Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Ana Garcia attended the University of Georgia along with Fern. Money was less of an issue for her, and Starbucks less a symbol of status or a site of conspicuous consumption. Her father was a successful dentist in suburban Atlanta and paid for her car, school, and sorority bills. She told me that she usually stopped by the same Starbucks Fern went to on her way to the library. Ana got her drinks to go. “I know exactly what I want, either a nonfat Vanilla Latte if I’m being healthy, a Peppermint Mocha if I’m not!” Either way, she explained, “it is a treat, a reward for studying and a pick-me-up.”

  Students aren’t the only ones treating themselves at Starbucks. Stay-at-home mom Sarah Montford made endless clever little economies to balance her family’s household budget. She bought frozen chicken breasts in bulk at Sam’s Club and children’s clothes at T. J. Maxx. Over the last few years, she hasn’t spent more than twenty dollars on a pair of shoes for herself. She even gave up her gym membership. Every once in a while, though, Sarah joined her friends at Starbucks. “It’s my chance to relax and to feel like I’m staying in touch with what’s going on,” she told an interviewer. “It’s important for keeping a sense of self.”1

  Meredith Lemmon is devoted to building a “God-seeking” home in Slidell, Louisiana. Married with a two-year-old daughter, the twenty-something mom spends her days “washing spit up out of clothes (this is a new hobby), cake decorating, and spending time with friends.” On a Web site, she talked about where Starbucks fit in her everyday routine. “First of all, Starbucks is way too expensive (or maybe I’m too frugal?), so I usually only go there on a splurge. If I do get that far, it depends on the day: Really cheap, but want to treat myself day: tall, half caff, coffee of the day; I’m feelin’ good about life day (and need some calcium): grande, half caff, non-fat, latte with splenda [sic]; not having such a great day: grande, non-fat, no whip mocha; having a bad day and need some sweet consolation: venti mocha and a dessert!”2

  THE URGE TO SPLURGE

  In 2003, Laura Paquet published a smart, succinct, and insightful book, The Urge to Splurge. When I told her over coffee at Starbucks in Ottawa about Fern, Ana, Sarah, and Meredith, she said, “That’s right,” adding that “these are affordable luxuries.” Starbucks, in fact, likes the term affordable luxuries. Howard Schultz uses the phrase to describe how customers regard the drinks and sugary treats his company serves. “You can’t buy a BMW every day or a Viking stove or an expensive dress,” Paquet explained to me, “but you can buy a cup of coffee.”

  Just as I finished writing down her comments about affordable luxuries or everyday status making, Paquet shifted gears. “But that is just one part of it.” When you look closer, she continued, these women were involved in what she and a few business school professors like to call “self-gifting”—buying presents or even time away from day-to-day routines for yourself.3

  Self-gifting, in turn, represented a form of carefully planned retail therapy. Unlike the more public desires for the traditional coffeehouse or social standing, this need is largely personal and emotional and only partially performative. In our postneed world where shopping has become a form of entertainment, self-expression, and identity making and where other institutions are receding, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people seek individual comfort and solace in consumption. After all, consumption is a key way that we add fun, and a deliberate kind of playfulness, to our public images and personal lives. Through buying, we navigate the marketplace, showing off our smarts and creativity and building a sense of belonging and individuality. Why not, then, manage our moods through buying? Why not gain some personal pleasure, which of course we do, from our purchases? The women whose stories opened this chapter bought things to feel better, mark an event in their lives, assert some control over their surroundings, have a good time, and steal a moment of relaxation, and they were willing to pay extra for these emotional perks.

  German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin coined the clinical term oniomania—onius is the Greek word for “sale”—to describe compulsive shopping disorders.4 People with this condition can’t or won’t stop buying until they get help or destroy themselves financially and emotionally. Self-gifting and self-medicating with lattes are cousins of oniomania— something much less severe, but not a totally unrelated condition or feeling. The people doing these things use shopping as an outlet for frustration and as a stress reliever. Add to that the idea of rewarding yourself and bucking yourself up through purchasing, and we begin to see how buying works in the lives of Fern, Ana, Sarah, and Meredith. We can also see how self-gifting, in turn, works for Starbucks, how this impulse gets people in the stores, often buying the most expensive drinks on the menu.

  Yet to say that Fern and the others are being manipulated or are engaged only in reckless spending—the most dangerous kind of buying— misses the point of self-gifting. All of these women operate in a much more deliberate and thoughtful manner. Each carefully calculates the value of the rewards that should be coming her way, determining what she can afford, how much she has earned (from working or studying or exercising or doing without), and how much she wants to celebrate or needs to make herself feel better. They base the cost of their purchases on their perceived emotional needs. More stress equals a bigger, more sugary, more expensive drink. A midterm adds up to a coffee; a ten-page paper, a grande Frappuccino. Spending thirty minutes at the gym on the elliptical trainer, that’s a latte; a 10K race for local firefighters, that’s a double-shot, syrupy drink and a scone. Tired of the kids whining about having nothing to do? That earns you a Starbucks run and forty minutes of solitude in a comfy chair. Feeling down after arguing with your partner? That adds up to a venti Frappuccino topped with whipped cream and a black-and-white cookie the size of a small Frisbee. Buying Starbucks, in these cases, is a pat on the back and sometimes a pick-me-up, but it is always a calculated move with value and reward firmly in the buyer’s mind.

  By purchasing an overpriced, but still not wildly expensive, drink and a little time away from it all, some reward themselves, while others self-medicate (which are both to a certain extent additional examples of the search for solutions in contemporary America in the private realm rather than the public realm). Either way, many people feel better or stay in a good mood for a little longer after a trip to Starbucks, and that makes the premium the company charges worthwhile. The emotional perks and spikes are key here, and this is what a lot of financial advisers and diet doctors worrying about the costs of latte purchases don’t get. Because the things we buy have meaning, consumption confers worth on the buyer—in this case, self-worth. Self-gifters believe (or hope) that their lives will be better after purchasing those jeans or drinking that venti latte and saying to themselves and others that they are worth it. But even more, they are taking control of their buying and doing it on their own terms for their own reasons.5

  Just about everyone engages in a little retail therapy on occasion. When I used to get a paycheck—back before direct deposit—I would walk to the bank. On the way, I would buy lunch, usually a sit-down lunch, not something quick or really cheap. After eating, I would wander over to the record store and buy a CD. I was self-gifting, rewarding myself for surviving another grueling month of teaching college students and tracking down footnotes in the library. Now I buy myself a few songs on iTunes when I get an e-mail telling me that my paycheck has been deposited into my account. The whole routine isn’t as fun as it used to be.

  Over the last couple of years, I have “worked” at Starbucks, so I don’t tend to go there for rewards or a pick-me-up. But my wife, Ann Marie, does sometimes. When I told her about this chapter, she smiled and said, “I do that—I splurge on iced lattes. I get them with a splash of vanilla, just a splash. It’s a special touch.”

  “When do you go? When you are having a bad day?” I asked, thinking about the articles I had been reading on retail therapy and self-gifting.

  “Sometimes. But mostly it is a treat, as you would say. Really, it is the time that is
the biggest treat. I sit down, and I get to read.” (It is probably worth noting here that we have two constantly ball-throwing boys under age ten.)

  When it comes to iced lattes with a splash of vanilla and a seat on a couch, Ann Marie is, it seems, somewhat typical. She uses her purchases, like a lot of us do, to gain an emotional lift and to take some control over her time. Many of the women I met while I did my research for this book told me similar stories about feeling better after buying coffee. One time I conducted a focus group at the University of Pennsylvania with six women and one man. (That’s who responded to posters and e-mails asking Starbucks users to come and talk about coffee consumption and earn ten dollars and a few slices of pizza.) Without my directly asking them, four of the women talked about buying Starbucks drinks or going to one of the stores as a treat or a reward or as a way to put them-selves in a better mood. The one man who participated didn’t talk about coffee in these terms. But this wasn’t odd. I got these results again and again in my conversations with people about Starbucks. Women talked about treating themselves with Frappuccinos much more than men did.

  University of Houston business school professor Jackie Kacen discovered similar patterns. In a paper she wrote on retail therapy and shopping cures, she noted that both men and women self-gift in the postneed world, but she also found that they bought different things. Women purchased far more clothes, for instance, than men. Men, how-ever, spent more on bigger-ticket items. Kacen speculated that these contrasts reflected, in her words, “differences in discretionary income and earning power between men and women in the US.” So when it comes to Starbucks, perhaps it was its relative affordability and convenience that made it a viable self-gifting venue for women.6

  Other factors further explain the gendered appeals of Starbucks as a place for self-gifting. This starts with the drinks. A Brooklyn teenager told me a story about a boy who liked her and wanted to ask her out on a date. To impress her, he ordered a plain black coffee at Starbucks. Why I asked? Because, she laughed, “it is more manly.” When women self-gift at Starbucks, they usually order milky, frothy concoctions, drinks that a contributor on Urbandictionary.com described as “decorated or girly in nature.” Sensing this gendered dynamic, in 2006, Burger King tried to carve out a place for itself in the burgeoning take-away coffee market. It called its new drink “BK Joe” and packaged it as a kind of brawny alternative to Starbucks. Burger King customers, insisted Denny Post, the company’s former “chief concept officer,” “don’t want it to be complicated, like a chai half-decaf whatever. They just want it to be straightforward. This is not frou-frou coffee.” To hammer the point home, BK Joe ads featured a construction worker wearing a helmet and workboots, drinking coffee that another ad said, poking more fun at Starbucks, came in “three easy-to-say sizes” (large, medium, and small).7 Clearly in this reading, functional, utilitarian coffee (and Burger King) were male, and Frappuccinos and Starbucks were female, a “girl thing,” as one blogger called it.8

  Television sitcoms and Hollywood films often portray women’s shopping—especially when it comes to purchasing Vanilla Lattes, shoes, and chocolates—as frivolous. Think of the image of the irrational shopaholic—say, Grace from Will and Grace—twisted up in a knot of Macy’s and Bloomingdale bags. But looking at women buying lattes for themselves at Starbucks reveals more about rational, not irrational, purchasing calculations and about personal politics and the social meanings of gender. “If you live in a patriarchal society,” Sharon Zukin, the author of Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture, explained to me, “you shop for others and you get your treats from men.” Through self-gifting, Zukin suggests, women say to themselves and others, “I deserve it”—the “it” being a not-too-expensive indulgence, a little time, or a small dose of relief from the endless everyday pressures of work, house-hold and child management, budgeting, and even dieting in postneed middle-class America.9 For some women, then, Starbucks has become a way to broadcast their self-worth and self-possession, and, in some cases, to deliver a muted feminist critique of the hectoring and finger-wagging advice coming at them all the time from supermarket magazines and cable station commentators. But again, these acts typically take place in the private realm, on cushy couches away from the public arena of political debate and discussion, thereby leaving untouched, in most cases, the gender conventions that this kind of buying might challenge.

  A SHORT HISTORY OF SELF-GIFTING

  In The Social Meaning of Money, Princeton University sociologist Viviana Zelizer challenges conventional thinking about the market and rationality. From Marx to Weber, commentators have treated all purchases as the same: as rational, utility-driven calculations. They don’t see much value in the emotional or personal. Through her extensive research, however, Zelizer uncovers a long, curvy, and complicated history of how people “earmark” and spend their money. Husbands and wives, she finds, regularly stashed away small coins and bills as “me money.”10 When no one is looking, they might buy a little something for them-selves. They turn shopping into fun, not work; money into a reward, not a master. Obviously, the self-gifting that goes on at Starbucks isn’t new, and neither is buying for pleasure new.11 It, too, has a history. How people self-gift or what they spend their me money on, and how these purchases shift with social and economic changes and transformations in ideas about family and gender, can tell us a lot about what we care about and desire and how we define, regulate, and talk about economic rationality and self-worth at a given moment.

  In 1992, trend watcher Faith Popcorn noticed a sharp uptick in what she described as “therapeutic” purchases of “small indulgences.” Just as Starbucks moved full-force out of Seattle, she observed “a militancy about self indulgence now, a strong sense of entitlement. It’s not ‘Oh, what I would give for [insert your fantasy here],’ it’s ‘I want it.’ ‘I will have it. And I deserve it.’ ”12

  Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske noticed a similar trend, particularly among women. To get a handle on shifting consumer desires, the two executives from the Boston Consulting Group crunch numbers on retail sales and monitor home prices. They also have a touch of the ethnographer in them. As part of their research, they watch what people buy, interview them about their purchases, and talk with them in their living rooms and on their back decks. (For instance, Silverstein did the in-depth interview with stay-at-home mom Sarah Montford mentioned in the chapter opening.) According to Silverstein and Fiske’s careful estimate, Americans spent $350 billion in 2003 on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, three-hundred-count cotton sheets, Kiehl’s hand and eye creams, and hundreds of other small indulgences.13 In their book Trading Up, they point to higher incomes, more women in the workforce, and rising home values as the key drivers behind the national spending spree that others have called “luxurification” and “affluenza.” At the same time, “everyday low prices” at Wal-Mart reduced what families spent on staples like toilet paper, pickles, and car batteries. In his book The Wal-Mart Effect, business journalist Charles Fishman estimates that the average American family saves $2,000 a year because of the bargains offered by the retail giant.14 But, as Silverstein and Fiske note and as the economic meltdown of 2008 showed rather dramatically, upper-middle-class consumers didn’t squirrel away this money in their saving accounts or give it to charities. They spent it on lattes and other luxuries often bought on credit.

  More than straightforward economic issues drove the purchase of small indulgences. In their conversations with consumers, Silverstein and Fiske noticed what they termed the “I’m worth it” phenomenon, a newish cultural permission especially pronounced among women to spend on themselves and do so out in the open. This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. It surely had to do with more than the emergence of the luxury economy, everyday discounts, and easy credit—the reasons Silverstein and Fiske cite. The rise in self-gifting stems, at least in part, from the frenzied pace of American life, the amount of working, driving, and activities Americans do (and sign their kid
s up to do). We are a nation running ourselves ragged—especially women, who usually bear the double (and then some) burden of paid labor and domestic labor. So a little break, a little bit of respite, is much needed and well worth it. Because they are worth it and their time is worth it, female consumers regularly treat themselves to a gift or a little time off from the monotony of cooking and cleaning or just a few moments of fun—a small indulgence as a rational reward or maybe as a useful incentive to keep up the frenzied pace.

  • • •

  Without fully acknowledging these social forces, Silverstein and Fiske see Oprah Winfrey behind the trend toward frequent self-gifting. They identify the talk-show host and one-woman multimedia enterprise as the powerful popularizer and great enabler for women’s “I’m worth it”/“I deserve respect” latte buying.15 Turns out, Oprah is a Starbucks fan, and Starbucks is a fan of Oprah. At their splashy annual stockholders’ meetings, Starbucks’ officials show clips from the previous year of scenes where the company’s stores, cups, and logo appeared in films and on television. In one of these, Oprah yelled on her show, “Yay, Starbucks.”16

  The identification between Starbucks and Oprah demonstrated something of the coffee company’s connection with women and the American mainstream in the 1990s. While just about everyone seems to respect Oprah, the foundation of her fan base comes from women from the nation’s broad middle class, showing once again how Starbucks had steadily expanded its appeal through the Starbucks moment. When it comes to her core audience, Oprah, as Silverstein and Fiske note, recognizes the pressures in most women’s lives. That is key to the bond between her and her fans: she understands them, and they respond to her empathy. Making me even more intrigued by the Winfrey-Starbucks connection, Meredith, the Christian mom and occasional Starbucks user from Louisiana introduced in the chapter’s opening, judged Oprah the “most influential woman of our day.” If she could spend an evening with anyone who lived in the last thousand years, she wrote, she would choose the talk-show host.