Everything but the Coffee (37 page)

“How?”

“Maybe Starbucks customers really do want trade to be fairer. Maybe they do want farmers in Guatemala and Rwanda to have a bit more money. Maybe they do want workers in this country to get paid OK and they want to hear some new music. Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing in the end.”

With that, Heather got me back on track and away from the Michael Moore–style documentary filled with easy-to-knock-down straw men— the direction I was veering in. She got me away from thinking so much about the company’s stock price and future prospects. She also got me away from thinking that it was only others who bought into this and made me remember that I bought things, like everyone else, to say something about myself and to feel better. She got me back to thinking about buying and buyers. She got me back to the consumers and back to the notion of desire. She got me back to the starting point of the book and, ultimately, to its conclusion.

What we drink has meaning for us and for those around us. That’s what I wanted to say and understand. As faith in politics and other social forces weakened in this country, more and more of us started to express ourselves through what we bought. When you look at things this way, Starbucks customers want a lot. Some surely do purchase cheap shots of status, easy absolution from guilt, reassuring drinks of predictability, and small doses of self-administered therapy. But they also pay for community, belonging, discovery, social justice, environmental protections, and fair trade and global peace. Somewhere just below the surface of our purchases and mixed with the vapory images for sale at every Starbucks
lurk the foundations—the core beliefs—of a more humane and equitable social order monitored by an ethically concerned and engaged citizenry.

The problem is getting what we need and what we want. Starbucks tells us, as do many other corporate voices, that the best way—actually, the only way—to go about creating a better today and a better tomorrow is through grocery stores, themed restaurants, and upscale, earth-toned coffee shops—that is, through the cash registers at these places. Following marketers, pitchmen, and pundits’ suggestions, we buy stuff to make the world a better place—this is Heather’s point. But while buying is surely a revealing activity, something useful for scholars to track, it isn’t—it can’t be—the solution to our hopes and dreams. Actually, it is becoming the problem, a distraction and a false promise, something that subtly undermines the essential rebuilding of civic, nonmarket relation-ships necessary to create that more equitable and fairer tomorrow.

We can’t buy belonging, community, happiness, or equality between the developed and underdeveloped worlds at the supermarket, clothing boutique, or the coffee shop. These things—the most important things and the things we want the most—take time and especially lasting dedication, political organizing, and the building of sturdy institutional structures. They take more than the aura thrown off by a four-dollar venti latte in a siren-logoed cup with a java jacket made from recycled material wrapped around it. It will take getting out of the trap of buying.

Maybe there is hope in the midst of despair and pain. Maybe the brutal assault of the New Depression will shake us loose from centering our lives on buying. Maybe it will replace the luxury regime of the old order with a new regime of limits. Maybe hard times will once again strengthen the bonds of family and neighborhood. And maybe Barack Obama will restore our faith in the public sector, now that we need it more than ever.

But these are all maybes, and they will surely be met with resistance from Milton Friedman’s still-fervent followers of the free market, from Starbucks-style marketers who benefit from the privatizing of the public and all of the bowling alone that goes with it, and from the rest of us, the consumer-citizens schooled to believe that things should be easy and that everything has a price.

Like Dr. Samuel Johnson did a hundred years ago, I went to the coffee-house to understand day-to-day life in my own era. For four years, I studied Starbucks and its customers, what the company sells and what its patrons care about and desire. More than six million people go to Starbucks every day. This book was born out of a quest to understand why. What are people buying, in the thinnest and deepest senses of that word? How are they using these private spaces for public actions? What are they doing with the products? In essence, I wanted to know why people choose to pay a premium—in time and money—for what Starbucks sells. What, if anything, can we learn about people’s ideas, concerns, preoccupations, and politics from these millions of everyday choices?

Answering these questions in full is obviously impossible. It would require getting inside the heads of millions of Starbucks customers, recording their thoughts, surveying their emotional states, and observing their embodied actions. No one has that kind of power, nor can I imagine anyone actually wanting that sort of omniscience. Still, the questions remain: Why Starbucks? Why now? What are the needs of our turn-of-the-century zeitgeist that Starbucks had been so successful at meeting? In short, what does Starbucks mean to us and say about us? More important, how can we answer these questions? What data
are relevant? What kinds of evidence can be gathered and prove to be persuasive?

To get at this world of Starbucks, I drew inspiration from a vast array of secondary literatures that, in one way or another, grapple with questions of shared meanings. I perused books on branding and business by insiders as well as fierce critics. I examined scholarly debates about globalization and nationalism, class and gentrification. I combed through studies of social psychology, mood management, and consumer behavior and read long histories of coffee, coffeehouses, and the shaping and contraction of public space. I read with interest various investigations of food and society, countercultures, and capitalism. And I studied urban ethnographies that explored how women and men interacted with various kinds of spaces and the people who populate them. I learned a great deal from all of these literatures but felt no closer to determining the best method for uncovering the stuff of cultural life I was trying to nail down.

In the end, the books that proved most influential in shaping
Everything but the Coffee
were books that evinced a deep and sustained immersion with their subjects, that combined investigative journalism with participant observation techniques spiked with the spirit of old-fashioned muckraking and open skepticism toward the self-congratulatory claims of corporate elites. I’m thinking of books like Thomas Frank’s
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
and
The Conquest of Cool
, Barry Glassner’s
The Culture of Fear
, Naomi Klein’s
No Logo
, Eric Schlosser’s
Fast Food Nation
, and Eric Klinenberg’s
Fighting for Air
. Their careful blending of diverse sources, methods, and evidence became the general template for the research in this book.

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.

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.