Everything but the Coffee (4 page)

As consumers associated Starbucks with McDonald’s, the company went from a manufacturer of highbrow identity to a seller of decent, convenient coffee. When the Seattle company sold affordable status making, it didn’t matter if it raised prices or the wait for Frappuccinos stretched to ten minutes. The crowds kept coming. In those days, hamburger and doughnut makers didn’t vie for the same clientele. But once Starbucks’ cups lost their mystique, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks all competed for the same always-in-a-hurry, caffeine-dependent, frothy-drink-seeking customers. The increased competition stemmed from Starbucks’ fall from that elevated place as a status producer, not from the marketing moves of fast-food chains. Few see a person walking out of a Starbucks store anymore and automatically think that person is hip or caring or successful. Again, this is the key to understanding the company’s weakened position—not failed movie promotions or companies with plastic seats encroaching on its turf or even the meltdown on Wall Street.

How can Starbucks get back to the past, and with it the license to charge a premium for an everyday product like coffee? Once a company loses its cultural cachet, it is hard to reclaim it. Just ask Cadillac or Microsoft or Sara Halterman.

When I caught up with Sara again over e-mail, the first thing she said to me was, repeating a bumper sticker tagline, “Friends don’t let friends go to Starbucks.” Clearly for Sara, Starbucks no longer seemed so “cultured” anymore. “It’s a monster,” she declared, “like Wal-Mart.” “I’m not a corporate person,” she continued, “and I associate Starbucks with corporations. I like the mom-and-pop places. I like to imagine the family running the store.” By then, Sara was as typical in her desire for embracing small-scale authenticity and avoiding Starbucks, as she was when she had gone to the corporate coffeehouses trying to look like she had money and style.
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Starbucks slipped not because of the logic of the market, but because of the rational cultural dimensions of supply and demand. In the post-need economy, products often run through cycles and end up consuming themselves. Widely popular and easy-to-read items need to be readily available and accessible enough that everyone knows what they stand for. But once something becomes too common, it can’t generate cool or envy or status. Now that Starbucks stores are in Tokyo and Terre Haute, London and Lancaster, and Franklin, Virginia, and Franklin, Indiana, the brand is too ordinary. Once cappuccinos turned into Frappuccinos the company didn’t seem as sophisticated anymore, either. And now that Cosí, Panera, and even some airport lounges use the same natural color schemes and IKEA-like furniture as Starbucks, it isn’t that special looking anymore, either. Now that Starbucks and its style are everywhere, its customers can no longer distinguish themselves from others by drinking venti lattes. The cup was emptied of cultural capital long before gas prices pushed past four dollars, Circuit City filed for bankruptcy, and GM teetered on the brink of collapse. Again, it was not about the coffee, and it was not solely about the money, the drinks just weren’t cultural bargains any more.

Without saying it out loud, Starbucks admitted that the moment when it could charge a premium for the privilege of carrying its cups had passed. Beginning in 2008, the company introduced dollar coffees, midday drink bargains, all-day breakfast deals and meal combos, and frequent-customer discounts.
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Competing on price, not culture, is what Wal-Mart and McDonald’s do.

Still, the rebellion against Starbucks, which demonstrated that consumers weren’t just dupes of marketers, didn’t mushroom into a rebellion against the larger consumer-saturated culture. With the economic crisis of the New Depression deepening, we might have less money and we might be spending less, but we are still shopping for a self-image, absolution from guilt, and a brighter future. Many of us just aren’t going to Starbucks to get these really valuable things anymore, though we might still head there on occasion for a decent cup of coffee in the morn
ing or when we are on the road and need a place to check in on Facebook or Twitter.

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Three narrative threads are woven together throughout
Everything but the Coffee
. First, the book details the rise and fall of the Starbucks moment and the key changes that accounted for the company’s shifting fortunes. Second, this is a hard, unvarnished look at what Starbucks promises and what it actually delivers. Finally, and most prominently, this is a study of desire, of what many in the United States want and care about and where we look for satisfaction and fulfillment in the branded postneed order with its endless buying options and atrophied public.

Each chapter examines a specific desire. From front to back—and here is a quick road map for the book—I look at how Starbucks packaged and sold coffee and authenticity, predictability and individuality, community and belonging, retail therapy and emotional perks, discovery and music, and a clean environment and global good feelings. To calculate the value of each of these desires, I point to broad changes in work, demographics, the built environment, and politics that gave rise to each of these specific functional, emotional, and aspirational needs, and how Starbucks marketed and met them either through delivering the actual goods or through offering an illusion of fulfillment.

Each chapter traces the arc of the Starbucks moment. I begin by looking at where a desire came from and how Starbucks capitalized on it. Toward the end of each chapter, I explore how by 2007 or so, the company’s customer base shrank as it had trouble filling, even in an illusionary way, the social, psychological, and political holes it promised to fix.

The book’s larger organization reflects the larger culture of buying, which is the grounding for the whole study. The chapters fit together like parts on that sliding scale consumers use to gauge value in the post-need economy. In the early chapters, I start with desires for coffee, public work spaces, and bathrooms, desires broadly linked to utility and the decline in social services and located on lower rungs of the ladder of
wants. From there I go on to investigate the more complex and valuable needs embedded in corporate coffeehouse culture, like the massaging of moods with frothy drinks, the allure of discovery through music, and the creation of seemingly vibrant communities. But nothing in our world of buying and more buying is ever clear-cut. Utility is never just about utility; it is also about emotional satisfaction and status. Green issues are not just about the environment, either; they are also about articulating social class. Not everyone, moreover, bought everything Starbucks sold every time they went for a latte, but the sparkling bathrooms, overstuffed chairs, and snapshots of smiling farmers were there if and when they needed them. And every once in a while, coffee was, well, just coffee or at least a caffeine delivery system. While the chapters zero in on specific desires, they also reflect this intertwining of needs.

One last thing worth mentioning: Starbucks sold something for just about everyone—individuality or predictability, a green planet or take-away convenience. Yet despite the company’s effusive pledges, none of the meanings for sale were strong enough or reflected enough of a commitment to the actual politics of the issue to alienate a large cross section of American consumers—which of course was by design. That’s how the company could win the loyalties of latte liberals and cappuccino conservatives, art students and business majors, a mass audience and a niche audience at the very same time. But in the end, no one looking to fulfill those higher needs actually got what he or she wanted.

What emerges in this book, then, is a critical examination of Starbucks and its history, the promises it made and the frequently paltry results it delivered. Even more, though, it is a sociologically grounded examination of widely shared desires in the United States that reveals what we cared about the most over the last fifteen or so years. It is a close look at our wishes and wants, but also at our lack of options in an increasingly privatized world. However detailed and layered this portrait is, though, it is not an uplifting picture, not of Starbucks, that all too typical company; or of the nation’s civic life at the end of the American century; or of us, the consumer-citizens hoping to purchase our way to happiness and salvation.

Real Coffee

I started my quest to understand Starbucks’ appeal at what the company now bills as its original store, opened, it says, in 1971 in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. It is a different kind of place than the Starbucks store on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus, the closest company outlet to my house. Situated at a busy intersection, this two-story, oddly shaped store is decorated, like all Starbucks these days, in natural-looking reds and greens and slightly upscale touches of chrome lights and wide overstuffed chairs. The first store, by contrast, is a plain rectangle. There are no fireplaces or lofts with comfy couches. Like many newer Starbucks outlets, this first store has wood floors, though these are not the light-colored stylish hardwood you usually see but wide dark planks scraped and worn by the heavy steps of work boots and the weight of two-wheeled steel dollies carrying bulky crates and boxes. Above the dropped lights, ducting—real ducting—runs the length of the ceiling. Deep buckets line one side. You can tell from the pictures on the walls that they used to be filled with piles of fresh-roasted, whole bean coffee.

Over the entrance of the Pike Place Market store hangs the company’s original logo. Inspired by sixteenth-century Norse woodcuts, this circle-shaped early design is, like everything else in the first store, natural looking, an earthy shade of brown, the color of coffee with a little
milk. Surrounded by the words “Starbucks” on the top and “Coffee, Tea, and Spices” on the bottom is a siren. Calling attention to her crafty design, the details of her tail are clearly and carefully drawn. So is the crown on her head. That is all she wears. Her full, soft-looking Rubenesque white body and breasts are exposed. “You can see her nipples,” a tourist who had just gotten off a bus pointed and giggled with a friend. Her tail is split down the middle, giving her an even more explicitly sexual aura. But that is the way she is supposed to be. She is after all a siren, a seductress who lures men from the sea to their death.

As the company grew, Starbucks didn’t want customers to focus on the siren symbolism too much. But the sign did announce that the product that it represented was natural and untainted. That was an association the firm wanted to establish. Items like this—really, ideas like this— had wide appeal in postwar America as mass-produced sameness spread across the country and made life seem more sterile and dull. Some consumers rebelled against the men in gray flannel suits and the regime of the supermarket by dropping out or creating agit political theater, but most of the protests were contained in the marketplace. Most registered their discontent by looking for new things to buy not by destroying the larger system of buying.
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JERRY BALDWIN’S SEARCH FOR THE REAL

A year after visiting that first Starbucks store, I got in touch with Jerry Baldwin. Along with Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl, Baldwin started Starbucks in 1971. I wanted to learn his coffee story, but I also wanted to know about his politics, if he thought about authenticity and sameness as much I thought he had. Did Starbucks spring from the rebellious waters of the 1960s, as I had heard? Was it, like Ben & Jerry’s, built to serve the ends of countercultural capitalism? After going back and forth, we set up a phone interview. Baldwin came off as warm, funny, insightful, and talkative, kind of like the ideal dinner party guest. Before I started asking him questions, he asked me about my project. I told him that I was trying
to understand why people went to Starbucks and paid a premium for its coffee. Before I finished my explanation, he said, “What I really wanted was people to come to the store interested in coffee.”

“My first adolescent cup of coffee,” he chuckled, “was, I guess, when I was fourteen years old.” Baldwin had gone to an event at his Bay Area high school. When it ended, he called home for a ride. His dad told him he was running a little behind. “Why don’t you head down to the diner at the corner and wait there?” his father suggested. Baldwin hopped onto a counter stool and ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress slid a mug of steaming hot dark brown liquid over to him. Baldwin looked at it. He loaded it with milk and sugar and still remembers that “it tasted awful.”

That bitter coffee baptism didn’t scare Baldwin away because he had discovered the caffeine part. Throughout his college years at the University of San Francisco (he started when Bob Dylan still sang folk songs in coffeehouses), he drank coffee every day. Most afternoons, he went to the student union to study and hang out. The coffee there was often strong and thick from sitting on a burner all day. When he went into the army in 1966 at twenty-three, he continued to drink coffee. In those days, he drank what they gave him, Folgers or Maxwell House or instant—it didn’t matter, and he didn’t have a choice. Wherever he went, coffee usually looked the same—light brown and almost see-through. And that is the way it looked when he made it at home. Away from the kitchen, it still looked the same. It came out piping hot at the diner in a chipped white porcelain mug (with endless refills) or at the corner deli in a blue paper cup with a picture of the Acropolis on it.

Tom Waits sang about this coffee. In his whiskey-soaked, nicotineetched voice, he told a fable about sitting in a diner one night when his veal cutlet suddenly got up and walked “down to the end of the counter and beat the shit out of my cup of coffee.” The singer joked, “I guess the coffee just wasn’t strong enough to defend itself.”
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That was coffee for Baldwin and almost everyone else in the United States in the 1960s. No wonder overall consumption in the United States was on a slow decline. Culturally, at this moment just before the generational divide broke
open, coffee posed—outside beatnik circles—as an adult drink or, even more, as an unhip beverage for the over-sixty set.