Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Built for the postneed, status-seeking, civically challenged world, Starbucks offered an important variation on McDonald’s-style, branded predictability. Sameness and comfort are certainly important for highly mobile yuppies, bobos, and creative class types. But for them, it is about more than just picking a dependable product in a crowded marketplace, the first point of branding going back to the early 1900s. Although this still matters, predictability in a frenzied, product-filled world carries with it added efficiency and emotional value—both reasons to pay the premium. Getting the same thing anywhere you go can be reassuring; perhaps it can serve as protection against the unpredictable.

  As chains stretched again across the United States in the 1990s, many upper-middlebrows went, as we have seen, in search of authenticity. Authenticity implied uniqueness and specialness, for both the product and the consumer. Bobos, as David Brooks points out in his book that coined the term, prized “novelty” and “self-expression.” So as much as they wanted the predictable, they also wanted to be able to portray themselves as unique individuals, not bland replicas of everyone else. Sensing this seeming contradiction, Starbucks tried to gloss over the tensions between the desires for sameness and choice by offering its customers what business experts have called “mass customization,” the idea of creating specific goods and services for each customer and being able to do it again and again, or what in coffee terms amounted to venti cups of predictability paired with grande novelty.8 It all worked for Starbucks and other companies trying to walk this tightrope, as long as the sameness didn’t crowd out the uniqueness and predictability didn’t over-whelm the real—or at least the seemingly real.

  DESIRING THE PREDICTABLE

  Lawyers and doctors, importers and exporters, bond traders and pharmaceutical reps seem to be constantly on the move. Endless travel for work and for pleasure, for new jobs and new opportunities, the racing here and there, driving and flying, riding the Long Island Railroad and hopping on the Chinatown bus, settling down and relocating, has generated for some people a sense of dislocation and uncertainty and a desire for predictability in taste and place. Some go to Starbucks for the coffee; they know it will be strong and pack a wallop of caffeine. That is just one reason. One person I met during my research told me he didn’t really like the taste of Starbucks coffee, but he went to the stores all the time because he knows, no matter where he is, he can get a cup of herbal tea and a copy of the New York Times. Starbucks built itself to serve particular upper-middle-class needs for sameness. Overhearing someone bashing Starbucks, a big-city resident chimed in: “You know . . . I have trouble being unkind to Starbucks.” Within a few blocks of his loft apartment, he said, are “countless choices when it comes to satisfying my coffee needs, but that just isn’t the case in many parts of the country.” So when he is out on the road, he goes for the predictable. “I was darn grateful,” he reported in 2005, “for the Starbucks stand at the airport.”9

  Christina Waters underwent a similar conversion, which also happened at the airport, the main transportation hub for higher-earners in the modern economy built on moving people and goods so quickly that they seem to come from nowhere and land nowhere. A reluctant creative class type, this self-described “aging hippie/liberal” joked that her “ideological fur rose right on cue when I started stumbling over Starbucks, like New Age McDonald’s, everywhere I went.” When Waters found herself stuck at Los Angeles International Airport at 5 A.M., she became “born again, Starbucks-wise.” Reluctant at first, she hesitated, but she needed some caffeine. “No latte ever tasted as good,” she confessed. A few months later, snow trapped Waters at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. And again, Starbucks bailed her out with a latte. “Starbucks,” she found, “is always right where you want it to be.” Soon, the coffee company was “hardwired” into her “internal search engine.” She looked for it every-where. At night, she dreamed of lattes. While to some, Starbucks stores still looked like links in a chain bent on world domination, to her, they showcased “great consistent coffee . . . rich, hot, perfectly made.” “So fine-tuned is the quality control here,” she said, concluding her conversion tale, “that a trainee in suburban Spokane can produce a macchiato every bit as satisfying as a veteran barista in Manhattan.”10

  When a Seattle coffee aficionado visited New York and saw a Starbucks on every corner, she commented that it certainly is “a convenient place to procure a pre-shopping cup of coffee.” You’ll get what you pay for, she maintained, “exactly the same mediocre product you get from every other Starbucks.” “Dull predictability,” that’s what Starbucks sells, she concluded, pointing to another, and perhaps contradictory, emotional value for sale at the hip-looking corporate coffee shops.11

  Commentator Steven Walkman and Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz, like many Americans, would welcome a little more “dull predictability.” Both point out that we suffer in the postneed economic order from a “tyranny of choice” that adds to our feelings of dislocation and isolation. Defenders of the consumer regime argue that the proliferation of choice in the marketplace can be liberating. But everywhere we go, Walkman and Schwartz note, there are endless options, myriad small differences to wade through, and endless decisions to make. To them, this doesn’t represent the expansion of freedom based on buying but a new kind of psychic prison built on stress. Walkman finds himself wondering all the time if he picked the right item. What if he didn’t? What if he left the perfect product back in the store? Go to Best Buy and televisions of all shapes and sizes line not one, or two, but three store walls. Each has more features than just about anyone needs or knows how to utilize. Walkman learned that the choices for something as ordinary as socks were just as extensive. When he went looking for a pair of plain white socks, he found hosiery for racquetball, running, walking, cycling, hiking, basketball, and aerobics. “What if I play racquetball occasionally and walk sometimes?” he asked the salesperson. She shrugged as if to say, well, why won’t you change socks in between each activity? Over the last decade and a half, the explosion of choice and the proliferation of minor differences spilled over into the coffee business as well. Now the morning cup of joe involves a nearly infinite number of decisions—drip or French press, a latte or cappuccino, an independent place or McDonald’s, Starbucks or Peet’s.12

  Economic historian Peter Coclanis has developed a strategy for dealing with the possible tyranny of coffee choices. A remarkably rational operator, the Columbia PhD goes to Starbucks and pays the premium when he is away from home—and these days he is on the road a lot. Currently, he serves as the associate provost for international affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He stops at Starbucks in order to get his caffeine boost and, in his words, to limit his “discovery costs.” According to this notion, as Coclanis explained it, with each purchase, consumers invest time and resources, deciding where to go and what to buy, worrying about whether they got the best value or finest product. In our hustle-and-bustle world with more for sale in more venues every day, this behavior can quickly turn costly—in terms of time and psychic energy. Imagine coming to Philadelphia or Ann Arbor and trying every single coffee shop in town before you decided on the one you liked the best. Rather than do that on a two-day visit to one of these places, Coclanis heads straight to Starbucks. He would prefer a more local, one-of-a-kind place, but he doesn’t have the time it takes to discover that place, nor does he want to take a risk on the coffee, so he usually opts for the predictable—and not bad, according to him: a cup of Starbucks drip coffee in a typically comfortable and clean setting.

  For some customers, the desire for predictability goes up in almost direct proportion to their distance from home. In many ways, this reflects the wider and deeper anomie of modern life, the detachment from friends and family, and the growing absence of meaningful daily interactions in our spatially disconnected everyday worlds. Bringing us back to the airport, travel is when many of us feel this sense of dislocation most acutely. It is when p
eople need a little predictability to save valuable time and emotional energy. “I am a big fan of Starbucks,” explains one businesswoman, “and as a frequent traveler, I am always happy to find a Starbucks and have a familiar place to order my coffee . . .. I have been happy to find them internationally, in the most unexpected towns in Europe.”13 For business-people like her, this has a sort of functional payoff as well: she doesn’t waste time on coffee decisions. What’s more, as another salesman put it, he goes to Starbucks for “a latte and a work station,” knowing that he will get for his money a “predictable business friendly environment.”14

  “People go to Starbucks for the familiar atmosphere,” the blogger “Liberty Belle” rightly observed. That is not, of course, the main reason why bobos and creative class types travel. When not working, dot-com whizzes and hospital administrators hit the road, quite often, to get a little outside their comfort zones, but even as they do, they still need some reassurance—something familiar—along the way. As Liberty Belle writes, when “the rootlessness of a new place threatens loneliness,” you need a fix of something from back home, a familiar place where you speak the language. “That’s when Starbucks is great!” says Liberty Belle. “No matter where you are, there’s always a Starbucks and it’s always the same old shit. If you can form a personal sphere of sanity around the Starbucks experience, you’ll never be alone in the world!”15

  At the start of a semester-long study abroad program, that’s just how Ana Garcia felt: alone in the world. Athletic and outgoing, the twenty-year-old sorority member from a McMansion-dotted Atlanta suburb hadn’t traveled much at that point in her life. When she first got to Madrid, she felt disoriented. “We were pulling up to our hotel on Gran Via,” she told me in an e-mail exchange, “after a five-hour bus ride with forty-four complete strangers” (the other students on her trip), “and I was exhausted.” “These crazy people,” she said about Spaniards, “eat so late, and I needed something to hold me over. And there it was right across from the hotel—a Starbucks.” She walked over and found that “it was a huge relief to get something we knew already (I had already had some language barrier problems, so at least I was familiar with Starbucks).” When I asked her about this experience again later in the semester, she joked, “I go to Starbucks . . .. It is nice to get little tastes of familiarity while over here (a little break from the lomo and cafe con leche!).”

  The predictability of Starbucks smoothed an even bumpier transition in Yasuko Owen’s life. One day, her husband walked into their Hawaii home and announced that his company had reassigned him without notice to Singapore. Not surprisingly, the news made the thirty-six-year-old, stay-at-home mom nervous and anxious. Back on the Big Island, she told a reporter, “there was a Starbucks and Borders right next to each other.” When she saw the same pairing in Singapore, she said to herself, “I could really live here.” Owen surely was not going to bristle, then, at the price of her latte. Predictability had functional and emotional value for her, and the price even at four dollars a drink was worth it.16

  MAKING A PREDICTABLE PUBLIC-LOOKING PLACE

  Predictability doesn’t just happen. Starbucks works hard to stage this easily consumed familiarity, starting with the coffee itself. Reluctant to franchise, Starbucks owns most of its outlets. That way, it can open stores across the street from each other, or cluster-bomb, to quote author Naomi Klein, downtown areas. Obviously, this approach crowds out competition, but on another level, it allows the company to control the details, starting with the coffee-making process itself and continuing with the store design, to ensure predictable-seeming tastes and experiences from Seattle to Singapore.

  Signaled by the introduction of the fully automated espresso machines, Starbucks’ industrial makeover meant less authenticity, but also it meant quicker lattes and enhanced sameness. In theory, at least, mechanization should mean the drinks taste the same everywhere. However, there’s a problem with this idea. Natural products aren’t entirely predictable. Like wine grapes, coffee beans taste different every year because they get exposed through the growing process to different amounts of rain and sun. But Starbucks still tries to create uniformity. It utilizes, for instance, secret shoppers to conduct beverage (and service) tests. Well-disguised company representatives visit stores and check drinks for their temperature, weight, and taste. Following the McDonald’s model, they try to ensure as much as possible that a Mocha Latte—where the syrup and milk overwhelm the beans—in Des Moines has the same predictable look, feel, and taste as it does in Dubai.17

  Starbucks baristas also tend to look alike—usually smiling and usually young. This, too, is no accident. As thick as a chemistry textbook, the Starbucks employee manual leaves little to chance. It provides workers with a script outlining exactly what they should say and the tone they should strike. It spells out what they can and can’t wear and what they can and can’t show of themselves. They have to wear a Starbucks shirt, a green apron, and sensible-looking dark khaki pants. No visible tattoos. No nose rings. Not too much makeup or perfume, and no earrings that dangle too far past the earlobes.

  Almost no one on the front line at Starbucks works full-time, and the hours are erratic and unpredictable. That schedule denies employees the predictability and sameness that the customers crave, but it does mean that younger people with flexible schedules tend to gravitate toward the jobs. They are the ones who can most easily deal with the swing shifts of nights followed by mornings and do the taxing, back-aching work. The baristas, therefore, have a generally predictable, youthful look.18

  Leslie Celeste, an Austin store manager, told me that if someone comes into her store looking for a job, she will ask one of the counter people, “What does he look like?” Only if they say the applicant is OK will she interview that person.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t hire you,” she answered, laughing.

  “Why?” I said, trying not to sound defensive.

  “You’re too old,” she said, laughing again. “And I don’t hire ugly people, either. I know I shouldn’t say this, but who wants to buy coffee from a kid with zits all over his face or some fat chick?”19

  Starbucks stores aren’t just filled with clean-cut young workers; the stores themselves are clean. Every ten minutes, a shift supervisor sets a timer for what the company calls a café check. When the bell goes off, someone slips from behind the counter to bus tables; refill the cream, milk, and sugar dispensers at the help-yourself bar; sweep the floors; and inspect the bathrooms. They check on the toilet paper and towels and wipe down all the surfaces with disinfectant. The goal, an employee explained to me, is to make sure “the store looked spectacular” and is “well stocked and especially appealing/inviting to our guests.”20

  Cleanliness represents an emotionally important marker of sameness. Whether wandering through foreign lands or eating at an ethnic restaurant or looking for coffee, newcomers look for reassurance.21 Travelers and everyday consumers often associate foreignness (and the undesirable) with filth. For them dirt triggers anxieties of disease and disorder—in other words, unpredictability. “Before I left the States,” Jadd Cheng explained in 2003, “I felt slightly disapproving of what seemed the corporate sameness of every Starbucks and I avoided them as much as possible.” Then he moved to Taipei. “But after misadventures ordering in a foreign tongue and navigating the dodginess of Taiwanese public restrooms, there was something comforting about entering a Starbucks that was identical to the ones back home, from the menu to the décor of the (very clean) bathroom.” Since then, he continued, “I’ve been hooked . . .. Maybe corporate sameness isn’t all that bad.”22

  Rather than risk the consequences of the unpredictable—smelly bath-rooms, sticky countertops, wobbly tables, foreign tongues, mysterious food, and maybe even unwashed people—many people will look, at home and abroad, for the spotless and familiar place even at the expense of consuming something more local, even more authentic (though the totally faux won
’t work, either—more on that and on bathrooms later). The see-through food displays, broom-pushing workers, and faint smells of cleanser act as clues, telling customers that they are at Starbucks, itself a clean, continuous unbroken space, not just a piece of real estate in a foreign country or another city.

  A few years ago, Brenda, a psychiatrist I know, remarried and moved from Philadelphia to California. She planned to stop at Starbucks stores along the way and promised to keep a travel log for me. “Scott and I,” Brenda wrote from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, “have been hanging out at Starbucks off of Interstate 95 for the past hour and a half. I have been on the Internet. Scott has been paying bills.”

  “What do you like about stopping at Starbucks?” I asked.

  “Well,” Brenda replied, “I feel comfortable here. It feels familiar.” Along with the wireless access, soothing colors, and comfortable chairs, Starbucks’ customers, with their predictable, clean, middle-class appearances, reassured Brenda. By contrast, she wrote, “We had breakfast at our Comfort Inn this morning surrounded by obese Americans eating unhealthy bad-looking food (I had Cheerios with full-fat milk; no option of low-fat). I hate to admit this about myself, but I sort of think that part of liking to be here is that I feel that it is not beneath me, as I kind of feel when I am at, say, McDonald’s ordering bad coffee.”

  The key to Starbucks—to any business—is that a dislocated person, someone away from home like Brenda, can read in a flash the cultural clues it throws off. Customers have to know right away where they are and who is around them. More than anything, Starbucks must translate this desire to be out in public, but in an absolutely safe place, into a predictable product and physical environment. As one patron declared, Starbucks isn’t a public library—and he meant this as a positive attribute. In other words, it is not open to everyone. There is no chance, the blogger Witold Riedel wrote approvingly, of having to engage in a long and tedious conversation with some crazy “old person.”23 An employee at an Ann Arbor store told me his managers regularly asked him to throw out the homeless whether they ordered anything or not. Not long after he passed this story on to me, I sat at the Starbucks near the University of Pennsylvania campus. A pan-handler came in, and out of nowhere a manager appeared to shoo him away. Limiting the access of the poor, unhoused, unwashed, and unfortunate is another way that Starbucks creates a predictable and safe middle-class environment. This isn’t just about Starbucks. Exclusion is key to bringing people together in public across the United States.24