Everything but the Coffee (19 page)

THE THEATER OF THE THIRD PLACE

I wanted to talk to George Ritzer, the author of a series of probing books on McDonald’s and its heartless rationality and endless remaking of global consumption patterns, for a long time. We finally set a date. It turned out to be one of those summer days that are so hot that they are downright mean. We went for lunch at the University of Maryland’s newish, rather formal, cherry-wood-paneled faculty club.
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While his colleagues wore suits and ties, Ritzer showed up in shorts, sandals, and a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt. His analysis was as playful and provocative as his Jimmy Buffet–style dress.

To him, the Starbucks experience—the idea of corporate-manufactured third places and multinational penny universities—was as empty as that community board in Austin. Bottom line, he said, the company strives to make money. “Everything else,” he insisted, is “window-dressing.” Coming back to his main point, Ritzer argued that selling as much coffee and as many CDs, mugs, and muffins as fast as it can represented Starbucks’ only mission.

When I told him that grab-and-go customers make up nearly 70 percent of sales in the suburbs and up to 90 percent at times in the city, he called out, “Right!” adding that all the leather couches and coffee bean lights were nothing more than “dramatic devices” and “props.”

As he said this, I immediately thought of a cramped Starbucks in downtown Philadelphia where I often went. Office workers and sales-people grabbing coffee on breaks and between meetings packed this place from early morning to late afternoon. Three wide, heavily cushioned chairs—the only ones in the store—sat in the front window pointed toward the street. Putting this furniture on display, Starbucks designers showcased their version of a third place as a respite from the city, traffic, kids, and daily life. That’s the essence of the idea of a third place to people who don’t actually use the space very often.

Ritzer contended that in this carefully staged narrative, customers themselves—just like the wall art, the copies of the
New York Times
, and the posters referring to the coffeehouse tradition—are props. The brilliant city watcher William Whyte once observed, “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.”
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Ritzer underlined the same point. The people in the “third place” coffeehouse let those in line rushing from the suburbs to the city, work to home, child care to tumbling classes know that this is a popular place (making themselves popular), a safe place (suggesting that there is no risk), and possibly a public space (the desired and faintly idealized notion of a third place). The theater dramatizes yet another of the firm’s promises. Customers on the go, Ritzer speculated, get “warm fuzzies” watching other people relax. They say to themselves, “This is a really great place, and one I day I will sit down.” And some day, they will come to Starbucks in search of comfort and maybe even a real coffeehouse conversation. But almost certainly, they will find themselves sitting alone next to someone else sitting alone, barricaded behind a computer, cell phone, and iPod. That doesn’t make Starbucks a third place, and more and more, it doesn’t even fulfill the illusion of community.
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Self-Gifting and Retail Therapy

Fern Berke kept a close watch over her money. She had no choice. Her father is a small-town police officer, and her mother is an office receptionist. They helped out when they could, but Fern mostly put herself through school at the University of Georgia, paying for her apartment, books, and food and keeping up with her car and insurance payments. When she went on spring break or needed a new pair of jeans or car battery, she had to cut back. The jump in gasoline prices after 9/11 and the flaring of tensions in the Middle East meant more economies for her.

Yet Fern still went to the Starbucks in downtown Athens every Friday as soon as she got her paycheck and sometimes after she finished a tough exam. She bought herself a venti Mint Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino with extra whipped cream for almost five dollars and a blueberry scone for two dollars more. Together the drink and the pastry added up to more than she made per hour at her part-time job. But that didn’t stop her from going to Starbucks, even though she was generally careful with her money, and despite budget advice in
Cosmo
recommending that women curb their latte consumption to save money. When she made her coffeehouse runs, she added to the third place feel of the store. She never got her drink to go. She always sat in a cozy overstuffed chair near
a window, listened to the music, and people watched. “This is a treat,” she told me.

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.”
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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!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.