry is a lot like Nick Cho. He owns Coffee Klatch, a pair of “third wave” Southern California stores. In 2007, a panel of judges voted his espresso the best in the world. When Starbucks announced a year later that it was closing all of its stores for espresso training, amounting in Schultz’s insistent words to a “bold demonstration of our [coffee] commitment,” Perry said that he would offer free drinks while his rival shut down. Then he mocked Starbucks and its claims of authenticity. “I’m not sure why it’s going to take them three hours to learn how to press a button,” he joked. While Schultz’s baristas practiced this skill, Perry said, taking one last dig, “Their customers can come to Coffee Klatch and learn how coffee is really supposed to taste.”58 Turns out, he told me, his store was packed that day, and he found himself a few new regular customers.

  CHAPTER II

  Predictability the Individual Way

  In 2004, Mark Woods, a reporter for the Jacksonville Times-Union, traveled to Athens, Greece. During the trip, he got into a rhythm. Every morning, he climbed out of bed and went to a café near his hotel for what he called “a thick, gritty, wake-up call—Greek coffee.”

  Several months before Woods arrived in Greece, Starbucks opened its first Athens store. Toward the end of his visit, Woods stopped in at one of the familiar coffeehouses (Jacksonville, his hometown, had sixteen Starbucks when he went overseas)—“not,” as he wrote, because he hadn’t “enjoyed the local beverages, but because I was curious about what a Starbucks in Athens would be like.”

  What it was like, Woods observed, was “eerily familiar. Same green-and-white sign. Same music. Same muffled conversation. Same counter. Same cups, chairs, and tables. Same metal canisters with the same type-face, in English, ‘WHOLE MILK.’ ”

  Even the coffee, Woods noted, “tasted familiar. Almost too familiar.” For the rest of his Greek vacation, he stayed away from Starbucks, “stopping at the corner café and ordering a hellenico metrio.”1

  The same perfectly calibrated predictability that chased Woods away in Athens adds value to Starbucks products and lures millions of people to its stores every day. University of Washington student Joshua Wheeler went to a Starbucks near the campus each morning. “It’s not necessarily superior,” he commented, “but it is familiar.”2 A West Coast traveler also admired Starbucks’ predictability. “I know that wherever I go, the . . . lemonade will taste the same.” Sometimes, he added, “that’s what I want.” Other times, he continued, “that’s all I can get.”3 Not just students on their own and traveling salespeople, but soccer moms between car pool stops and psychiatrists between appointments want the familiar. That’s what many go for and then get at Starbucks. “If you’re looking for a casual coffeehouse with a comfortable level of predictability,” an online guide to Cleveland informed visitors, “Starbucks is the place to go.”4

  Sociologist George Ritzer, who developed the idea of the “McDonaldization of society,” would explain Wheeler’s and that West Coast traveler’s actions in functional terms. “In a rationalized society,” he writes, “people prefer to know what to expect in most settings and at most times. They neither desire nor expect surprises.” They want the Big Mac they eat today to taste just like the one they ate yesterday and the one they will eat tomorrow. Trained over the years by McDonald’s and its legion of imitators, they expect all brands to operate in the same fashion. Starbucks customer
s trust that their grande Caffè Verona blend will taste the same at O’Hare Airport as it does in Pensacola or Salt Lake City and that the store in New York City will look like the one in Fort Collins, Colorado. They want predictability in what many see as an unpredictable world. But this is not, as Ritzer argues, about functionality alone. It is also about emotion.5

  “Customers,” writes Eric Schlosser in his best-selling exposé of McDonald’s, Fast Food Nation, “are drawn to familiar brands by an instinct to avoid the unknown.” A brand “offers a feeling of reassurance when its products are always the same and everywhere the same.”6 These days, it seems, people want sameness perhaps more than ever. As the world grows larger due in part to globalization and new forms of communication, as travel increases and takes people farther from home more often than before, and as all this motion seems to weaken the bonds of community, consumers look to the familiar for both product dependability and psychological relief. People on the move gravitate toward brands, observes a Florida real estate agent, because recognizable stores and products “give them a level of comfort” and a piece of “something more tangible that they left behind.” That’s the emotional part. The familiar often makes people feel better, and they are willing to pay for that comfort.7