Everything but the Coffee (31 page)

Saying that the similarities between people amounted to more than the differences, Starbucks’ narratives highlighted reassuring notions of universalism, which many seemed to yearn for in the post-9/11 world. Getting to that better place, the company promised, won’t take much effort or sacrifice. That’s the unspoken Starbucks promise. “Everything we do,” the company said as part of its “Shared Planet” program launched in 2009, “you do.” According its press statements, all you had to do, then, was pay its coffee premium and you got to position yourself as part of the solution, not the problem, because your coffee company engaged in good works. In this scenario, innocence by association (here it is again) trumped truly ethical consumption—buying to make a political statement, support the struggles of others, and build enduring challenges to authority. At Starbucks, showing once again how neatly the company fit the neoliberal moment, the movement begins with the individual buyer and ends at the cash register. Buy right and you have done your part.

But there is one more profit-generating wrinkle to Starbucks helping the little guy. When it comes to lending a hand far and wide—to absolution and dissociation—many customers seem willing to pay an even higher premium for a feel-good story about global peace than they are even for green solace and everyday discoveries. Starbucks’ coffee costs more, a New York sales clerk acknowledged while waiting in line for her latte, but she didn’t care because it made her feel “better intellectually.” Another Starbucks regular added she appreciated the “cheerful fliers” with pictures of “happy . . . Costa Rican coffee growers.” They let her believe that “we aren’t making the world a more vicious place by frequenting this coffee juggernaut.”
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What happens, though, when you look between the lines and behind the image? Will Starbucks still be worth it and still seem like it was making the world a better place for little guys? Or is it just helping out the big guys and using the little guys as props? These aren’t, however, just questions about Starbucks. They are about why its customers, especially those in the United States, wanted to hear these stories and why they paid extra for them.

PAYING FOR A GOOD FARMER’S STORY

In a riff that echoes the Hear Music sounds of discovery, Starbucks turned its global coffee story into a travelogue. Drinking coffee, the company wanted customers to think, was like taking a trip to a distant land. “Who says you can’t explore . . . the exotic flavors of Africa at home?” read a sign at an Indiana Starbucks. A poster at a New York store urged customers to “Explore Our Coffee World. Discover the Flavor of Latin America.”
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Even though you might be at home or just a few blocks away on your virtual coffee trips, this doesn’t mean, Starbucks officials promise, you aren’t leaving a footprint in faraway lands. On the company’s Web page, under the link for “social responsibility,” there is another link to “farmers’ stories.” “Meet some of our very best friends,” reads the introduction. “They are the farmers and families who are instrumental in growing the finest coffees in the world. See how Starbucks is working to balance business needs with social and environmental responsibilities in our coffee-producing communities.” Click again and you will find twelve short videos that take you from the rain forests of Costa Rica to the steep mountains of Mexico to the villages of Papua New Guinea to the ancient coffee fields of Ethiopia.
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On these trips, you aren’t going where most tourists go—to Orlando or Paris or even to Inca ruins. Like a good, cool, and full member of the creative class would want to do, you are going behind the scenes to remote, hard-to-reach places deep in the countryside.

PBS viewers and everyday discoverers would recognize right away the feel and format of the Starbucks films. With their grainy textures and calculated unprofessionalism, they say that these are real places filled with real people. As the camera pans across coffee farms and tiny hamlets, the narrator’s calm voice hovers above. She has that fair-minded, slightly didactic tone that rules the airwaves of public television and radio. Just to prove that she is telling it like it is, a local comes on every now and then repeating in his or her native language what the narrator
said a moment before in English. The quotes serve as cinematic foot-notes. They are the indisputable truth. Carefully woven together, the dialogue and visuals make the films seem like documentaries, like impartial accounts and clear windows into unknown places. You are supposed to forget that they are manufactured for Starbucks; that they are what I would call “corpumentaries”—movies made to contribute to a company’s brand mythology. And, of course, you are not supposed to think about what isn’t there, the evidence the filmmakers leave out or don’t explore.

John Moore, a former Starbucks marketer and author of a how-to business book about the firm, told me the company didn’t want to show pictures of workers actually working in its posters and brochures. “They looked too exploitative,” he explained, adding that they didn’t “conjure up good feelings.” The films on starbucks.com don’t stray from this script. While they show handsome, well-dressed peasants smiling and standing next to piles of beans, they don’t show men trudging up the sides of steep hills to small fields or bleary-eyed women sitting in front of conveyor belts sorting through beans looking for imperfections for hours on end. They don’t show teenagers in the fields or the shacks where the families live. They don’t cite troubling—in some cases mind-boggling—statistics from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) about the depressed income levels or alarming infant mortality rates in the places where Starbucks coffee is grown. They get around troubling issues by showing robust-looking workers at home and occasionally in the processing plants. They touch on the endemic poverty of coffee-growing areas by emphasizing that Starbucks pays a relatively higher price for its beans. With the added money earned by selling to this socially responsible company, good things happen, we are told. Every farmer’s story hammers this point home. There is no political repression or globalized version of Dickensian exploitation or the guilt that comes with either of these facts of life in the developing world—just abundant information about the opportunities Starbucks’ foreign policy provides to the hardworking rural folk who grow its beans and, by implication, to
the people who buy its products. Remember, as Starbucks claims, every-thing they do, you do.

Starbucks sets one its farmers’ stories in Colombia’s cocaine-growing region. The film says nothing about how coffee pickers in this area make less than fifteen hundred dollars a year, less than two weeks’ pay for the average Starbucks customer. Instead, early in the story, the narrator explains that the company pays double the going world price for coffee. This is, though, a bit misleading since the film seems to be talking about what commodity traders call the C price charged for very average Arabica beans, the stuff that goes into Folgers and Maxwell House. Neither Starbucks nor Peet’s nor Caribou nor any other high-end coffee company buys these cheaper, inferior beans. Just about everyone in the specialty coffee market pays double the world C price. Again, Starbucks is rather typical. But the corpumentary leaves out these details. According to the film, the money paid by Starbucks has quietly lured farmers away from the perilous—to them and to us—drug trade. But that’s not all. Still, the Starbucks premium, we learn, has translated into school uniforms, new math books, healthy lunches, and desktop computers. So, the narrator intones as the film wraps up, “in the middle of the fight against drug trafficking, better prices and social programs . . . [helped] . . . rebuild these communities by creating more economic stability and a better life for the farmers.”

Starbucks chips in in other ways as well, and it advertises its contributions in its films and press statements. In the mid-1990s, the company donated half a million dollars to schools in Central America. About the same time, it began building an ongoing relationship with CARE, the well-established and well-regarded humanitarian organization committed to fighting global poverty. For years, in fact, Starbucks was CARE’s largest North American contributor. Money paid to the organization funded clean water and maternity health projects as well as disaster relief in Angola, Burundi, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Indonesia (all countries where the average yearly wage doesn’t reach one thousand dollars). “That’s the type of company [this] is,” Alan Gulick, a Starbucks
spokesperson, told a Denver reporter in 1998, referring to the firm’s international charitable contributions.
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In the spring of 2000, a few years after Gulick made this declaration and not long after the Siege of Seattle, in which antiglobalization protesters smashed the windows of a Starbucks store, Medea Benjamin, an official from the human rights group Global Exchange, blasted Starbucks for serving “sweatshop coffee.” Unless the company agreed to carry more fair-trade beans, she threatened to launch a “Roast Starbucks” campaign with pickets and leaflets at thirty key stores across the United States. Fair trade, in the most general sense, promises to make the global commodity chain more equitable and more responsive to the needs of small shareholders. When it comes to coffee, fair-trade-certified beans typically come from “little guys.” Under the arrangement, they get paid a premium above the market price for their products plus access to affordable credit and extra benefits if they produce their crops in environmentally friendly and sustainable ways. Fair-trade growers also typically work through cooperatives—associations of small farmers making decisions collectively and selling directly to buyers, rather than individually at local markets or washing stations where middlemen operate, always taking a cut off the top. In an even larger sense, as the geographer Michael Goldman notes, fair trade tries to politically, economically, and psychologically connect producers in the underdeveloped world to consumers in the developed world in a transnational relationship built around human needs ahead of supply and demand.
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With Global Exchange’s demonstrations sure to gain wide media attention and public scorn, Starbucks cut a deal. It announced that it would begin selling fair-trade-certified coffee at all of its then twenty-three hundred U.S. stores. “This is a major step in the struggle to assure that small farmers around the world are able to feed their families,” announced Juliette Beck of Global Exchange. “Getting Starbucks,” she continued, “to accept Fair Trade products sends a signal to other corporations that it is possible to offer consumers the products we want, while paying farmers the prices that they deserve.”
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Global Exchange won a compromise, not a total victory. Grumbling about the quality of fair-trade beans, Starbucks didn’t commit to selling only fair-trade fare, but it did agree to buy a pile of these beans each year. By 2004, Starbucks became the world’s largest consumer of fair-trade coffee. Yet this represented only 3.7 percent of the company’s total yearly purchases. By 2006, a little more than 6 percent of the company’s beans came with a fair-trade certification. Three years later, it declared its commitment to buy even more fair trade coffee. In England, Starbucks pledged to use only these kinds of beans in its espresso-based drinks.
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Despite these purchases, Starbucks nonetheless left a large amount of fair-trade coffee unsold at origin, but again, this fact isn’t highlighted its global narratives of doing good.

Even as fair trade grows in popularity, fair-trade farmers often have to dump significant portions of their beans on the open market without getting the fair-trade premium for their crops. There still aren’t enough buyers out there. Starbucks could easily purchase tens of thousands of additional pounds of fair-trade coffee each year without paying a whole lot more, but it doesn’t (and it doesn’t talk much about this decision, just the fact that it buys a lot of making-farmer’s-lives-better, guilt-free beans). What’s more, it doesn’t feature fair-trade coffee as its “coffee of the day” very often. Still, Starbucks puts on the hard sell—“greenwashing,” some have called it—when it comes to trumpeting its fair-trade connections.
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In one corpumentary set high in the Peruvian mountains, Starbucks tells a carefully edited fair-trade story. Family farmers there have been taught (by Starbucks, the narrative implies) to grow fair-trade coffee. An official for Conservation International, Starbucks’ well-regarded global partner, appears on screen without revealing his connection to the company, to praise Starbucks for its fair-trade policies. He says nothing about how activists had pressured Starbucks to move on this front or about the modest percentage of fair-trade coffee it buys or how much it—and others—leave unsold. “The Starbucks purchases,” he proclaims at the end of the film, “have directly helped small families. Their economic situation is better.”

Starbucks doesn’t just broadcast its fair-trade purchases on Web site videos. Few Starbucks coffees have their own brochures, but the fair-trade blend does. At one store, I saw a chalkboard sign over a basket of fair-trade-certified beans that said, “Help the helpless.” On dozens of occasions, I have walked into Starbucks stores, especially near college campuses, and seen bags of the company’s fair-trade coffee stacked near the door. I didn’t think much about this at first. Then I read Paco Underhill’s perceptive book,
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
. He doesn’t recommend that businesses put items they want to move quickly next to the main entry point. Customers, he explains, aren’t ready to buy when they first walk into a place. At that point, they need a moment to transition and focus.
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When I talked with Underhill, I asked him why, given this widely recognized shopping dynamic, some companies still put merchandise by the front entrance. “This isn’t a selling place,” he reiterated. “It is a place to announce something . . . to plant an idea.” I asked him what Starbucks was trying to convey with those bags of fair-trade beans by the door. He answered rather tersely, “You will have to ask Starbucks.”