Everything but the Coffee (11 page)

The predictability of Starbucks smoothed an even bumpier transition in Yasuko Owen’s life. One day, her husband walked into their Hawaii home and announced that his company had reassigned him without notice to Singapore. Not surprisingly, the news made the thirty-six-year-old, stay-at-home mom nervous and anxious. Back on the Big Island, she told a reporter, “there was a Starbucks and Borders right next to each other.” When she saw the same pairing in Singapore, she said to herself, “I could really live here.” Owen surely was not going to bristle, then, at the price of her latte. Predictability had functional and emotional value for her, and the price even at four dollars a drink was worth it.
¹⁶

MAKING A PREDICTABLE PUBLIC-LOOKING PLACE

Predictability doesn’t just happen. Starbucks works hard to stage this easily consumed familiarity, starting with the coffee itself. Reluctant to franchise, Starbucks owns most of its outlets. That way, it can open stores across the street from each other, or cluster-bomb, to quote author Naomi Klein, downtown areas. Obviously, this approach crowds out competition, but on another level, it allows the company to control the details, starting with the coffee-making process itself and continuing with the store design, to ensure predictable-seeming tastes and experiences from Seattle to Singapore.

Signaled by the introduction of the fully automated espresso machines, Starbucks’ industrial makeover meant less authenticity, but also it meant quicker lattes and enhanced sameness. In theory, at least, mechanization should mean the drinks taste the same everywhere. However, there’s a problem with this idea. Natural products aren’t
entirely predictable. Like wine grapes, coffee beans taste different every year because they get exposed through the growing process to different amounts of rain and sun. But Starbucks still tries to create uniformity. It utilizes, for instance, secret shoppers to conduct beverage (and service) tests. Well-disguised company representatives visit stores and check drinks for their temperature, weight, and taste. Following the McDonald’s model, they try to ensure as much as possible that a Mocha Latte—where the syrup and milk overwhelm the beans—in Des Moines has the same predictable look, feel, and taste as it does in Dubai.
¹⁷

Starbucks baristas also tend to look alike—usually smiling and usually young. This, too, is no accident. As thick as a chemistry textbook, the Starbucks employee manual leaves little to chance. It provides workers with a script outlining exactly what they should say and the tone they should strike. It spells out what they can and can’t wear and what they can and can’t show of themselves. They have to wear a Starbucks shirt, a green apron, and sensible-looking dark khaki pants. No visible tattoos. No nose rings. Not too much makeup or perfume, and no earrings that dangle too far past the earlobes.

Almost no one on the front line at Starbucks works full-time, and the hours are erratic and unpredictable. That schedule denies employees the predictability and sameness that the customers crave, but it does mean that younger people with flexible schedules tend to gravitate toward the jobs. They are the ones who can most easily deal with the swing shifts of nights followed by mornings and do the taxing, back-aching work. The baristas, therefore, have a generally predictable, youthful look.
¹⁸

Leslie Celeste, an Austin store manager, told me that if someone comes into her store looking for a job, she will ask one of the counter people, “What does he look like?” Only if they say the applicant is OK will she interview that person.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t hire you,” she answered, laughing.

“Why?” I said, trying not to sound defensive.

“You’re too old,” she said, laughing again. “And I don’t hire ugly people, either. I know I shouldn’t say this, but who wants to buy coffee from a kid with zits all over his face or some fat chick?”
¹⁹

Starbucks stores aren’t just filled with clean-cut young workers; the stores themselves are clean. Every ten minutes, a shift supervisor sets a timer for what the company calls a café check. When the bell goes off, someone slips from behind the counter to bus tables; refill the cream, milk, and sugar dispensers at the help-yourself bar; sweep the floors; and inspect the bathrooms. They check on the toilet paper and towels and wipe down all the surfaces with disinfectant. The goal, an employee explained to me, is to make sure “the store looked spectacular” and is “well stocked and especially appealing/inviting to our guests.”
²⁰

Cleanliness represents an emotionally important marker of sameness. Whether wandering through foreign lands or eating at an ethnic restaurant or looking for coffee, newcomers look for reassurance.
²¹
Travelers and everyday consumers often associate foreignness (and the undesirable) with filth. For them dirt triggers anxieties of disease and disorder—in other words, unpredictability. “Before I left the States,” Jadd Cheng explained in 2003, “I felt slightly disapproving of what seemed the corporate sameness of every Starbucks and I avoided them as much as possible.” Then he moved to Taipei. “But after misadventures ordering in a foreign tongue and navigating the dodginess of Taiwanese public restrooms, there was something comforting about entering a Starbucks that was identical to the ones back home, from the menu to the décor of the (very clean) bathroom.” Since then, he continued, “I’ve been hooked . . .. Maybe corporate sameness isn’t all that bad.”
²²

Rather than risk the consequences of the unpredictable—smelly bath-rooms, sticky countertops, wobbly tables, foreign tongues, mysterious food, and maybe even unwashed people—many people will look, at home and abroad, for the spotless and familiar place even at the expense of consuming something more local, even more authentic (though the totally faux won’t work, either—more on that and on bathrooms later). The see-through food displays, broom-pushing workers, and faint smells
of cleanser act as clues, telling customers that they are at Starbucks, itself a clean, continuous unbroken space, not just a piece of real estate in a foreign country or another city.

A few years ago, Brenda, a psychiatrist I know, remarried and moved from Philadelphia to California. She planned to stop at Starbucks stores along the way and promised to keep a travel log for me. “Scott and I,” Brenda wrote from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, “have been hanging out at Starbucks off of Interstate 95 for the past hour and a half. I have been on the Internet. Scott has been paying bills.”

“What do you like about stopping at Starbucks?” I asked.

“Well,” Brenda replied, “I feel comfortable here. It feels familiar.” Along with the wireless access, soothing colors, and comfortable chairs, Starbucks’ customers, with their predictable, clean, middle-class appearances, reassured Brenda. By contrast, she wrote, “We had breakfast at our Comfort Inn this morning surrounded by obese Americans eating unhealthy bad-looking food (I had Cheerios with full-fat milk; no option of low-fat). I hate to admit this about myself, but I sort of think that part of liking to be here is that I feel that it is not beneath me, as I kind of feel when I am at, say, McDonald’s ordering bad coffee.”

The key to Starbucks—to any business—is that a dislocated person, someone away from home like Brenda, can read in a flash the cultural clues it throws off. Customers have to know right away where they are and who is around them. More than anything, Starbucks must translate this desire to be out in public, but in an absolutely safe place, into a predictable product and physical environment. As one patron declared, Starbucks isn’t a public library—and he meant this as a positive attribute. In other words, it is not open to everyone. There is no chance, the blogger Witold Riedel wrote approvingly, of having to engage in a long and tedious conversation with some crazy “old person.”
²³
An employee at an Ann Arbor store told me his managers regularly asked him to throw out the homeless whether they ordered anything or not. Not long after he passed this story on to me, I sat at the Starbucks near the University of Pennsylvania campus. A pan-handler came in, and out of nowhere a manager appeared to shoo him
away. Limiting the access of the poor, unhoused, unwashed, and unfortunate is another way that Starbucks creates a predictable and safe middle-class environment. This isn’t just about Starbucks. Exclusion is key to bringing people together in public across the United States.
²⁴

“America is a place where our public spaces are private spaces,” Philip Roth writes in his dead-on novel about postwar life and tensions,
American Pastoral.
²⁵
Since the breakdown of formal segregation in the 1950s, many middle-class Americans have continued to try to limit their contact with unknown others and the crimes they often associate with them. Suburban malls represent perhaps the clearest expression of the desire for safe, predictable communities. Built far from downtowns, concentrated pockets of poverty, and people of color and outside the reach of public transportation, the mall appears open while simultaneously limiting access. Anyone—in theory—can shop at the Gap and Build-a-Bear and have a crispy sandwich at Chic-fil-A and a gooey treat at Cinnabon. But how do you get there if you don’t have a car? And if you don’t have a decent job, what would you buy there? You can’t do anything you want at the mall, either. You can’t say anything you want; you can’t dress anyway you want. If you violate the rules, security guards might throw you out or call the police and get you arrested. The mall is private space masquerading as public space.
²⁶

Even when they are downtown, Starbucks stores work a lot like sub-urban malls. This starts with location. By putting coffeehouses in airport terminals and shopping malls, next to men’s shops selling blue blazers in college towns, down the street from gray-stoned Episcopalian churches in leafy suburbs, and in the lobbies of tall glass-towered office buildings and pricey hotels in center cities, Starbucks targeted its audience and created a customer base. These are all places filled with wealthy, solidly, and inescapably middle-class people. Near their homes and on their way to work, these customers go to Starbucks and expect to encounter people just like them. Out of town, they depend on this predictability even more. This, in part, explains not just the rise of the suburbs but the suburbanization of urban places as well, the turning of city patches into suburban
enclaves. Starbucks stores might look and sound urban, but they operate in a suburban fashion, by looking open to everyone when they really aren’t.
²⁷

Still, the illusion of openness is important to creative class types who imagine themselves as cosmopolitan, tolerant, and supportive of diversity.
²⁸
Inside, though, Starbucks puts up filters to ensure predictability, which in this case actually creates exclusivity. Language, for starters, keeps some away. Ordering at Starbucks requires a little learning. Early on, the coffee company manufactured its own pseudo-Italian vocabulary and its own syntax. That means that someone has to teach you how to talk there, someone who has access to Starbucks, a company located largely in upscale, mostly white areas. In hopes of fitting in, I once saw a customer practicing his order in front of a barista. If you don’t get your drink name right, the person behind the counter will shake his head. There is an underlying point to this performance: only those familiar with Starbucks, meaning those with access to Starbucks and its customers, are welcome there.

Cost acts as an even more aggressive gatekeeper. Just like a house in the suburbs, Starbucks in actual, not cultural, terms is relatively expensive. In many ways, a high-priced cup of coffee is the price of admission to this clean, predictable place. Those who want to take a chance or who won’t or can’t pay, can’t get in. At the diner, coffee costs a dollar. At McDonald’s, you can get sixteen ounces of coffee for ninety-nine cents, or as little as forty-nine cents in the middle of the 2008 economic meltdown. At many food trucks on city corners, coffee costs only seventy-nine cents. But at each of these places, you run the risk of bumping into the wrong kind of people—the kinds of people my old neighbor Brenda wanted to avoid, and couldn’t, at that lower-end roadside motel. At Starbucks, the cheapest drink on the menu—twelve ounces of plain coffee—costs about $1.60. Lattes and Frappuccinos sell for two to three times that amount.

Starbucks’ mainstream, watered-down hip-ness—the fact that it plays the easy listening sounds of Norah Jones and James Taylor, but not the
anti-Bush tirades of Green Day or the southern-fried raps of Nas, and that it generally hires fresh-faced young workers, but not sullen kids with lip rings, visible tattoos, or baggy pants that only stay up in defiance of the laws of gravity—acts as another filter. Punks and corner kids, anarchists and performance artists usually stay away. They wouldn’t be caught dead in a corporate coffeehouse, and that’s all right with Starbucks. Neither would my recently deceased and definitely not hip Jewish stepgrandfather go to Starbucks. He was an accountant. He wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor. If he had wanted to, he could have gone to Starbucks, but he didn’t want to. Like the borscht-belt comedian Jackie Mason, who did a whole routine in the 1990s on Starbucks’ inflated pricing and bloated language, he couldn’t see a single good reason to spend over a dollar for a cup of coffee any more than he could see getting rid of his checked jackets and blue loafers. “What’s wrong with them?” he might have said about the shoes. “They cover my feet just fine.” Starbucks would take my grandfather’s business over that of metal-heads with mohawks, but it doesn’t really want him sitting in an out-of-style coat in one of its cool-looking overstuffed chairs.
²⁹
Starbucks wants its customers to know at a glance that its stores are filled with predictably safe and decent, modestly hip but not really cool or edgy people—people who look just like them or how they want to look.

Making every Starbucks look familiar and feel safe requires heavy doses of policing, employee disciplining, and systemization. In other words, as McDonald’s expert George Ritzer suggests, it requires that Starbucks stores operate like McDonald’s franchises. Indeed, as Starbucks grew, it became more like McDonald’s every day, turning consumption, work, and management into a series of predictable centrally controlled routines. But the thick aura of McDonald’s was, at the same time, a threat to the Starbucks experience and the willingness of customers to pay as much for a cup of coffee as they would for a fast-food meal. Status seekers don’t want to buy the transparently ordinary or mass produced, so Starbucks had to hide its rationality, or what I would call its “McDonald’s side.”