“America is a place where our public spaces are private spaces,” Philip Roth writes in his dead-on novel about postwar life and tensions, American Pastoral.25 Since the breakdown of formal segregation in the 1950s, many middle-class Americans have continued to try to limit their contact with unknown others and the crimes they often associate with them. Suburban malls represent perhaps the clearest expression of the desire for safe, predictable communities. Built far from downtowns, concentrated pockets of poverty, and people of color and outside the reach of public transportation, the mall appears open while simultaneously limiting access. Anyone—in theory—can shop at the Gap and Build-a-Bear and have a crispy sandwich at Chic-fil-A and a gooey treat at Cinnabon. But how do you get there if you don’t have a car? And if you don’t have a decent job, what would you buy there? You can’t do anything you want at the mall, either. You can’t say anything you want; you can’t dress anyway you want. If you violate the rules, security guards might throw you out or call the police and get you arrested. The mall is private space masquerading as public space.26
Even when they are downtown, Starbucks stores work a lot like sub-urban malls. This starts with location. By putting coffeehouses in airport terminals and shopping malls, next to men’s shops selling blue blazers in college towns, down the street from gray-stoned Episcopalian churches in leafy suburbs, and in the lobbies of tall glass-towered office buildings and pricey hotels in center cities, Starbucks targeted its audience and created a customer base. These are all places filled with wealthy, solidly, and inescapably middle-class people. Near their homes and on their way to work, these customers go to Starbucks and expect to encounter people just like them. Out of town, they depend on this predictability even more. This, in part, explains not just the rise of the suburbs but the suburbanization of urban places as well, the turning of city patches into suburban enclaves. Starbucks stores might look and sound urban, but they operate in a suburban fashion, by looking open to everyone when they really aren’t. 27
Still, the illusion of openness is important to creative class types who imagine themselves as cosmopolitan, tolerant, and supportive of diversity.28 Inside, though, Starbucks puts up filters to ensure predictability, which in this case actually creates exclusivity. Language, for starters, keeps some away. Ordering at Starbucks requires a little learning. Early on, the coffee company manufactured its own pseudo-Italian vocabulary and its own syntax. That means that someone has to teach you how to talk there, someone who has access to Starbucks, a company located largely in upscale, mostly white areas. In hopes of fitting in, I once saw a customer practicing his order in front of a barista. If you don’t get your drink name right, the person behind the counter will shake his head. There is an underlying point to this performance: only those familiar with Starbucks, meaning those with access to Starbucks and its customers, are welcome there.
Cost acts as an even more aggressive gatekeeper. Just like a house in the suburbs, Starbucks in actual, not cultural, terms is relatively expensive. In many ways, a high-priced cup of coffee is the price of admission to this clean, predictable place. Those who want to take a chance or who won’t or can’t pay, can’t get in. At the diner, coffee costs a dollar. At McDonald’s, you can get sixteen ounces of coffee for ninety-nine cents, or as little as forty-nine cents in the middle of the 2008 economic meltdown. At many food trucks on city corners, coffee costs only seventy-nine cents. But at each of these places, you run the risk of bumping into the wrong kind of people—the kinds of people my old neighbor Brenda wanted to avoid, and couldn’t, at that lower-end roadside motel. At Starbucks, the cheapest drink on the menu—twelve ounces of plain coffee—costs about $1.60. Lattes and Frappuccinos sell for two to three times that amount.
Starbucks’ mainstream, watered-down hip-ness—the fact that it plays the easy listening sounds of Norah Jones and James Taylor, but not the anti-Bush tirades of Green Day or the southern-fried raps of Nas, and that it generally hires fresh-faced young workers, but not sullen kids with lip rings, visible tattoos, or baggy pants that only stay up in defiance of the laws of gravity—acts as another filter. Punks and corner kids, anarchists and performance artists usually stay away. They wouldn’t be caught dead in a corporate coffeehouse, and that’s all right with Starbucks. Neither would my recently deceased and definitely not hip Jewish stepgrandfather go to Starbucks. He was an accountant. He wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor. If he had wanted to, he could have gone to Starbucks, but he didn’t want to. Like the borscht-belt comedian Jackie Mason, who did a whole routine in the 1990s on Starbucks’ inflated pricing and bloated language, he couldn’t see a single good reason to spend over a dollar for a cup of coffee any more than he could see getting rid of his checked jackets and blue loafers. “What’s wrong with them?” he might have said about the shoes. “They cover my feet just fine.” Starbucks would take my grandfather’s business over that of metal-heads with mohawks, but it doesn’t really want him sitting in an out-of-style coat in one of its cool-looking overstuffed chairs.29 Starbucks wants its customers to know at a glance that its stores are filled with predictably safe and decent, modestly hip but not really cool or edgy people—people who look just like them or how they want to look.
Making every Starbucks look familiar and feel safe requires heavy doses of policing, employee disciplining, and systemization. In other words, as McDonald’s expert George Ritzer suggests, it requires that Starbucks stores operate like McDonald’s franchises. Indeed, as Starbucks grew, it became more like McDonald’s every day, turning consumption, work, and management into a series of predictable centrally controlled routines. But the thick aura of McDonald’s was, at the same time, a threat to the Starbucks experience and the willingness of customers to pay as much for a cup of coffee as they would for a fast-food meal. Status seekers don’t want to buy the transparently ordinary or mass produced, so Starbucks had to hide its rationality, or what I would call its “McDonald’s side.”
While Starbucks showed off its predictability with promises, implicit and explicit, that the drinks, people, and environment are the same everywhere, it simultaneously masked its sameness behind images of choice and individuality. Heirs to the counterculture’s rejection of mass culture minus its most radical politics, yuppies and creative class types like to think of themselves as unique, as anything but run-of-the-mill, even in their coffee choices. This part of their buying and self-image showed up in a 2006 study. The Wall Street Journal reported that year, at the height of the Starbucks moment, that Dunkin’ Donuts paid a dozen Starbucks regulars to try Dunkin’ Donuts coffee for a week. What happened surprised Justin Holloway, the advertising executive who had designed the experiment. No one switched teams—or “tribes,” as he called them—and it wasn’t about taste. Starbucks customers didn’t like Dunkin’ Donuts’ standardized decor and products. They bristled when employees—dressed in orange and not called baristas— poured predetermined amounts of milk and sugar into their drinks. “The Starbucks people,” Holloway noted with a bit of sarcasm, “couldn’t bear that they weren’t special anymore.” One of his associates concluded that Starbucks patrons “seek out things that make them feel important.”30
Knowing its audience, Starbucks gave its customers the raw material to construct an individualized and even important self-image right alongside the predictable.31 In its glossy 2006 corporate social responsibility report, titled “My Starbucks,” the company insisted that each of its then fourteen thousand outlets possessed some physical characteristic unique to that place.32 Every single store, several officials told me when I visited corporate headquarters in 2006, has a signature exterior feature or a mural or an exposed beam different from the one right across the street or across town. When the architectural details don’t stick out, company designers have stepped in with a twist of their own, a special little reading nook or a different arrangement of the furniture. Before the opening of a New York store, company-paid researchers dug through the city archives for black-and-white photo
graphs of the building in its earlier incarnation and then hung the prints on the coffee shop walls. Now this link in the Starbucks chain was like no other place.33
“Customize your drink,” the sign read at the Starbucks in Richmond, Virginia. Starbucks offers three—really, four—different sizes (an eight-ounce “short” drink is available but not on the menu). Stores feature Komodo Dragon and Caffè Verona blends, either caffeinated or decaffeinated. You can get a latte or Frappuccino. You can add a shot of espresso or maybe a blast of vanilla syrup to any drink. Starbucks provides half-and-half, whole milk, skim milk, and soy milk. To go or for here. In total, Starbucks has somewhere between forty thousand and eighty thousand different drink choices. No matter how you calculate it, just about everyone can have, if desired, their own drink their own way. The endless choices and options at Starbucks become, as they do in so many other sites in our buying-saturated, civically atrophied world, a platform for apparent freedom and individualism.
Like other firms operating in the postneed “experience economy,” Starbucks doesn’t just customize its drinks; it customizes its service as well.34 “Personalization,” the Starbucks employee manual insists, means “knowing customers’ names or drinks or personal preferences.” Unlike at a deli counter, it tells its employees, visitors to Starbucks are not numbers. Workers need to smile, laugh, and ask customers their first names when they order. Starbucks put this system in place not just to sort through who gets what but also to help employees get to know the regulars as quickly as possible. That way, they can address them by name, as individuals, when they come through the door the next day and the day after that.
To help baristas coax out customers’ inner individualism, the employee manual lays out a number of what it calls “legendary service scenarios.” In one, a worker hands over a drink and says, “Tall mocha, thank you.” “Basic or legendary?” the manual asks. “Basic,” is the answer, “because it is what the customer expects. It is a polite response, but there is no personal connection.” To upgrade the service, the manual recommends that workers say something along these lines: “Thanks, John, enjoy your mocha!” By putting it this way, it explains, “The partner recognized the customer by name. There was a personal connection.”35
Starbucks’ drinks and staged customer service routines attempt to turn each customer into a unique individual. But at Starbucks there is an added bonus. These individuals don’t have to risk leaving the mainstream to express their individuality. Surely some customers don’t care about the personal touch. They just want their lattes, and they want them to taste the same everywhere and for the tabletops and bathrooms to be clean every time they visit. For this, they will pay a little extra. Yet some customers want a splash of something extra. They want their mass-produced drinks and individuality at the same time. But this is a distinctly modest kind of individuality—the sort that prefers Banana Republic to edgy, high fashion. Few Starbucks customers desire to be totally different from the crowd, to stick their necks out too far and maybe be seen as outsiders or weird. (That would have made them early adopters of the truly independent coffee shop, with its typically taciturn servers.) Starbucks customers wanted something broadly fashionable (and easily recognizable) but with a twist, something that stamped it and them as modestly unique.36
Several Starbucks employees told me stories about latte lovers who would use the employees and the company’s service ethos as “social crutches.” The neediest patrons came in a few times a day and danced to the sounds of their names being called out from behind the counter. What these superregulars shared in common was a penchant, one worker told me, for “big, huge drinks with lots of caffeine and very customized”—drinks, he added, that they claimed as their very own. Sometimes these customers dared new employees to try to make their specialized treats as if to say that the beverages belonged to them, not to Starbucks.
In a world where Starbucks seems to be everywhere, you are, then, never alone or far from your very own drink or your special place. Starbucks customers can buy their individuality in sixteen thousand stores worldwide, and each one will, the company promises, make the drink exactly the same way. Starbucks sells industrial-sized, mass-produced, interchangeable individuality. That is predictability at its highest profit-producing point. In the last few years, however, Starbucks’ promise of sameness has begun to eat away at its power to convey even a modicum of uniqueness—at both the community and personal levels.
GOING TOO FAR AND GETTING TOO PREDICTABLE
Main Street in our minds—the ideal that many of us grew up with or got from postcards, black-and-white movies, and trips to Disneyland—starts with a brick church at one end of town and a granite bank at the other end. In between, there is a string of two-and three-story buildings, each looking a little different from the other and selling something a little different. All the shops have window displays and half-opened doors. They sell hometown newspapers and Life, penny candy and fresh-cut meat, clothes for Easter and the new school year, and chocolate shakes and Cherry Cokes paired with thin burgers and shoestring fries. The owners know their customers’ names, sizes, and fashion sensibilities. In the middle of all of this is a quirky Woolworth’s or a J. J. Newberry’s—that’s it for national stores.
Sure, there is a heavy dose of nostalgia in these memories, but the downtowns of the past were different from today’s upper-end downtowns. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Charleston, South Carolina, to Pasadena, California, you’ve got chains—not, in these places, McDonald’s or Burger King, but “new age chains,” as the Canadian activist-writer Naomi Klein calls them, like Starbucks, the Body Shop, and Qdoba Mexican Grill—outlets with small yet still distinctive signs, that use natural-looking products and color designs, and talk about community and corporate social responsibility.37 Along branded Main Streets from Maine to California, Einstein Bros. Bagels stands next to a Barnes & Noble next to a Banana Republic next to a Ben & Jerry’s next to a Chili’s next to a Starbucks. In the next town, there is a Gap (which owns Banana Republic), Così, Borders, the Body Shop, and Starbucks. Out on the highway, Applebee’s saddles up next to Borders next to the mall with a Gap, Foot Locker, Children’s Place, Sunglass Hut, and Build-a-Bear. Inside as well as in the parking lot, there is a Starbucks. Across the highway in another sea of parking spaces are The Home Depot, Petco, and Target with a Starbucks kiosk inside. The next town over has the same strip. It is not like there is one Main Street and then another anymore, or one commercial strip and then another. It is more like there is one single, low-slung, set-back Main Street of branded stores in America, and it gets repeated over and over again like a film trailer on a loop.
There is a tipping point here, however. Too much sameness alarms, rather than reassures, many bobos and creative class types; it cuts into their sense of individuality. “[C]hain stores,” Houston’s Thomas L. Robinson lamented, “have homogenized the landscape so that there are few remaining external clues [to] where you are.” Like others anxious about the most recent spread of “generica,” Robinson blames Starbucks.38 This isn’t entirely fair. Starbucks isn’t the only chain out there, and the predictability it sells wouldn’t work if people didn’t want it. But Starbucks has grown so rapidly and spread so far, so fast, that is has replaced McDonald’s and as the symbol for many of the newest and most troubling wave of homogenization. Small-business owner Michael Sheldrake spelled it out at the start of the Starbucks moment. “Perhaps no phenomenon,” he told a New York Times reporter in 1996, “has more profoundly transformed American Main Streets in the 1990s than the ‘chain problem.’” From tony Annapolis, Maryland, to the Melrose district of Hollywood to preppy Harvard Square, retail streetscapes, as he put it, “have been steadily homogenized as heavily marketed national chains have outgunned and displaced locally owned retailers, whose resources and organization generally pale in comparison to the likes of Starbucks.”39
Martha Hodes worries about the impact of Starbucks as well. A respected scholar of sex and race, she tea
ches history at New York University, not far from where she grew up. When Martha talks, she moves her hands a lot. When she talks about Starbucks, she slashes her hands up and down in a fast, agitated chopping motion.
“Let me tell you a story,” she said as she sliced her left hand across the space between us, when I mentioned to her my interest in writing about Starbucks. “I was in Boston doing research,” she began. “It was one of those icy cold nights. I was walking and the wind cut right through my coat. Up ahead, I saw lights. It looked like a coffee shop. I picked up my pace. As I got closer, I just kept thinking about how great it would be to sit down and warm up.” When she reached the storefront, she found out it was a Starbucks. “I just kept walking. I didn’t care how cold it was. I have never been to a Starbucks. I won’t go.”
In a “pure world,” Martha told me on a hot summer morning as we sat across from each other at an independent coffee shop, “I wouldn’t patronize chains.”
Everything but the Coffee Page 9
