Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Low Stars, a band that Starbucks introduced in 2007, echoes almost note for note what Warren hears in the not-so-new Starbucks musical template. With their textured harmonies and layers of acoustic guitars, the band sounds like a lighter version of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. “It has been done before,” said Warren, “and done better.” While Starbucks signed Low Stars as a new artist, he noted, it turned its corpo-rate back on indie bands—“the most creative thing in rock right now.”

  “Like who?” I asked.

  “Grizzly Bear, Drive-By Truckers, and LCD Soundsystem.”

  “What’s wrong with these bands?”

  Warren answered, “The Truckers—too foreground, too loud, too heavy. LCD—they are a wild band, combining electronic and disco. Too wild for Starbucks.”

  I wondered, then, did Low Stars make artistic choices with Starbucks, and maybe Springsteen, in mind? I knew that on the New York indie circuit in the 1990s, girl group Antigone Rising once opened for Aerosmith and sometimes played Led Zeppelin–inspired, boy-rock guitar solos.31 For Starbucks, however, they preformed unplugged. Warren didn’t have any specific information on Antigone Rising or Low Stars. But it wouldn’t have surprised him if these bands or any band softened or reshaped its sound for the Hear Music editors. “People make records with Starbucks in mind all the time,” he reported. Why wouldn’t they if they wanted to make money? The coffee company possessed far-reaching marketing prowess, a marketing prowess that fit well the post–Tower Records world. Essentially, the company controlled what its more than forty-five million weekly customers heard and saw. Low Stars’ deal with Starbucks, for example, included six to eight weeks of prime real estate placement next to cash registers—the best place for impulse purchases—in thousands of stores in the United States and Canada, in-store airplay and signs, and a regular spot on Starbucks’ now-defunct XM Satellite Radio channel.32

  “Another part of the Starbucks thing,” Warren observed, getting to the heart of the company’s musical offerings, “is discovery.” NPR listeners and Starbucks customers, he noted about this audience—also his audience—“are right in the middle of being adventurous and risky, but not too risky.” Starbucks officials understood this dynamic as well as anyone. They knew their customers loved the idea of discovering some-thing new—a new coffee from a distant country or a new band or artist, especially, as Warren pointed out, if the new singer sounds a lot like an old one. What’s better than Antigone Rising, a new band with a good story that sounds like the Indigo Girls, or Low Stars sounding like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young or the Eagles, or teenager Sonya Kitchell, who signed with Hear Music in 2007 and sounded to one music critic like Norah Jones’s “younger cousin”?33

  Even with its heavy emphasis on the familiar, Hear Music continued to push beyond its safe soundscape every once in a while. It stocked Beck’s edgy and eclectic album Güero (translation: “blondie”) when it came out. It never stopped playing some world music. In 2007, the sound managers included the hip-hop-and jazz-infused samba music of Brazilian singer-songwriter CéU in Hear Music’s Debut CD series. In a very Starbuckian bit of self-promotion, Ken Lombard of Starbucks Entertainment told reporters that his company was proud to present the CD, adding, “We are tireless in the pursuit of world-class emerging artists to introduce to our customers.”34 But what Lombard didn’t say— and wouldn’t say—was that these riskier offerings don’t have to sell. They serve in a way as cultural loss leaders, products that are priced low (e.g., toilet paper at Wal-Mart) to get people in the store and help sell other products. They are more performance pieces than sales items. Like the overstuffed chairs in the windows and the people sitting in them, they serve as advertisements for the chain. They say that the Hear Music people really do know music, so you can trust them and go ahead and purchase at full price the CDs of the artists you already know— Coldplay, Norah Jones, and Paul McCartney—because the tastemakers have given these records their stamp of approval. The air of discovery gets deployed to sell the familiar.

  EXTENDING THE EXPERIENCE

  “Our customers,” Howard Schultz announced in 2006, “have given us the permission to extend the experience.”35 That was the chairman’s way of saying that Starbucks would begin to market films and books. (This marked a second go round on the book front.) While Starbucks moved into new mediums, it continued to sell a well-tested combination of safe discovery and easy access to cultural capital. When it came to the books, it adopted the already road-tested Oprah model, one not that different from the Hear Music model it already used. Starbucks decided to feature one book at a time. That way it would seem like the company thought hard about its choices—and it did, about how characters, plot, and literature could provide the company with an even thicker aura of discovery and good feelings.

  For its first author, Starbucks tapped Mitch Albom. A former sports reporter, Albom now writes books with Jimmy Stewart kinds of characters. They make you shed a tear or two, but they also let you know that deep down everything’s all right. Albom’s protagonists dispense good, old-fashioned advice to others who have strayed a bit from the path— but only a bit. In Tuesdays with Morrie, a book that spent an undergraduate career on the New York Times best-seller list, Albom reconnects with his college history professor, then dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Gruff on the outside but a true mensch on the inside, the old academic delivers sweet, sagely advice. Of course, he is charming, funny, and only slightly didactic; he doles out moral lessons that sound a bit like the quotes on Starbucks cups—live a simple life and love the ones who love you—in weekly installments of gentle, predictable stories.

  In 2006, Starbucks decided to put One Day Longer, Albom’s follow-up to Tuesdays with Morrie, in all of its U.S. stores. In this book, not much thicker than a CD case, we meet a three-time loser, Charles “Chick” Benetto. Divorced, broke, and washed up as a baseball player, he drifts along drunk and numb to life. Chick hits rock bottom when his daughter doesn’t invite him to her wedding. Thinking about killing himself, he wanders back to the house he grew up in. There he sees his mother Pauline—then dead for eight years—and they spend one last day together. In a final saintly, maternal act, this ghost sets her son straight. Through her unquestioning love, she makes him feel worthy of living again. Chick will be OK.

  “Risky”—that’s how Starbucks described its choice of the book to follow the Albom novel into the stores. With it came talk of daring and discovery. Jonathan Galassi, the publisher of the nonfiction book, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, led the way. “They have made a courageous choice,” he said of Starbucks.36 On the surface, Beah’s haunting tale couldn’t be more different from Albom’s saccharine story. Blood, murder, and mayhem fill just about every one of the book’s powerful and moving pages. Only twelve years old, Beah roams his war-ravaged homeland of Sierra Leone dodging the rebels and looking to reconnect with his family. Eventually the bad guys capture him, keep him high on dope, and strap an AK-47 across his chest and send him out to battle. While the book doesn’t flinch at evil, at calculated malevolence, at outright meanness, it does shy away from politics. What plunged Beah’s homeland into chaos? What were people fighting for and over? What did the rebels believe? What in the past served as a prelude to this ugly present? How were Western nations and multinational corporations implicated in his country’s political and economic plight? We never really know. Society and culture, power and politics, the whole public sphere—these issues aren’t part of the story. In the end, Beah comes around to where Albom’s Benetto stands. He survives this hell and lives to tell about it. But even more important, he emerges with his humanity and decency intact. This is a story, like Albom’s, about personal redemption both for Beah and perhaps for a reader sitting in an overstuffed Starbucks chair reading the book, discovering something new while sipping a latte.

  • • •

  “We have developed a voice,” Ken Lombard asserted. “Our customers trust us with music, film, and
books.”37 This is that Bing role Starbucks always coveted. Lombard might be right that his company possessed that trust and voice for a time, but it was a voice with a narrow range. What his company sold after the success of the Ray Charles CD was the appearance of diversity and sophistication, choice and perpetual discovery, of Bing and the college-age Don MacKinnon, rather than actual choices and new kinds of art. Perhaps miscalculating what its customers wanted, Starbucks didn’t take that trust too far, too close to the edge where it might, in the short term, lose some muffin and latte sales, but win the respect and admiration of customers and critics. To remain a valued cultural broker, the company had to continue to appear somewhat fresh, somewhat authentic, and somewhat interested in genuine discovery. Too many Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Sonya Kitchell, and Kenny G CDs (in 2008, Hear Music did bring out a Valentine’s Day disc by the saxophonist) eventually scraped off some of the company’s last few edges of hip, at least in the minds of its most ardent new experience–hunting and diversity-seeking “everyday explorers.”38

  By 2008, the music, like so much at Starbucks, started to consume itself. With the company’s stock sliding downward, business critics complained that the CDs cluttered the stores and took away from the brand’s coffeeness, its original claim of authenticity and the source of the trust it had tried to leverage in other directions. Hoping to brace its fall, Starbucks announced in the summer of 2008 that it was scaling back its musical and entertainment offerings (and that Ken Lombard was leaving the company) to concentrate on its core business: coffee.39 Maybe there just wasn’t enough freshness and difference left on the CD racks to matter anymore and to make the coffee taste and look better.

  CHAPTER VI

  Not-So-Green Cups

  Greenhouse gases and green issues did something quite remarkable. They made Al Gore cool. Watching him stride across the national stage as a senator, vice president, and presidential candidate, few thought of him in his staid Brooks Brothers suits and drab red ties as hip. One journalist, in fact, described Gore as a “somber policy wonk” who campaigned for office delivering “bland speeches on lock boxes.” But after Gore lost his bid for the presidency (or, depending on your point of view, hanging chads and the Supreme Court snatched it from him), he underwent a makeover. He went away for a while and came back with a beard, blue jeans, and a case full of charts and graphs about global warming. Pretty soon, he found himself on the Late Show yukking it up with Jay Leno and Lindsay Lohan. Then, he picked up an Academy Award and a standing ovation from the Hollywood crowd. By 2006, it was official. Entertainment Weekly upgraded Gore’s status to cool.1

  It wasn’t Gore’s new look, even after he shaved the beard and ditched the Levi’s, that made him cool. It was the issue. Green was in. According to an extensive consumer survey conducted in 2007 by Cone, a Boston-based branding and consulting firm, an overwhelming majority of Americans cared about the environment. Reportedly, while most of us willingly conserved energy, saved water, and recycled paper, bottles, and cans, we wanted the corporations we did business with to do the same and then some. Ninety-three percent told the Cone pollsters that they believed that companies had “a responsibility to preserve the environment.”2

  The Cone survey revealed something else. It hinted at Gore’s challenge and Starbucks’ opportunity. Lots of people lined up to hear the vice president lecture, watched his film, and bought his books. Few, however, have followed his advice. Gore called for more than a change in personal behavior or corporate promises. He tried to corral the green faithful into a political movement to take back the government and rescue the environment. Remember, though, the Cone report noted that green consumers expected private solutions to remedy the problem. They would help out personally by stashing away their empties in recycling bins, but they expected the companies they bought from to do the really heavy lifting.

  The turn toward corporations stemmed from a broader turn away from politics. Since Watergate, a large cross section of Americans seem to have given up on politics, in the broadest sense. While many still think that political affiliation reveals something about who you are and what you believe, fewer and fewer think about the government as a vital actor, except in a negative sense. (All of this might change with Barack Obama’s election, but it hasn’t yet.) Even more distrust the political process and the politicians behind it. Many new greens, especially well-heeled ones, imagine themselves as independents, free from party loyalties and all forms of partisanship. Gore’s newfound celebrity and acceptability stemmed at least in part from the fact that he wasn’t running for office anymore. In many people’s eyes, he could finally stand up untainted by politics. But this pointed again to the problem. While Gore’s new legion of fans desired solutions to sprawling, complex, multidimensional problems like global warming and the proliferation of waste, they had lost faith in the electoral system and in state action. That left them with few real options. Having turned away from government initiatives and regulation, many turned almost instinctively to corporations to clean up the mess—the same mess that the corporations had helped create in the first place. In a pattern that would get repeated over and over with issues from the environment to global inequities, upper-middlebrows, with nowhere else to go, turned to private solutions to remedy the ills they saw around them. They would show that they cared about the earth by recycling their wine bottles and buying tomatoes at the farmers market and by spending their money with companies that also cared about the planet. In other words, they eschewed the political path, opting instead to have their buying speak for them.

  • • •

  Aaron Roberts never crossed paths with Al Gore. He never took a stand, it seems, on the environment, either, but his larger story, like the ex–vice president’s, points to the persistent desire among many in this country for new solutions to entrenched problems and to the dearth of public options for remedying these matters. In the end, Roberts’s story also points right at Starbucks. That’s not, though, where it started.

  On a June night in Seattle in 2001, Roberts left his house just after 11 P.M. He drove his mother’s white Cadillac to a convenience store to pick up some Brillo pads and a Mounds chocolate bar and to cash in a lottery ticket worth twenty-seven dollars.

  After that, everything went wrong. Roberts raced through traffic, got pulled over, and then flung his car into drive with a police officer attached to it, bouncing the lawman up and down on the pavement like a human basketball. He stopped, and another police officer confronted him. Words were passed. A shot went off. Roberts ended up dead at the scene from a blast to the stomach.

  Roberts was a black man, and Craig Price and Greg Neubert, the police officers involved, were white. Afterward, they portrayed them-selves as good cops doing a hard job. If anyone, black or white or Asian, they said, had cut across three lanes of traffic without stopping, they would have pulled that driver over, too. They insisted that Roberts had escalated the situation by turning his car into a weapon. It wasn’t about race or Rodney King or anything like that; it was about that Caddy and one man’s reckless behavior.

  The Rev. Robert Jeffrey wasn’t so sure. He had known the thirty-seven-year-old Roberts most of his life. Sure, the minister conceded, he wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t a bad kid, either. He was pretty sure, though, that the Seattle police didn’t care about any of this. When they saw him, they saw a black man—which meant, almost without thinking, the clergyman suspected, that they saw a criminal. When you thought like this, Jeffrey insisted, you shot first and covered up later.

  Reverend Jeffrey preached at Roberts’s funeral and promised that this man would not lose his life in vain. He called on city leaders to act. But how, he wondered, could he get them to hear him? Seattle police had shot other black men, and members of the black community had protested; yet nothing changed. Over the years, Jeffrey had led marches, registered voters, and pushed for more opportunities for black businesses. But still, he believed, the police shot first and talked later. How could he chan
ge things? This time he would try something different. He called for a boycott of Starbucks.

  “Huh?” wondered many in Seattle and around the country. Why Starbucks? What did the company, famous for its local charity work, commitment to diversity, and good deeds, have to do with Roberts’s death or the police? Not much and a whole lot, Jeffrey and his allies answered. “We’re not asking them [Starbucks] for money,” explained Dustin Washington, a Jeffrey’s associate. “We’re not saying they haven’t done things for the community. All we’re saying is that as partners in the community, they have a corporate responsibility to demand police accountability.” He continued, “We’ve protested. We’ve marched. We’ve begged. We’ve written letters. What else is there for us to do? We’re asking the people who control money to support the people.” Jeffrey echoed this point: “We are tired of begging. We are citizens of this city, and if we don’t get what we want, we know how to get it.” He added on another occasion, “Since our votes are not getting us what we need, we need to see if where we spend our money can.”3 Clarifying the boycott’s logic, Jeffrey elaborated, “These corporations drive public policy, and politicians are in the middle. And just dealing with the poor guy in the middle doesn’t cut it anymore. We’ve got to start dealing directly with the corporations that want our business.”4