Everything but the Coffee (7 page)

Consuming luxury, as Veblen had noted long before, however, was never about bringing people together. Buying was, and certainly remains, about etching distinctions. Amsterdam-based trend watcher Reinier Evers refers to Twitchell’s trading up, with a more pointed and closer-to-the-mark class analysis, as the “snobization” of America. “We live in a consumption society and a meritocracy,” he believes; “thus, our identity is shaped by the things we consume. So the more luxury items we can purchase and show the rest of the world, the higher we rank in society.”
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Increasingly over the last two decades, women and men with higher
salaries and more college classes under their belt broke away from the sensible middle class and engaged in a new round of conspicuous consumption. But unlike the wealthy of the turn of the century whom Veblen had based his research on, they didn’t show off their status simply by buying expensive things—though elevated cost was important to them. Buying pricey cups of coffee and industrial kitchen appliances certainly allowed them to show that they had money, money to burn. Yet they also wanted to show off their education and know-how. That is where the authenticity part mattered and where it became, under Starbucks and Whole Foods and so many other natural-looking chains, more about status and sophistication than it was about the counterculturally tinged consumption and rebellion against the fake that Jerry Baldwin and his fellow travelers favored. Post-post-hippies, like Howard Schultz, associated authenticity not so much with the search for more genuine products, wrote consumer behavior specialist Michael Solomon in 2003, as with a range of upscale values, “like a better lifestyle, personal control, and better taste.”
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To display smarts, superior tastes, and even enlightened politics, the upper classes of the 1990s focused their buying on things that looked natural and rare but also required special knowledge to fully understand. They bought a California wine to demonstrate that they knew about exceptional vintages, or a Viking stove because they knew that real cooks used these oversized machines, or a bike trip through Provence because they knew from their college art history classes that the hills and sun there inspired pained and brilliant painters. This buying was not just about changing aesthetics, as David Brooks suggested in his bobo study, or about the intrinsic value of design, as Virginia Postrel argued in
The Substance of Style
.
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It tied the upper middle classes back to Veblen. Buying in post-Reagan America was not about keeping up with the Joneses; it was about
separating
yourself from the Joneses, the conformists in the middle. Yet, as Veblen had predicted and Schultz surely knew, the Joneses would follow. That was, in fact, what Schultz was trying to set up. By the turn of the new century, the Joneses were indeed on board,
but getting them to Starbucks required turning Baldwin’s search for the authentic—even if it did take place in the marketplace—into something less authentic and farther from its original sources.

As Schultz took aim at the young, the well-paid, and frequent travelers, he continued to portray his company as a bastion of authenticity. Highlighting the firm’s know-how and coffeeness, Starbucks employed “baristas” who served espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, mistos, and americanos in tall, grande, and venti sizes. Some of the Italian-sounding names were real, and some were made up. But the intention was always the same: to link the Seattle-based company to Europe, the very center of true coffee culture in the eyes of most well-traveled North Americans. Nowadays, this language seems rather overblown, but in Schultz’s early years it was easier to believe. The company did more than just create a language about coffee. It backed it up with strong, audience-winning coffee performances that helped to solidify the bonds between the brand and early adopters.

For much of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Schultz’s Starbucks bought reasonably high-quality beans and treated them the way experts say they should be treated. Giving the stores a lush coffee aroma, employees ground the beans fresh behind the counter right before brewing them. In those days, Starbucks used semiautomatic Marzocco machines, meaning that employees needed to know how to make the drinks. Over the course of several days, company instructors taught new employees how to grind beans fine for espresso, load the portafilter, and pull the shot just as a thin gold-crusted crema formed on the top. That was just espresso. Trainees had to learn how to steam milk to the right temperature and scoop out the foam for cappuccinos; they had to be able to tell the difference between medium and dark roast, single-origin coffees and multiregional blends; and they had to know how to brew coffee in a French press and in a drip maker.
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After initial training, the company pushed ongoing coffee education for its employees. I remember when I first started drinking Starbucks in the early 1990s, the manager at the store near my Pasadena apartment
regularly sat down with servers in the late afternoon for coffee tastings. I would hear them sniffing, quaffing, and slurping. I would listen as they talked about the citrusy hues of Ethiopian coffees and the mellow nuttiness of Colombian beans. I would watch them scribble messages into small notebooks. Every once in a while they would share the coffee with those of us in the store reading our books and having our meetings. Eventually some of the knowledge seeped down, not to me but to some of my fellow regulars. Still, the performances made an impact. I was convinced that Starbucks knew a lot about coffee and that when I purchased its coffee I got a little of that knowledge. Even people who didn’t go to Starbucks learned this lesson. In those days, people would see me with a Starbucks cup and say stuff like, “You know your coffee, don’t you? I just drink the regular stuff.”

Schultz didn’t just let the coffee do the authenticity talking. He often boasted to reporters that Starbucks didn’t advertise. Of course, this wasn’t exactly true then, and it isn’t true now. The stores and the cups serve as two persistent advertisements, and so do the firm’s endless sponsorships (and filling of public spaces) of fun runs and literacy drives. Even the health care provisions for workers are a type of advertisement. But until the crisis-ridden days of 2007, Starbucks didn’t run TV commercials or radio promos; it rarely handed out drink coupons or frequent-customer cards. Before then, Schultz turned his company’s lack of obvious advertising into a badge of honor and a bond with his customers. He knew that by the 1990s his target audience of the well-educated distrusted traditional advertising. They saw it as a fraud, as deliberate and deceitful acts of corporate manipulation. They saw themselves, more-over, as smart enough and media-savvy enough to be above these kinds of cheap ploys. They were individuals, in their minds, not sheep. Schultz, then, created a different image for his company. He wouldn’t shill his coffee with flashing neon signs or halftime ads at the Super Bowl, as middling brands Bud and Chevy did. In fact, his company spent only 5 percent of what McDonald’s spent and a third of what Dunkin’ Donuts spent on traditional forms of persuasion.
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Still, that didn’t mean
he didn’t push his lattes. Understanding how the well-educated and well-paid constructed their self-images in an age of advertising backlash, Schultz sold his brand in quieter ways through storefronts, logoed cups, and endless interviews (i.e., mythmaking) with reporters in which he talked about how his company didn’t need to promote itself.
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Starbucks’ design schemes further highlighted its claims of naturalness and coffee knowledge. When the maverick experience architect Wright Massey mapped out a handful of templates for company stores in the mid-1990s, he made room for coffee bins, like at the original Pike Place Market shop. He also incorporated displays in outlets that traced the transformation of the beans from the fields to the cups. Some even let you touch raw, unprocessed green beans. Massey used a mixture of colors to enhance the natural look. The very first Starbucks stores went for a sleek, slightly European feel. While this decor tied the brand to the continental center of coffeeness, it didn’t speak loudly enough—by the mid-1990s—to upper-middle-class desires for the natural and how the natural made them look and feel better.
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Massey got the company more in tune with the times. He splashed the stores with a color palette of blues, reds, greens, and browns. Each of Massey’s individual colors represented, in his naturalist narrative, a part of the coffee-growing process. Blue was for water; red, for the fire needed to roast the beans; and green and brown, for the plants and soil. Adding more detail, Starbucks put down wood floors and earth-toned tiles and bought chairs and tables stained in light to medium shades of beige, brown, and cherry. Even the accessories to the coffee had a natural, closer-to-the-source look and feel. For example, sugar at Starbucks was brown and came in brown wrappers. The napkins were brown, too. At first not many people knew just what a scone was, but with its awkward shape and fruit filling, it looked at a glance to be healthier and more natural than an Egg McMuffin. As a last touch, the decorators covered the store’s signature overstuffed chairs in rough-hewed natural fabrics.
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I asked James Twitchell, the luxury consumption expert, about Starbucks’ color scheme. He told me he liked what the company did
with green in particular. Most firms, he explained, shy away from this color, thinking “that it is too emotionally complicated.” But Twitchell thought the greening of Starbucks added to the company’s allure. The color tells customers that they are buying something natural and free of taint—in other words, something authentic and of a higher value. “The purer the product in the luxury economy,” he observed, “the more you can charge.”

Even as Schultz continued to press the theme of authenticity with free-spending yuppies, he started to change the company to get it ready for expansion into the mainstream. He didn’t call a press conference. Not long after he took over the company, he hired graphic designers to cover up the body of the siren in the middle of the logo. With Schultz’s approval, they drew her as a less seductive, less dangerous icon, more a sweet, mild-mannered mermaid than a sexually dangerous siren. The designers tightened the focus on her face and gave her a pleasant non-descript smile. Then, they erased her breasts and nipples. Most significantly, they got rid of the woodcut feel and replaced it with a clean, neon shininess. Quietly, the new logo signaled the beginning of Starbucks’ all-important move from upper-crust neighborhoods to middle-tier suburbs, from Main Streets to strip malls, from a higher-end niche market to the widest part of the mainstream, from a product that confirmed upper-middle-class success and natural sensibilities to a product adopted by middling folk who aspired to be successful and wanted to consume like the successful.

Denny Post, the Burger King and later Starbucks marketer, noticed, again, the brand’s repositioning in the status marketplace. “How could they afford all of those cups of Starbucks?” Post wondered halfway through the 1990s, when Starbucks had only hundreds, not thousands of stores concentrated in wealthy pockets of America. At the time, Post worked on Madison Avenue and every morning watched fresh-faced interns and junior, junior executives come strutting through the office carrying bright white Starbucks cups. She knew that these just-out-of-college twenty-somethings made next to nothing. Why would they
spend so much of their salary on overpriced coffee? One day, Post posed this question to one of her younger colleagues.

“Oh, I don’t buy it every day,” he answered. “I get a cup of regular coffee—the cheapest thing on the menu—on Monday, and then I save the cup for the rest of the week. I fill it up every morning in my apartment before I leave the house.”

“How come?” Post wanted to know.

“It looks good,” her coworker declared.

CONQUERING THE MAINSTREAM
AND GETTING LESS REAL

Betsy Tippens was an early authenticity-seeking adopter of Starbucks. Like Jerry Baldwin, she was in some ways rebelling against the blandness of the supermarket. Beginning in 1981, she started going to the Pike Place Market outlet every Saturday. She listened to the same musicians outside the front door Howard Schultz had heard on his first visit to the store. Inside, it was warm and crowded, and as Betsy told me, “it smelled so good.” Customers formed two lines, one for the drip coffee (by then Baldwin had relented and started serving coffee) and the other for bulk beans. Behind the countertops, as Betsy remembers, stood long-haired guys in flannel shirts and frumpy aprons. To her, they seemed like “left-overs from the hippie era” or the “first grunge guys.” Mostly, though, “they knew everything about coffee, and they were dying to tell you about it.”

By 1987, Betsy had learned a lot about coffee from Starbucks herself, and she wouldn’t drink Maxwell House anymore. That same year she and her husband moved to Boston. They would miss Saturdays at the market, though “we were really happy to know that we could get Starbucks by then from mail order.” (This selling strategy was another way Starbucks kept its early adopters in the fold.) Two years later—and two years after Schultz took over the company—Betsy and her husband came back to Seattle. “The slightly hippie-ish” counter guys, Betsy
regretted, “were gone.” To her, Starbucks now focused “on fancy drinks,” adding that “it was not about coffee; it was about a new ordering thing.” By then, Betsy described herself as a coffee aficionado, yet, as she said, “I couldn’t understand this new language.”

Betsy sounds a lot like a fan of an indie rock band that has gone big-time. She felt like she had lost something almost precious in the transformation of Starbucks from a local company to a national brand. Maybe she did lose something when people like me who didn’t know much about coffee jumped on the Starbucks bandwagon. But this wasn’t all about perception.

Just like the logo, Starbucks was changing, in real ways. Outside the spotlight in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Schultz prepared to take the company public. He would do so on June 26, 1992. After that, he pushed deeper into the mainstream.