Everything but the Coffee (10 page)

Predictability the Individual Way

In 2004, Mark Woods, a reporter for the
Jacksonville Times-Union
, traveled to Athens, Greece. During the trip, he got into a rhythm. Every morning, he climbed out of bed and went to a café near his hotel for what he called “a thick, gritty, wake-up call—Greek coffee.”

Several months before Woods arrived in Greece, Starbucks opened its first Athens store. Toward the end of his visit, Woods stopped in at one of the familiar coffeehouses (Jacksonville, his hometown, had sixteen Starbucks when he went overseas)—“not,” as he wrote, because he hadn’t “enjoyed the local beverages, but because I was curious about what a Starbucks in Athens would be like.”

What it was like, Woods observed, was “eerily familiar. Same green-and-white sign. Same music. Same muffled conversation. Same counter. Same cups, chairs, and tables. Same metal canisters with the same type-face, in English, ‘
WHOLE MILK
.’ ”

Even the coffee, Woods noted, “tasted familiar. Almost too familiar.” For the rest of his Greek vacation, he stayed away from Starbucks, “stopping at the corner café and ordering a
hellenico metrio
.”
¹

The same perfectly calibrated predictability that chased Woods away in Athens adds value to Starbucks products and lures millions of people to its stores every day. University of Washington student Joshua Wheeler
went to a Starbucks near the campus each morning. “It’s not necessarily superior,” he commented, “but it is familiar.”
²
A West Coast traveler also admired Starbucks’ predictability. “I know that wherever I go, the . . . lemonade will taste the same.” Sometimes, he added, “that’s what I want.” Other times, he continued, “that’s all I can get.”
³
Not just students on their own and traveling salespeople, but soccer moms between car pool stops and psychiatrists between appointments want the familiar. That’s what many go for and then get at Starbucks. “If you’re looking for a casual coffeehouse with a comfortable level of predictability,” an online guide to Cleveland informed visitors, “Starbucks is the place to go.”
⁴

Sociologist George Ritzer, who developed the idea of the “McDonaldization of society,” would explain Wheeler’s and that West Coast traveler’s actions in functional terms. “In a rationalized society,” he writes, “people prefer to know what to expect in most settings and at most times. They neither desire nor expect surprises.” They want the Big Mac they eat today to taste just like the one they ate yesterday and the one they will eat tomorrow. Trained over the years by McDonald’s and its legion of imitators, they expect all brands to operate in the same fashion. Starbucks customers trust that their grande Caffè Verona blend will taste the same at O’Hare Airport as it does in Pensacola or Salt Lake City and that the store in New York City will look like the one in Fort Collins, Colorado. They want predictability in what many see as an unpredictable world. But this is not, as Ritzer argues, about functionality alone. It is also about emotion.
⁵

“Customers,” writes Eric Schlosser in his best-selling exposé of McDonald’s,
Fast Food Nation
, “are drawn to familiar brands by an instinct to avoid the unknown.” A brand “offers a feeling of reassurance when its products are always the same and everywhere the same.”
⁶
These days, it seems, people want sameness perhaps more than ever. As the world grows larger due in part to globalization and new forms of communication, as travel increases and takes people farther from home more often than before, and as all this motion seems to weaken the bonds of community, consumers look to the familiar for both product
dependability and psychological relief. People on the move gravitate toward brands, observes a Florida real estate agent, because recognizable stores and products “give them a level of comfort” and a piece of “something more tangible that they left behind.” That’s the emotional part. The familiar often makes people feel better, and they are willing to pay for that comfort.
⁷

Built for the postneed, status-seeking, civically challenged world, Starbucks offered an important variation on McDonald’s-style, branded predictability. Sameness and comfort are certainly important for highly mobile yuppies, bobos, and creative class types. But for them, it is about more than just picking a dependable product in a crowded marketplace, the first point of branding going back to the early 1900s. Although this still matters, predictability in a frenzied, product-filled world carries with it added efficiency and emotional value—both reasons to pay the premium. Getting the same thing anywhere you go can be reassuring; perhaps it can serve as protection against the unpredictable.

As chains stretched again across the United States in the 1990s, many upper-middlebrows went, as we have seen, in search of authenticity. Authenticity implied uniqueness and specialness, for both the product and the consumer. Bobos, as David Brooks points out in his book that coined the term, prized “novelty” and “self-expression.” So as much as they wanted the predictable, they also wanted to be able to portray themselves as unique individuals, not bland replicas of everyone else. Sensing this seeming contradiction, Starbucks tried to gloss over the tensions between the desires for sameness and choice by offering its customers what business experts have called “mass customization,” the idea of creating specific goods and services for each customer and being able to do it again and again, or what in coffee terms amounted to venti cups of predictability paired with grande novelty.
⁸
It all worked for Starbucks and other companies trying to walk this tightrope, as long as the sameness didn’t crowd out the uniqueness and predictability didn’t over-whelm the real—or at least the seemingly real.

DESIRING THE PREDICTABLE

Lawyers and doctors, importers and exporters, bond traders and pharmaceutical reps seem to be constantly on the move. Endless travel for work and for pleasure, for new jobs and new opportunities, the racing here and there, driving and flying, riding the Long Island Railroad and hopping on the Chinatown bus, settling down and relocating, has generated for some people a sense of dislocation and uncertainty and a desire for predictability in taste and place. Some go to Starbucks for the coffee; they know it will be strong and pack a wallop of caffeine. That is just one reason. One person I met during my research told me he didn’t really like the taste of Starbucks coffee, but he went to the stores all the time because he knows, no matter where he is, he can get a cup of herbal tea and a copy of the
New York Times
. Starbucks built itself to serve particular upper-middle-class needs for sameness. Overhearing someone bashing Starbucks, a big-city resident chimed in: “You know . . . I have trouble being unkind to Starbucks.” Within a few blocks of his loft apartment, he said, are “countless choices when it comes to satisfying my coffee needs, but that just isn’t the case in many parts of the country.” So when he is out on the road, he goes for the predictable. “I was darn grateful,” he reported in 2005, “for the Starbucks stand at the airport.”
⁹

Christina Waters underwent a similar conversion, which also happened at the airport, the main transportation hub for higher-earners in the modern economy built on moving people and goods so quickly that they seem to come from nowhere and land nowhere. A reluctant creative class type, this self-described “aging hippie/liberal” joked that her “ideological fur rose right on cue when I started stumbling over Starbucks, like New Age McDonald’s, everywhere I went.” When Waters found herself stuck at Los Angeles International Airport at 5 A.M., she became “born again, Starbucks-wise.” Reluctant at first, she hesitated, but she needed some caffeine. “No latte ever tasted as good,” she confessed. A
few months later, snow trapped Waters at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. And again, Starbucks bailed her out with a latte. “Starbucks,” she found, “is always right where you want it to be.” Soon, the coffee company was “hardwired” into her “internal search engine.” She looked for it every-where. At night, she dreamed of lattes. While to some, Starbucks stores still looked like links in a chain bent on world domination, to her, they showcased “great consistent coffee  . . . rich, hot, perfectly made.” “So fine-tuned is the quality control here,” she said, concluding her conversion tale, “that a trainee in suburban Spokane can produce a macchiato every bit as satisfying as a veteran barista in Manhattan.”
¹⁰

When a Seattle coffee aficionado visited New York and saw a Starbucks on every corner, she commented that it certainly is “a convenient place to procure a pre-shopping cup of coffee.” You’ll get what you pay for, she maintained, “exactly the same mediocre product you get from every other Starbucks.” “Dull predictability,” that’s what Starbucks sells, she concluded, pointing to another, and perhaps contradictory, emotional value for sale at the hip-looking corporate coffee shops.
¹¹

Commentator Steven Walkman and Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz, like many Americans, would welcome a little more “dull predictability.” Both point out that we suffer in the postneed economic order from a “tyranny of choice” that adds to our feelings of dislocation and isolation. Defenders of the consumer regime argue that the proliferation of choice in the marketplace can be liberating. But everywhere we go, Walkman and Schwartz note, there are endless options, myriad small differences to wade through, and endless decisions to make. To them, this doesn’t represent the expansion of freedom based on buying but a new kind of psychic prison built on stress. Walkman finds himself wondering all the time if he picked the right item. What if he didn’t? What if he left the perfect product back in the store? Go to Best Buy and televisions of all shapes and sizes line not one, or two, but three store walls. Each has more features than just about anyone needs or knows how to utilize. Walkman learned that the choices for something as ordinary as socks were just as extensive. When he went looking for a pair of
plain white socks, he found hosiery for racquetball, running, walking, cycling, hiking, basketball, and aerobics. “What if I play racquetball occasionally and walk sometimes?” he asked the salesperson. She shrugged as if to say, well, why won’t you change socks in between each activity? Over the last decade and a half, the explosion of choice and the proliferation of minor differences spilled over into the coffee business as well. Now the morning cup of joe involves a nearly infinite number of decisions—drip or French press, a latte or cappuccino, an independent place or McDonald’s, Starbucks or Peet’s.
¹²

Economic historian Peter Coclanis has developed a strategy for dealing with the possible tyranny of coffee choices. A remarkably rational operator, the Columbia PhD goes to Starbucks and pays the premium when he is away from home—and these days he is on the road a lot. Currently, he serves as the associate provost for international affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He stops at Starbucks in order to get his caffeine boost and, in his words, to limit his “discovery costs.” According to this notion, as Coclanis explained it, with each purchase, consumers invest time and resources, deciding where to go and what to buy, worrying about whether they got the best value or finest product. In our hustle-and-bustle world with more for sale in more venues every day, this behavior can quickly turn costly—in terms of time and psychic energy. Imagine coming to Philadelphia or Ann Arbor and trying every single coffee shop in town before you decided on the one you liked the best. Rather than do that on a two-day visit to one of these places, Coclanis heads straight to Starbucks. He would prefer a more local, one-of-a-kind place, but he doesn’t have the time it takes to discover that place, nor does he want to take a risk on the coffee, so he usually opts for the predictable—and not bad, according to him: a cup of Starbucks drip coffee in a typically comfortable and clean setting.

For some customers, the desire for predictability goes up in almost direct proportion to their distance from home. In many ways, this reflects the wider and deeper anomie of modern life, the detachment from friends and family, and the growing absence of meaningful daily interactions in
our spatially disconnected everyday worlds. Bringing us back to the airport, travel is when many of us feel this sense of dislocation most acutely. It is when people need a little predictability to save valuable time and emotional energy. “I am a big fan of Starbucks,” explains one businesswoman, “and as a frequent traveler, I am always happy to find a Starbucks and have a familiar place to order my coffee . . .. I have been happy to find them internationally, in the most unexpected towns in Europe.”
¹³
For business-people like her, this has a sort of functional payoff as well: she doesn’t waste time on coffee decisions. What’s more, as another salesman put it, he goes to Starbucks for “a latte and a work station,” knowing that he will get for his money a “predictable business friendly environment.”
¹⁴

“People go to Starbucks for the familiar atmosphere,” the blogger “Liberty Belle” rightly observed. That is not, of course, the main reason why bobos and creative class types travel. When not working, dot-com whizzes and hospital administrators hit the road, quite often, to get a little outside their comfort zones, but even as they do, they still need some reassurance—something familiar—along the way. As Liberty Belle writes, when “the rootlessness of a new place threatens loneliness,” you need a fix of something from back home, a familiar place where you speak the language. “That’s when Starbucks is great!” says Liberty Belle. “No matter where you are, there’s always a Starbucks and it’s always the same old shit. If you can form a personal sphere of sanity around the Starbucks experience, you’ll never be alone in the world!”
¹⁵

At the start of a semester-long study abroad program, that’s just how Ana Garcia felt: alone in the world. Athletic and outgoing, the twenty-year-old sorority member from a McMansion-dotted Atlanta suburb hadn’t traveled much at that point in her life. When she first got to Madrid, she felt disoriented. “We were pulling up to our hotel on Gran Via,” she told me in an e-mail exchange, “after a five-hour bus ride with forty-four complete strangers” (the other students on her trip), “and I was exhausted.” “These crazy people,” she said about Spaniards, “eat so late, and I needed something to hold me over. And there it was right across from the hotel—a Starbucks.” She walked over and found that “it
was a huge relief to get something we knew already (I had already had some language barrier problems, so at least I was familiar with Starbucks).” When I asked her about this experience again later in the semester, she joked, “I go to Starbucks . . .. It is nice to get little tastes of familiarity while over here (a little break from the
lomo
and
cafe con
leche!).”