Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  The specifics of how I collected my data bear mentioning here. To get a handle on what consumers thought and did—and, moreover, what they wanted out of their branded coffee and out of life itself—I used direct social observation. I hung out at Starbucks, watching and listening. I did this twelve to fifteen hours a week, for roughly nine months, totaling about five hundred hours of observation “in the field.” My observation routines were sometimes rather random, but more often carefully planned. By design, I frequently varied where I sat at Starbucks. Sometimes I set myself up near the coffee bar, listening to the exchanges between workers and customers. Other times, I sat in the café and watched and eavesdropped. To get a sense of the frequencies and distributions of the themes and actions I was tracking, I counted things when I could. I counted the number of people who came and went (about 74 percent got their coffee to go); I counted how many stayed and for how long; I counted when they sat down or just used the restroom, and when they brought their own cups or used throwaway containers. I calculated the average wait for a drink (which varied by time of day but generally was about three and a half minutes for an espresso-based drink, though it could stretch to seven or eight minutes), the percentage of men and women customers (outside of the morning rush, when men slightly out-numbered women, women represented 67 percent of the customers), what customers bought (lattes are the most popular drink Starbucks sells), where they sat, and how many were alone (61 percent), and how many came for meetings and how many talked with people they didn’t already seem to know.

  All told, I went to some 425 Starbucks outlets in nine countries. In the United States, where I spent most of my time, I went to Starbucks stores in more than twenty states in every region of the country except the Mountain West and Upper Midwest of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. I went to as many different kinds of Starbucks as possible, stores in big cities and small towns, in major air-ports and along the interstate, on college campuses and in gentrifying neighborhoods, and in malls and along leafy Main Streets. And I went to flagship stores with oversized fireplaces as often as I went to crammed shops with room for only a few café tables.

  While I traveled a great deal and went to a lot of stores in a lot of places, I generally went to the same stores over and over again. Mostly, I went to a variety of Starbucks stores near my home in Philadelphia. On a rotating schedule, I went to one store in the suburbs, another downtown at the bottom of an office tower, another next to a college campus, and a third in a more urban, though not downtown, residential neighborhood. Over time, I covered one whole day at each of these stores. I went in the morning and at night, before lunch and before dinner, on weekdays and weekends. Usually, I went by myself and sat by myself. Every once in a while, though, I would invite experts, broadly defined, to join me in my observations. I went to Starbucks with teenagers and marketing professors, sociologists and linguists, interior designers and experienced architects, branders and trade unionists. I also conducted four formal and informal focus groups and one survey on coffee-drinking habits and the perception of Starbucks with Singapore college students. (This survey generated twenty-three responses.)

  In addition to these forms of direct social observation, I took another cue from Samuel Johnson and did what any curious person would do: I talked to people. I interviewed people in person, over the phone, or by e-mail and even on Facebook. Sometimes I talked to them in all of these ways. On some occasions, I used a tape recorder, but mostly I took careful notes on our conversations. Over the course of my research, I spoke with 272 people and filled up seven composition books with quotes and observations. I spoke with Starbucks customers and workers, one of the company’s founders, and a couple of company marketers. I met with coffee growers, dry mill owners, and fair-trade activists in Nicaragua. I talked with independent coffee shop owners and urban planners, and paper product manufacturers and an environmental investigative journalist. I went to company headquarters, where I interviewed a number of Starbucks officials and did a coffee tasting (cupping), although the company offered me then and afterward only the most limited access to its personnel. I supplemented the interviews with written sources. I followed numerous blogs and message boards about Starbucks, the most useful being www.starbucks.com, starbucksgossip.com, and Ihatestarbucks.com. I read posts about Starbucks on MySpace and urbandictionary.com. And I downloaded thousands of articles available through ProQuest and Lexus-Nexus about the company from newspapers and magazines based in South Jersey; Seattle; New York; Phoenix; Lakeland, Florida; Los Angeles; Dubai; Des Moines; and hundreds of places in between. As with my observations at the stores, I tried to get a mix of big cities, smaller towns, and suburbs to capture the largest swath of the Starbucks experience.

  What was the reason behind this methodological melting pot? My approach enabled me to understand crucial variations not only in how the company operated in different geographic settings and locales, but also in how different kinds of customers consumed its products. By noting what varied and what did not, I was able to derive a clearer picture of what was constant across all these different experiences, and it is these more constant elements of the Starbucks moment that I try to depict in this book.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Cal Fussman, “What I’ve Learned: Alice Cooper,” Esquire, Jan. 2009, 79.

  2. Connie Lewis, “Jack Perks Up His Coffee in Slugfest with Starbucks,” San Diego Business Journal, Oct. 8, 2007.

  3. Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Picador, 2000).

  4. Lucas Conley, OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion (New York: Public Affairs, 2008). On the ambition of branders to seize more and more space, see Marc Gobé, Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brands in a Consumer Democracy (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), and Douglas Atkin, The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers (New York: Portfolio, 2004).

  5. For two surveys of the triumph of the consumer order in twentieth-century America, see Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). Much, of course, has been written about Friedman and neoliberalism. For a primer, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). A number of the case studies in Mike Davis and David Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamlands of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2008), are also useful and show the broad implications and usage of the trend and the term. On the retreat of the state, among other things, see Klein, No Logo, and on the relationship between globalization and this transformation, see Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (New York: Times Books, 1995). For a case study examining the tensions between the consumer economy and local institutions, see the classic study, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 164–180.

  6. Probably the place to start any study of Starbucks is with Howard Schultz’s memoir, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hyperion, 1997). The key books on the Starbucks effect and its history, with a nod (but just a nod) to culture and politics are Taylor Clark, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture (New York: Little, Brown, 2007); and Kim Fellner, Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). On the business of Starbucks, see, for example, Nancy F. Koehn, “Howard Schultz and Starbucks Coffee Company,” Harvard Business School Case Number 9-801-361, Feb. 13, 2001; Joseph A. Michelli, The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007); Michael Moe, Finding the Next Starbucks: How to Invest and Identify the Hot Stocks of Tomorrow (New York: Portfolio, 2006); John Moore, Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed fr
om the Ground of Starbucks Corporate Culture (Chicago: Kaplan Business, 2006); John Simmons, My Sister’s a Barista: How They Made Starbucks a Home Away from Home (London: Cyan Communications, 2005); Kevin Holman, “The Starbucks Model: Creating a Retail Experience for Your Customers,” Do-It-Yourself Retailing, Jan. 1, 2005. In a bit of a different twist, Wall Street Journal reporter Karen Blumenthal looks at Starbucks as a way to understand stock prices and how they work. See her book Grande Expectations: A Year in the Life of Starbucks’ Stock (New York: Crown Business, 2007).

  7. For more on the emergence of this economic moment, see Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

  8. Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are (New York: Random House, 2008). See an earlier—though certainly not consumer-as-agent-focused—account in the classic study by Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2007).

  9. This is, of course, an enduring argument. See, for example, Don Slater’s discussion of “dupes” versus “heroes” in Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Boston: Blackwell, 1977), especially 471. For a recent restatement of the Frankfurt school, see Benjamin Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: Norton, 2007).

  10. Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 347–363.

  11. See a more schematic, though similar, scale in Marsha Rickets, “Valuing Things: The Public and Private Meanings of Possessions,” Journal of Consumer Research 21 (Dec. 1994): 504–521. See also Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Mary Douglas and Barton Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1996); and Sharon Zukin, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (London: Routledge, 2003).

  12. Steven Levy, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

  13. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

  14. A note on sourcing: Much of this book is based on interviews, conversations, and e-mail correspondence. When I refer to one of these exchanges, I will typically say in the text that I e-mailed or spoke with that person and will not provide any further documentation. Otherwise, if the quote is taken from a published source, such as a newspaper, magazine, book, or online discussion, I will cite that source in a note. For more on the research, see “A Note on the Research” at the end of the book.

  15. E-mail from Kern, Apr. 12, 2007, in author’s possession.

  16. John Deverell, “Coffee Battle Heats Up: Starbucks’ Entry on the Metro Scene Means Stiff Competition for Rival Second Cup and Other Specialty Shops,” Toronto Star, Jan. 22, 1996.

  17. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); see, for instance, 16–17.

  18. On yuppies as leaders in buying patterns in the 1980s, see Russell W. Belk, “Yuppies as Arbiters of the Emerging Consumption Style,” in Advance in Consumer Research, ed. Richard J. Lutz (Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 1986), 514–519. On Starbucks, see “A Latte to Go and $4BN Turnover S’il Vous Plait,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 2004. See also William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader, ed. James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 122–143. For the most influential formulation of a link between buying and distinction making, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

  19. “Starbucks Serves Up Success during Its 2007 Meeting of Shareholders,” www.starbucks.com/aboutus/pressdesc.asp?id=760.

  20. In some ways, the process I am describing and the corporate actors I am emphasizing are similar to the main lines of argument stressed by Thomas Frank in his terrific book, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  21. McPherson et al., quoted by Conley, OBD, 78–79. For the original work, see Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Bradhears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review 71 (June 2006): 353–375. For more on social isolation and its costs, see also Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: The Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

  22. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). More broadly, see John Field, Social Capital (London: Routledge, 2008). See also Theda Skocpol, “Unraveling from Above,” The American Prospect 25 (Mar.–Apr. 1996): 20–25.

  23. From “The Internet Movie Database,” www.imdb.com. The Paul Haggis film invokes the work of Mike Davis and what Davis sees as the emergence of an extensive and quickly entrenched geography of fear in the modern metropolis. See, for examples, Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990); and Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). To explore this idea a bit more, see also Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992); and Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2004).

  24. Scott Bedbury, A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 89–90. For another example, see Steve McGee, “How to Build Brand Friendship,” Business Week, May 9, 2008.

  25. On brands as essentially multimedia outlets, see Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (New York: Routledge, 2004).

  26. Tim Harlow, “Starbucks Coffee Is Too Expensive, New Survey Says,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Aug. 12, 2008. Between 2000 and 2007, by contrast, Starbucks raised its prices four times without losing much, if any, of its customer base. Laura Petrecca and Sue Kirchoff, “Coffee King Starbucks Raises Its Prices,” USA Today, July 24, 2007.

  27. Emily shared her views with Keith Brown, a St. Joseph University sociologist and fellow coffee researcher. In this case, he shared his notes with me.

  28. On the anti-Starbucks turn, see J. Craig Thompson and Zeynep Arsel, “The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Globalization,” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (Dec. 2004): 631–642.

  29. Bruce Horovitz, “Starbucks Tests Letting $1 Coffee at Some Seattle Stores,” USA Today, Jan. 24, 2008; Jessica Mintz, “Starbucks Tests Promotions across the US,” July 9, 2007, http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080709/starbucks_promotions.html?.v=2; Lauren Shepherd, “Starbucks Offers Afternoon Drink Deal Nationwide,” Aug. 5, 2008, http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080805/starbucks_2_iced_drinks.html?.v=2; Janet Adamy, “Starbucks Plays Common Joe,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 2009. On the larger question of price and marketing, see Stephanie Clifford, “How Low Can You Go,” Inc., Aug. 2007, www.inc.com/magazine/20070801/how-low-can-you-go.html.

  CHAPTER I

  1. On the appeal of the authentic in the marketplace, see these rather uncritical assessments: John Cloud, “Synthetic Authenticity,” Time, Mar. 13, 2008; James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007). For another look at Starbucks and the appeal of authenticity, see Greg Dickinson, “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (Fall 2002): 5–27. The best book on the counterculture and consumption is Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Bus
iness Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). On the New Left, see Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Iron Cage and Its Alternatives in Twentieth Century American Thought,” in Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, ed. Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 296–313.

  2. See Tom Waits, “Intro” to “On a Foggy Night,” Nighthawks at the Diner (1975).

  3. Interestingly enough, Petrini’s itself would become a chain and get swallowed up by a bigger company in the 1980s.

  4. Quoted in Warren Belasco, “Food and the Counterculture: A Story of Bread and Politics,” in The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating; A Reader, ed. James L. Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 217.

  5. Waters quoted in David Kamp, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 131. See also Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2007).

  6. Kamp, The United States of Arugula, 190.

  7. On the elusiveness of the idea of authenticity—specifically, on the idea that authenticity is a search—see David Grazian’s wonderful book, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). There is an extensive and valuable literature on the appeal of the genuine and authentic, which includes Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).