Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  In truth, though, Starbucks had begun to stumble a couple of years before Washington had to rescue Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac and Manhattanites started donning Tom Joad hats and humming Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads.3 Even as the deluxe economy crumbled, consumers continue to consume and express themselves through their purchases, including coffee purchases. Like so much about Starbucks, its stumbles at the end of the Bush era served as a reminder of its ordinariness and as an indicator of broader trends, even continuities.

  In the civically challenged world of endless buying, which propelled latte profits, consumers bought coffees for comfort and solace and to make public statements. But in this same world, all products were ephemeral. Nothing was enduring. In the first days of the New Depression, luxury was out; 1930s-style frugality was in. Corporate coffeehouses weren’t cool; independent ones were. Despite the desperate financial news, people in the United States were still buying coffee, they were still getting it to go, and they were still paying three and four dollars for their drinks. While some insisted that the days of self-gifting and over-the-top spending were over, it was hard to make a direct correlation between the larger economy and everyday consumption patterns. To be sure, brands and products have terminal shelf lives, and the sell-by date is determined as much by cultural value as it is by price. When an item loses its usefulness, in terms of both utility and cultural resonance, consumers stop buying it. That doesn’t mean, however, they stop buying altogether, even in the midst of a huge economic meltdown. For better or worse, the postneed economic order has endured.

  Based on my observations and conversations, it didn’t seem like independently owned coffee shops and local places, where four-dollar lattes were as commonplace as at Starbucks, took much of a hit in 2008 as world markets tanked. Again, this continuous business reflects the same relentless, remorseless cultural logic of the postneed economy. It was Starbucks that was hurting in 2007 and 2008, not the coffee business or the business of expressing yourself through your beverage choices. That is not to say that the loss of trillions of dollars in stock values and surging rates of unemployment didn’t make it harder for Starbucks to get going again. But that’s the point. Starbucks was already down, even as the luxury coffee market remained viable. Starbucks, remember, was already discounting its goods and offering “members-only values” to “coffee superlovers” when the whole economy started to sour in the fall of 2008.4 It had already become so ordinary that it had lost its cultural and symbolic value to its customers. Its shelf life as a high-end good was over. Because of that, by the start of 2009, if not before, it wasn’t a bargain anymore, not in the way that consumers calculated worth with culture, status, and self-image in mind. Why would people who still had money in their pockets go out of their way to stop at Starbucks, when other brands sold cheaper coffee or drinks that tasted just as good (or just as milky and sugary), and other stores told better stories about what their products said about you, the consumer? Again, the larger story is as much about Starbucks’ troubles as it about the endurance of the post-GM order way of thinking where consumption trumps everything else.

  I didn’t start researching this book, however, to explain Starbucks’ fall. I began trying to make sense of the company’s success, which, in the end, has allowed me to see the reasons for its fall even more clearly. When I look back now, the origins of this book can be traced to New Year’s Day 2003 and to a Starbucks in a strip mall parking lot in suburban Atlanta. The night before, friends invited us for dinner and a sleep-over. We brought with us to the party a forty-dollar bottle of French champagne. After tangy Spanish cheeses, creamy pâté, provolone-stuffed mushrooms, a pasta course, a main course, salad, two different desserts, martinis, wine, and scotch, we waddled over to the television and watched the ball drop over a soggy Times Square. Just after Dick Clark called out, “Happy New Year,” I popped the cork. Just about everyone, however, put their hands over their flutes or asked for just a sip. One person didn’t feel well—a stomach thing from all the food and drink; another had a long run scheduled for the next day. So staring at me only twenty minutes after midnight was my first dilemma of the New Year. Do I toss about twenty-five dollars’ worth of champagne down the drain or drink it? I drank it.

  Early the next morning, the sun poured through the blinds, shining a bright light on the rhythmic banging in my head. Unable to sleep any-more, I pulled on pants and walked downstairs. Everything was quiet. With no one up, I climbed into my car and went in search of coffee, and of course I found a Starbucks.

  Inside the coffee shop, the world was awake. People came and went. A few seemed to recognize each other, and the coffee slingers behind the counter kept up a constant, cheerful banter.

  “Imir, do you need a Tylenol with that latte?”

  “Baxter, hey. Happy New Year. I’ve got your venti coffee right here.”

  “Hi, Joanne. I didn’t expect to see you this morning. How are you doing? Feeling OK?”

  “Not bad. I went out, but I came home pretty early.”

  Something was happening here. I sat and drank my coffee with a shot of espresso—I needed an extra boost—and watched the comings and goings and listened to conversations and chitchat for about an hour and a half. This was the moment I started to study Starbucks and the moment I realized that the company sold more than coffee. It was also the moment I started to think that I had been wrong about Starbucks, though I would have lots of moments like this over the next few years.

  Only a couple of months before, I had signed a petition circulating around Athens, Georgia—where I lived at the time—calling on city leaders to keep Starbucks out of downtown. Like a lot of my neighbors in this college town sixty miles northeast of Atlanta, I worried that the corporate colossus might put local coffee shops out of business. But even more, I feared that the opening of a chain store could signal an end to the funky, laid-back, slightly hip (and hippie-ish and punkish) character of our Main Street areas. But on this New Year’s Day, I started to rethink the role of Starbucks in everyday life. As the women and men, twenty-something and fifty-something, white-and brown-skinned customers came and went, I thought maybe Starbucks could be a new kind of public space. Maybe this was where Americans gathered to talk and find out what was going on in the age of malls, gated communities, and oversized cars. So, I wondered, if Starbucks was in fact a new form of public space: What did it mean that our public spaces were corporately controlled and conceived? That’s where I started this book, with that question.

  In the earliest stages of my research, I defended Starbucks against what I saw then—and what I still do, to a certain extent—as knee-jerk attacks against bigness and sameness (kind of like the ones that led me to sign that petition in Athens). Where could we gather, I would say in the company’s defense? Who else is building these kinds of places in modern America, I would ask rhetorically? And who else takes care of their workers’ health care costs and pays decent prices at the source? Starbucks, I would answer, adding, “It isn’t that bad.” What’s more, there was a lot to learn, not in a business sense, but in a sociological sense from the company’s success. Clearly, it gave people what they wanted. That’s what I thought then. But as I sat at more Starbucks stores and read more about the company, my views started to change.

  Pretty quickly, I stopped seeing the company as an engine of community. Instead, I saw it as a mythmaker offering only an illusion of belonging and meeting its customers’ desire for connections in form, maybe, but surely not in substance. Once I came to this conclusion, I started to dig deeper into the company’s other promises—great working conditions, musical discovery, fair treatment of farmers, and concern for the environment. Every time I went excavating, the stories turned out to be more complex, more heavily edited, and more ambiguous than I had first thought. Each time, it became clear that Starbucks fulfilled its many promises only in the thinnest, most transitory of ways and that people’s desires went largely unfulfilled.

  Things tipped for me, as
I said in the last chapter, when I started to investigate Starbucks’ policies in Rwanda. The anger I felt over what Starbucks did—or, more precisely, what it didn’t do—started to color my thinking across the board. After my Rwandan moment, the tone and substance of my writing started to change. From that New Year’s Day in Atlanta, it had moved from a rather sympathetic account to a detailed examination of the sociology of the company’s success and appeal to something of an exposé. By this point, I started to criticize the company. People from inside the firm picked up on this, and that’s why, I guess, they wouldn’t talk with me as I finished the project. “Again Bryant,” Frank Kern, vice president of global communications, scolded me in a kind of breakup e-mail (after this he didn’t answer my messages), “it’s clear you feel there is some ‘hidden agenda’ with us, which is simply not true.” Alienating Kern—who got let go from Starbucks within the year—wasn’t the problem (he was pretty defensive from the start), nor was the emphasis totally off, but the real issue was that the focus of the book was changing and moving too far from a study of consumption and what one remarkably successful company could reveal about what many of us cared about and desired, and how these needs and wants could be fulfilled, to a rather one-dimensional account of corporate greed and manipulation—an old yarn, really.

  The book’s focus changed again in 2007 when Starbucks started to stumble. I felt like I had to go back and explain where it went wrong, why it consumed so much of itself, and why it had little chance of reclaiming its cultural capital. But that was in many ways a story about Howard Schultz’s maneuvering more than anything else. This wasn’t, however, the book I wanted to write; it wasn’t about those people at the Atlanta Starbucks that New Year’s Day. I was spending too much time on the company and losing sight of the customers and the larger everyday culture of buying and the pull-back of the public—the things I truly wanted to understand.

  I didn’t realize I had lost my way until I sat down and talked with my friend Heather Thompson. When she’s not teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she walks the halls and searches the libraries of Attica prison. She’s not out on some new work release program, however. She is busy finishing an essential book on that penitentiary’s furious and deadly 1971 uprising. On a fall night while she was visiting Philadelphia, she made the mistake of asking me about my Starbucks project. At the time I was between my exposé phase and trying to explain the company’s fall. I guess I started to rant. I talked about the cups and the music, and I went on and on about Rwanda and Ethiopia.

  “Do you know how much fair-trade coffee Starbucks actually buys?” I asked. I didn’t let Heather answer.

  “Only 5 or 6 percent of their total purchases,” I proclaimed and rolled my eyes. Continuing the lecture, I carried on about how, nonetheless, Starbucks lets its customers believe that every single bean it purchases comes from fair-trade sources. “Bastards!” I might even have said to punctuate my tirade.

  “You know there is another way to look at this,” Heather suggested when I finally took a breath.

  “How?”

  “Maybe Starbucks customers really do want trade to be fairer. Maybe they do want farmers in Guatemala and Rwanda to have a bit more money. Maybe they do want workers in this country to get paid OK and they want to hear some new music. Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing in the end.”

  With that, Heather got me back on track and away from the Michael Moore–style documentary filled with easy-to-knock-down straw men— the direction I was veering in. She got me away from thinking so much about the company’s stock price and future prospects. She also got me away from thinking that it was only others who bought into this and made me remember that I bought things, like everyone else, to say something about myself and to feel better. She got me back to thinking about buying and buyers. She got me back to the consumers and back to the notion of desire. She got me back to the starting point of the book and, ultimately, to its conclusion.

  What we drink has meaning for us and for those around us. That’s what I wanted to say and understand. As faith in politics and other social forces weakened in this country, more and more of us started to express ourselves through what we bought. When you look at things this way, Starbucks customers want a lot. Some surely do purchase cheap shots of status, easy absolution from guilt, reassuring drinks of predictability, and small doses of self-administered therapy. But they also pay for community, belonging, discovery, social justice, environmental protections, and fair trade and global peace. Somewhere just below the surface of our purchases and mixed with the vapory images for sale at every Starbucks lurk the foundations—the core beliefs—of a more humane and equitable social order monitored by an ethically concerned and engaged citizenry.

  The problem is getting what we need and what we want. Starbucks tells us, as do many other corporate voices, that the best way—actually, the only way—to go about creating a better today and a better tomorrow is through grocery stores, themed restaurants, and upscale, earth-toned coffee shops—that is, through the cash registers at these places. Following marketers, pitchmen, and pundits’ suggestions, we buy stuff to make the world a better place—this is Heather’s point. But while buying is surely a revealing activity, something useful for scholars to track, it isn’t—it can’t be—the solution to our hopes and dreams. Actually, it is becoming the problem, a distraction and a false promise, something that subtly undermines the essential rebuilding of civic, nonmarket relation-ships necessary to create that more equitable and fairer tomorrow.

  We can’t buy belonging, community, happiness, or equality between the developed and underdeveloped worlds at the supermarket, clothing boutique, or the coffee shop. These things—the most important things and the things we want the most—take time and especially lasting dedication, political organizing, and the building of sturdy institutional structures. They take more than the aura thrown off by a four-dollar venti latte in a siren-logoed cup with a java jacket made from recycled material wrapped around it. It will take getting out of the trap of buying.

  Maybe there is hope in the midst of despair and pain. Maybe the brutal assault of the New Depression will shake us loose from centering our lives on buying. Maybe it will replace the luxury regime of the old order with a new regime of limits. Maybe hard times will once again strengthen the bonds of family and neighborhood. And maybe Barack Obama will restore our faith in the public sector, now that we need it more than ever.

  But these are all maybes, and they will surely be met with resistance from Milton Friedman’s still-fervent followers of the free market, from Starbucks-style marketers who benefit from the privatizing of the public and all of the bowling alone that goes with it, and from the rest of us, the consumer-citizens schooled to believe that things should be easy and that everything has a price.

  A NOTE ON THE RESEARCH

  Like Dr. Samuel Johnson did a hundred years ago, I went to the coffee-house to understand day-to-day life in my own era. For four years, I studied Starbucks and its customers, what the company sells and what its patrons care about and desire. More than six million people go to Starbucks every day. This book was born out of a quest to understand why. What are people buying, in the thinnest and deepest senses of that word? How are they using these private spaces for public actions? What are they doing with the products? In essence, I wanted to know why people choose to pay a premium—in time and money—for what Starbucks sells. What, if anything, can we learn about people’s ideas, concerns, preoccupations, and politics from these millions of everyday choices?

  Answering these questions in full is obviously impossible. It would require getting inside the heads of millions of Starbucks customers, recording their thoughts, surveying their emotional states, and observing their embodied actions. No one has that kind of power, nor can I imagine anyone actually wanting that sort of omniscience. Still, the questions remain: Why Starbucks? Why now? What are the needs of our turn-of-the-century zeitgeist that Starbucks had been so su
ccessful at meeting? In short, what does Starbucks mean to us and say about us? More important, how can we answer these questions? What data are relevant? What kinds of evidence can be gathered and prove to be persuasive?

  To get at this world of Starbucks, I drew inspiration from a vast array of secondary literatures that, in one way or another, grapple with questions of shared meanings. I perused books on branding and business by insiders as well as fierce critics. I examined scholarly debates about globalization and nationalism, class and gentrification. I combed through studies of social psychology, mood management, and consumer behavior and read long histories of coffee, coffeehouses, and the shaping and contraction of public space. I read with interest various investigations of food and society, countercultures, and capitalism. And I studied urban ethnographies that explored how women and men interacted with various kinds of spaces and the people who populate them. I learned a great deal from all of these literatures but felt no closer to determining the best method for uncovering the stuff of cultural life I was trying to nail down.

  In the end, the books that proved most influential in shaping Everything but the Coffee were books that evinced a deep and sustained immersion with their subjects, that combined investigative journalism with participant observation techniques spiked with the spirit of old-fashioned muckraking and open skepticism toward the self-congratulatory claims of corporate elites. I’m thinking of books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? and The Conquest of Cool, Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Eric Klinenberg’s Fighting for Air. Their careful blending of diverse sources, methods, and evidence became the general template for the research in this book.