Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  BOWLING ALONE

  Fast-forward to the late 1980s. Faith Popcorn calls herself a futurist even though she seems better at observing the sociology of the moment than predicting what will happen next. Beginning in the “government is the problem” Reagan years, she noticed that upper-middle-class Americans— Starbucks’ early adopters—were “hunkering down,” “holing up,” and “hiding out under covers.” She called this trend “cocooning” and defined it as “an impulse to go inside when it gets too tough and scary outside.” Everything from “rude waiters and noise pollution to crack-crime, recession, and AIDS,” Popcorn maintained, led to this “heavy duty burrowing.” Worried about their personal safety and the uncertainty around them, people stayed home and avoided the few third places left in the United States. At the same time, Republican-proposed budget cuts pulled government funding for libraries, parks, schools, and arts programs. Along the way, we lost many of our most vital public spaces, the sites where we learned the third place skill of talking to strangers and feeling secure doing so.

  Everyday purchases highlighted what Popcorn observed. Mail-order business tripled over the decade of the 1980s, reaching half a billion dollars a year. Indicating again that people were staying inside, sales of Joe Boxer pajamas, a perfect complement to the stay-at-home life, increased by 500 percent.33 More ominously, Americans also built a vast landscape of exclusion to protect themselves from their real and imagined fears of crime, drugs, and disease. The wealthy moved into gated communities and fortified their homes with motion-sensitive security systems and antisnooping devices. They drove Hummers and other military-like vehicles to work and on vacations. The slightly less well-off settled miles from downtown and any form of public transportation in homes where the most conspicuous architectural feature was a steel-doored garage with an automatic opener.34 That way, cocooners could go from their SUVs and minivans into their houses without ever stepping foot on a street or seeing a neighbor or, worse, a stranger.

  Robert Putnam famously measured the retreat from the public in another way. With bar graphs and pie charts, he showed, as mentioned in the introduction, that by the start of the Starbucks moment in the early 1990s, Americans had stopped hosting potlucks, going to PTA meetings, joining ethnic and neighborhood associations, writing law-makers, and turning out to vote. Bowling, in particular, revealed for him the troubling patterns of the loss of civic and social life. More and more of us went bowling, but far fewer of us belonged to leagues. We were, Putman lamented, “bowling alone.”35

  A strange thing that no one has really talked about happened just as Popcorn pointed her finger at the cocooning trend and Putnam released his statistics on the decline of civic life. Crime rates dropped, and as soon as they did, people started to come out of hiding. They backed their Explorers out of their garages and went downtown for dinner and a show. Some joined book groups at Borders and salons sponsored by the Utne Reader. Others took up Bible studies and Sundays at megachurches. Still others seemed willing to bowl again or just have a cup of coffee out-side the house, but before they went anywhere, they wanted to make sure they were safe and that the people around them were safe. That emphasis on safety, on knowing at a glance that you were OK, became the perquisite for all out-of-the-house places. Only when middle-class types could easily find reassuring clues were they willing to leave the protections of the landscapes of fear. But still the willingness to go out at all points to a trend that Popcorn and Putnam had missed. What the tentative steps from home showed was that many upper-and middle-class Americans didn’t, in the end, like bowling alone or cocooning all that much. They wanted contact, belonging, and a renewed sense of community. Some turned to the Internet for these things, but lots of others went to Starbucks.36

  • • •

  Nanyce Green helped design the first American Girl Place store in Chicago and then the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. In 2005, she reminded a group of architects and city planners gathered at Harvard that America had “lost many of [its] community places.” “There are not enough places to go and feel safe,” she complained. By providing this sense of security, Starbucks had become, she believed, our needed “community place.” What Green didn’t note in her rather upbeat take on the corporate coffeehouse was what was actually going on at Starbucks. She saw the people in the stores, like I had, and assumed that they were there together. But she didn’t grasp just how far latte drinkers had drifted from the practice of community and how their ideas about safety got in the way of really coming together, how all of these things combined to create the appearance of togetherness more than actual togetherness, and how Starbucks had turned this illusion into a valuable commodity for her and for the company.

  It was as if the people Green saw at Starbucks in the 1990s were waking up from a long slumber and rubbing the crusties out of their eyes. Looking around the corporate coffee shop, they saw, much to their relief, that they were not alone and that the people next to them—pressed as they had been through the price filter—were not all that different from them. (Again, predictability proved reassuring.) Still, most just sat there and watched others. They weren’t ready to jump headlong into the loud, politically charged, and sometimes chaotic coffeehouse conversations or really even to talk to anyone they didn’t already know. Maybe as true public spaces evaporated in the postwar years, they had lost their third place skills. Like me, maybe they didn’t know how to talk to strangers anymore, even when they wanted to talk with them. So people went to Starbucks and watched others in public—to see at first if they really liked leaving home and maybe to contemplate the possibilities of talking to others and joining raucous debates. But that next step only rarely seems to happen at Starbucks. While some stores had chatty baristas, few employed really updated “coffeehouse men.” The employees who could fill this role didn’t stay around long enough or work predictable enough hours to become part of the community. That pattern stems in part from the Starbucks business model. Except for management, everyone at the company works part-time and often not on the same shifts each week or month, making it hard for them to get know customers and customers to get to know them. While Starbucks pays a bit better than McDonald’s and provides its employees with health insurance, it still has an 80 percent yearly turnover rate.37 It is hard to have coffeehouse men creating connections among the clientele if they aren’t there for long.38 Without these key actors to make introductions and keep the conversation going, patrons stayed by themselves. Given their inexperience with third places, many must have thought that was what the others wanted—to be by themselves—so they didn’t talk. Starbucks, then, worked best as an exclusive and controlled environment for people alone, people studying and working, and people meeting with other people they already knew. And because repetition (remember, Starbucks has thousands of outlets) works in our culture as a teacher, customers thought coffeehouses were supposed to be alone in public places and that’s how they acted in them.

  Without question, Starbucks has succeeded in creating predictable environments where it is safe, easy, and convenient to be alone. Customers have responded by paying a premium—almost like an admission ticket—to the store. Yet you can’t make yourself look better, and there is no enchantment, to borrow a term deployed by sociologists Max Weber and George Ritzer, in safety or sitting at a table by yourself.39 This isn’t what we imagine when we think of community or daydream about the things that are missing in our bowling alone lives, so that’s not what Starbucks markets. On the front of a company brochure, a sleek, well-dressed couple right out of a Banana Republic catalog sits at a café table on a crowded urban sidewalk—think Paris or Greenwich Village— sipping coffee. In other marketing materials, Starbucks portrays itself as the heir to the “heritage and intimacy of the traditional coffeehouse.”40 Peter Maslen, then president of Starbucks Coffee International, told a reporter in 2000, “[W]hat our brand stands for is based on the European coffeehouse culture.”41 Starbucks reinforced the links between itsel
f and the penny universities, urban cafés, and beatnik hangouts through repeated quotes of how we imagined these places to sound and feel and how they could make us look and feel.

  COFFEEHOUSE QUOTES

  The music of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck has always had a kind of countercultural cool. This was the sophisticated urban sound of intellectuals, hipsters, painters, and novelists—the imagined coffeehouse crowd. That’s why Starbucks pumped this music into its stores, especially in the early days before it turned itself into an alternative to Tower Records.

  More quotes appeared on the walls. Artists, essayists, and writers made a home for themselves in the penny university coffeehouses. They gave these places a sense of romance, intrigue, and intensity. Starbucks makes gestures in this direction as well. Art hangs on the walls of all its stores. Yet this is never edgy, raucous, or iconoclastic art. Rarely is it locally produced art, either. It is instead Starbucks-made and -generated art created at some centralized studio factory. From Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, Starbucks stores display inflated abstract expressionist and pop art–infused homages to coffee. As tall as a basketball hoop and as wide as a garage door, these mixed-medium, earth-toned montages show steaming mugs of coffee, a few lines of poetry or prose about coffee and community, photographs of coffee plants covered by squiggly lines, and preprogrammed random-looking drops of paint. But as experience architect Greg Beck told me, the art still works. It tells people, he explained, that Starbucks cares about art, and so do its customers, then, by going to Starbucks.

  In another quote from the past, Starbucks promised community. So did the Someday Café in Somerville, Massachusetts. Opened in 1993, this was a Beat-era throwback. The owners of the coffeehouse decorated it with mismatched furniture and photographs from local artists. They play a blistering soundtrack of alternative music. On the back walls, they let customers plaster fliers in a rainbow of colors announcing shows of punk bands at cramped bars and alt-country acts at reconverted theaters. Handwritten notes dot the community board, making it look like a paper patchwork quilt. Bands seek new guitar players. Someone is looking for a “sunny room in home with vegan/macro kitchen.” ACT UP announces an emergency meeting, anarchists call for a protest against the death penalty, and the local Pagans invite anyone interested to a Wednesday night potluck.42

  Tucked back in the corner of most Starbucks stores are the company’s own version of community boards with phrases like “What’s Happening” or “Starbucks Happenings” running along the top. Like everything at Starbucks, the company has a policy on the community boards. Over coffee at a store in Austin, Texas, a former employee let me peek at the “Dos/Don’ts of Community Boards” from the late 1990s. The list went like this:

  Do—showcase Starbucks’ participation and involvement in the local community.

  Do—post community events that Starbucks is involved in or sponsored.

  Do—post photos of Starbucks partners’ involvement in community events.

  Do—post positive news articles about your store’s community involvement.

  Do—post “thank you” letters and awards or certificates pertaining to our support within the community.

  The rules instructed store managers not to post anything about politics or religion. Groups involved in recycling and conservation could use the boards, but not environmental activists. Classified ads or calls for room-mates are also not allowed. Generally, the company reminds employees, “Do not post any information on any event not sponsored by Starbucks.”

  The manager of a Washington, DC, Starbucks clearly followed the rules. When I stopped for a coffee in 2006, three items hung on the “Our Neighborhood” board. There was an advertisement for subscriptions to the official Starbucks paper, the New York Times. “Coffee,” the ad said, “Makes News More Interesting and Vice Versa.” Below this was a flier about Ethos Water, Starbucks’ bottled water product and the clean-water projects it funded in the developing world. Also tacked up was a copy of the company’s social responsibility brochure.

  When I asked Leslie Celeste, the manager of a busy Starbucks in Austin, Texas, about the community board in her store, she chuckled. But she quickly got back to company policy, saying that she won’t let religious or political groups put fliers there. Occasionally, she told me, she pinned up calls for auditions at local theaters and notices about art openings at nearby galleries. When we went to look at the store’s community board, it was empty. That’s the way it usually was, she laughed.

  With its third place quotes, jazz soundtrack, abstract expressionist-looking art, and heavily edited community boards, Starbucks tries again and again to link itself to coffeehouse culture. The search for a connection to the past extends even to talk, that central feature of the penny university. “In the tradition of coffee houses everywhere,” the company’s Web page proclaims, “Starbucks has always supported a good, healthy discussion.” With a statement like this, the company shows that it recognizes the desire for something beyond just a better cup of coffee than the diner serves. However vague, it does seem that creative class types like the possibility of contact, connections, freewheeling art forms, and vigorous, spirited, and contentious debate. Or they like the sophistication and urbanity that others associate with these kinds of exchanges. Over the years, therefore, Starbucks’ branders have tried to connect the company to the impulse to talk about big ideas.

  In 1999, Starbucks teamed up with Time Custom Publishing to launch the magazine Joe. According to the venture’s managing editor, the glossy aimed to “replicate the ideas, conversations, and encounters in a coffee-house.” “Life is interesting. Discuss.” That’s what Joe’s subtitle declared. The magazine didn’t make it past a few issues. Starbucks, however, didn’t give up on creating the appearance of coffeehouse conversations.

  On a second try at getting the discussion going, Starbucks officials plastered quotes—now more than three hundred of them—on the company’s take-away cups.43 “Our goal with The Way I See It is to promote free and open exchange of ideas,” explained Starbucks spokesperson Tricia Moriarty. “We think this tradition of dialogue and discussion is an important facet of the coffeehouse experience.”44 On one cup, Dan Rapp, a Starbucks customer from Cincinnati, intones, “I think every professional athlete should have to attend at least five kids’ games every year, just so they remember what the sport is really about.” That is quote number 73. (I tripped over this one in a parking lot.) I picked number 278 off a subway floor. On it Ben Kweller, who is described on the cup as a “rock musician” whose “songs can be heard on Starbucks XM Café Channel 45,” asserted, “In the end we’re all the same.” Number 59 (found on the sidewalk in front of my house) featured Andy Roddick, the tennis star and the youngest American ever to climb to the top of the world rankings. He said, “Having two older brothers is a healthy reminder that you’re always closer to the bottom than the top.” In case anyone disagreed with Rapp, Kweller, Roddick, or any of the other coffee cup philosophers, the company denied responsibility for the content. “This is the author’s opinion,” it says at the bottom of every cup, “not necessarily that of Starbucks.” Even as it distances itself from the cup quotes, Starbucks, nodding in the direction of coffeehouse tradition, invites customers to join online exchanges about the views expressed on its containers, although it is hard to imagine who could quarrel with most of the lines. Who isn’t in favor of recognizing our commonality or adults watching kids play baseball or demonstrating humility? But, of course, when you are as ubiquitous as Starbucks, someone is going to be opposed to something.

  “My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long,” novelist Armistead Maupin laments on a Starbucks cup. “I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.” For one Baylor University faculty member, this quote was too long and too gay. In response to the professor’s protest, the Starbucks store on the campus of the Waco, Texas,
Baptist school stopped serving coffee in the Maupin cups. Linda Ricks, a university official, reported that the dining services agreed to ditch the offending containers out of what she called respect for “Baylor culture.” “There are different viewpoints on . . . campus,” Ricks elaborated. “We pulled the cup to be sensitive.” She told the press that Starbucks had supported the removal. “They aren’t intending to generate conflict at all,” Ricks said about the cup quotes. “Starbucks fully supported our decision because they understand our environment.” 45

  • • •

  Just like it cleaned up the community boards and cup quotes, Starbucks cleaned up coffeehouse culture. Whatever the lasting pull of the traditional coffeehouse, a darkish hue hung over these places. These were not mainstream hangouts for soccer moms or Wall Street traders—the typical people Starbucks gets into its stores. The coffeehouse of the 1950s was an essentially nocturnal place. Usually it sat in a gritty industrial zone or a rundown ethnic neighborhood. Often you descended into these basement joints. After stepping down, you had to cut through a haze of smoke. Only a few wobbly mismatched floor lamps lit these places. Under dark cover, anything could happen to anyone, and that’s what some feared (and others hoped for). Just after World War II, the lord mayor of Birmingham, England, railed against what he called the “aimless juvenile café society,” accusing it of steering young people toward “paths of crimes.” Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean associated the coffeehouse with slackers, free love advocates, junkies, Reds, and criminals.46

  Targeting its still uneasy, postcocoon customers, Starbucks did every-thing it could to disconnect the brand from the dangers associated with the coffeehouse. Starbucks’ earliest stores stood at what company officials liked to call the intersection of Main and Main, on the best blocks in the best part of town, near the busiest office towers and wealthiest neighborhoods. No one, moreover, walked down into the corporate coffee shops. Saying that it had nothing to hide, Starbucks stores usually stand at street level and have floor-to-ceiling windows. You can see inside and know at a glance that this is a safe place. The lights are bright, not glaring like at McDonald’s or the diner, but not dimmed like at a roadhouse tavern or beatnik coffeehouse.