Everything but the Coffee (12 page)

While Starbucks showed off its predictability with promises, implicit and explicit, that the drinks, people, and environment are the same everywhere, it simultaneously masked its sameness behind images of choice and individuality. Heirs to the counterculture’s rejection of mass culture minus its most radical politics, yuppies and creative class types like to think of themselves as unique, as anything but run-of-the-mill, even in their coffee choices. This part of their buying and self-image showed up in a 2006 study. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that year, at the height of the Starbucks moment, that Dunkin’ Donuts paid a dozen Starbucks regulars to try Dunkin’ Donuts coffee for a week. What happened surprised Justin Holloway, the advertising executive who had designed the experiment. No one switched teams—or “tribes,” as he called them—and it wasn’t about taste. Starbucks customers didn’t like Dunkin’ Donuts’ standardized decor and products. They bristled when employees—dressed in orange and not called baristas— poured predetermined amounts of milk and sugar into their drinks. “The Starbucks people,” Holloway noted with a bit of sarcasm, “couldn’t bear that they weren’t special anymore.” One of his associates concluded that Starbucks patrons “seek out things that make them feel important.”
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Knowing its audience, Starbucks gave its customers the raw material to construct an individualized and even important self-image right alongside the predictable.
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In its glossy 2006 corporate social responsibility report, titled “My Starbucks,” the company insisted that each of its then fourteen thousand outlets possessed some physical characteristic unique to that place.
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Every single store, several officials told me when I visited corporate headquarters in 2006, has a signature exterior feature or a mural or an exposed beam different from the one right across the street or across town. When the architectural details don’t stick out, company designers have stepped in with a twist of their own, a special little reading nook or a different arrangement of the furniture. Before the opening of a New York store, company-paid researchers dug through the city archives for black-and-white photographs of the building in its
earlier incarnation and then hung the prints on the coffee shop walls. Now this link in the Starbucks chain was like no other place.
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“Customize your drink,” the sign read at the Starbucks in Richmond, Virginia. Starbucks offers three—really, four—different sizes (an eight-ounce “short” drink is available but not on the menu). Stores feature Komodo Dragon and Caffè Verona blends, either caffeinated or decaffeinated. You can get a latte or Frappuccino. You can add a shot of espresso or maybe a blast of vanilla syrup to any drink. Starbucks provides half-and-half, whole milk, skim milk, and soy milk. To go or for here. In total, Starbucks has somewhere between forty thousand and eighty thousand different drink choices. No matter how you calculate it, just about everyone can have, if desired, their own drink their own way. The endless choices and options at Starbucks become, as they do in so many other sites in our buying-saturated, civically atrophied world, a platform for apparent freedom and individualism.

Like other firms operating in the postneed “experience economy,” Starbucks doesn’t just customize its drinks; it customizes its service as well.
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“Personalization,” the Starbucks employee manual insists, means “knowing customers’ names or drinks or personal preferences.” Unlike at a deli counter, it tells its employees, visitors to Starbucks are not numbers. Workers need to smile, laugh, and ask customers their first names when they order. Starbucks put this system in place not just to sort through who gets what but also to help employees get to know the regulars as quickly as possible. That way, they can address them by name, as individuals, when they come through the door the next day and the day after that.

To help baristas coax out customers’ inner individualism, the employee manual lays out a number of what it calls “legendary service scenarios.” In one, a worker hands over a drink and says, “Tall mocha, thank you.” “Basic or legendary?” the manual asks. “Basic,” is the answer, “because it is what the customer expects. It is a polite response, but there is no personal connection.” To upgrade the service, the manual recommends that workers say something along these lines: “Thanks, John, enjoy your
mocha!” By putting it this way, it explains, “The partner recognized the customer by name. There was a personal connection.”
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Starbucks’ drinks and staged customer service routines attempt to turn each customer into a unique individual. But at Starbucks there is an added bonus. These individuals don’t have to risk leaving the mainstream to express their individuality. Surely some customers don’t care about the personal touch. They just want their lattes, and they want them to taste the same everywhere and for the tabletops and bathrooms to be clean every time they visit. For this, they will pay a little extra. Yet some customers want a splash of something extra. They want their mass-produced drinks and individuality at the same time. But this is a distinctly modest kind of individuality—the sort that prefers Banana Republic to edgy, high fashion. Few Starbucks customers desire to be totally different from the crowd, to stick their necks out too far and maybe be seen as outsiders or weird. (That would have made them early adopters of the truly independent coffee shop, with its typically taciturn servers.) Starbucks customers wanted something broadly fashionable (and easily recognizable) but with a twist, something that stamped it and them as modestly unique.
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Several Starbucks employees told me stories about latte lovers who would use the employees and the company’s service ethos as “social crutches.” The neediest patrons came in a few times a day and danced to the sounds of their names being called out from behind the counter. What these superregulars shared in common was a penchant, one worker told me, for “big, huge drinks with lots of caffeine and very customized”—drinks, he added, that they claimed as their very own. Sometimes these customers dared new employees to try to make their specialized treats as if to say that the beverages belonged to them, not to Starbucks.

In a world where Starbucks seems to be everywhere, you are, then, never alone or far from your very own drink or your special place. Starbucks customers can buy their individuality in sixteen thousand stores worldwide, and each one will, the company promises, make the drink
exactly the same way. Starbucks sells industrial-sized, mass-produced, interchangeable individuality. That is predictability at its highest profit-producing point. In the last few years, however, Starbucks’ promise of sameness has begun to eat away at its power to convey even a modicum of uniqueness—at both the community and personal levels.

GOING TOO FAR AND GETTING TOO PREDICTABLE

Main Street in our minds—the ideal that many of us grew up with or got from postcards, black-and-white movies, and trips to Disneyland—starts with a brick church at one end of town and a granite bank at the other end. In between, there is a string of two-and three-story buildings, each looking a little different from the other and selling something a little different. All the shops have window displays and half-opened doors. They sell hometown newspapers and
Life
, penny candy and fresh-cut meat, clothes for Easter and the new school year, and chocolate shakes and Cherry Cokes paired with thin burgers and shoestring fries. The owners know their customers’ names, sizes, and fashion sensibilities. In the middle of all of this is a quirky Woolworth’s or a J. J. Newberry’s—that’s it for national stores.

Sure, there is a heavy dose of nostalgia in these memories, but the downtowns of the past were different from today’s upper-end downtowns. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Charleston, South Carolina, to Pasadena, California, you’ve got chains—not, in these places, McDonald’s or Burger King, but “new age chains,” as the Canadian activist-writer Naomi Klein calls them, like Starbucks, the Body Shop, and Qdoba Mexican Grill—outlets with small yet still distinctive signs, that use natural-looking products and color designs, and talk about community and corporate social responsibility.
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Along branded Main Streets from Maine to California, Einstein Bros. Bagels stands next to a Barnes & Noble next to a Banana Republic next to a Ben & Jerry’s next to a Chili’s next to a Starbucks. In the next town, there is a Gap (which owns Banana Republic), Così, Borders, the Body Shop, and Starbucks.
Out on the highway, Applebee’s saddles up next to Borders next to the mall with a Gap, Foot Locker, Children’s Place, Sunglass Hut, and Build-a-Bear. Inside as well as in the parking lot, there is a Starbucks. Across the highway in another sea of parking spaces are The Home Depot, Petco, and Target with a Starbucks kiosk inside. The next town over has the same strip. It is not like there is one Main Street and then another anymore, or one commercial strip and then another. It is more like there is one single, low-slung, set-back Main Street of branded stores in America, and it gets repeated over and over again like a film trailer on a loop.

There is a tipping point here, however. Too much sameness alarms, rather than reassures, many bobos and creative class types; it cuts into their sense of individuality. “[C]hain stores,” Houston’s Thomas L. Robinson lamented, “have homogenized the landscape so that there are few remaining external clues [to] where you are.” Like others anxious about the most recent spread of “generica,” Robinson blames Starbucks.
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This isn’t entirely fair. Starbucks isn’t the only chain out there, and the predictability it sells wouldn’t work if people didn’t want it. But Starbucks has grown so rapidly and spread so far, so fast, that is has replaced McDonald’s and as the symbol for many of the newest and most troubling wave of homogenization. Small-business owner Michael Sheldrake spelled it out at the start of the Starbucks moment. “Perhaps no phenomenon,” he told a
New York Times
reporter in 1996, “has more profoundly transformed American Main Streets in the 1990s than the ‘chain problem.’” From tony Annapolis, Maryland, to the Melrose district of Hollywood to preppy Harvard Square, retail streetscapes, as he put it, “have been steadily homogenized as heavily marketed national chains have outgunned and displaced locally owned retailers, whose resources and organization generally pale in comparison to the likes of Starbucks.”
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Martha Hodes worries about the impact of Starbucks as well. A respected scholar of sex and race, she teaches history at New York University, not far from where she grew up. When Martha talks, she
moves her hands a lot. When she talks about Starbucks, she slashes her hands up and down in a fast, agitated chopping motion.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said as she sliced her left hand across the space between us, when I mentioned to her my interest in writing about Starbucks. “I was in Boston doing research,” she began. “It was one of those icy cold nights. I was walking and the wind cut right through my coat. Up ahead, I saw lights. It looked like a coffee shop. I picked up my pace. As I got closer, I just kept thinking about how great it would be to sit down and warm up.” When she reached the storefront, she found out it was a Starbucks. “I just kept walking. I didn’t care how cold it was. I have never been to a Starbucks. I won’t go.”

In a “pure world,” Martha told me on a hot summer morning as we sat across from each other at an independent coffee shop, “I wouldn’t patronize chains.”

“Why not?” I wondered.

“The form of capitalism I believe in is small business. Keep the resources in the community.” Another reason she doesn’t like chains is homogeneity. “You can get off the plane now in Florence and there is a McDonald’s. Why go to Florence?” (There isn’t a Starbucks in Florence or anywhere else in Italy yet, but her point is an obvious one.)

“A lot of this,” she continued, “comes from growing up in the Murray Hill section of New York in the 1970s.” The city, she reminded me, was no paradise in those days. Local government verged on bankruptcy, the sub-ways barely worked, and crime statistics jumped off the charts. Martha once got mugged in her own building. Still, she explained, “everything was local. I knew the grocer, Mr. Henry, and the pharmacist, Mr. Stern. And they knew me. You knew the business people, and you knew where your money was going. They really were your neighbors. Really, they
were
,” Martha said, leaning hard on the words, “your neighbors.” By contrast, she said, when CVS throws up a store and says it’s your neighborhood pharmacy, “that’s bullshit. It is deception. I hate it. It is a fabrication.”
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All chains—Burger King, McDonald’s, Olive Garden, The Home Depot, and so on—irk Martha. But Starbucks really grates on her. Part of
it was the speed with which it grew. “Almost overnight,” she contended, it took up the city’s best spots, like the Astor Diner on Astor Place. “Suddenly New York City is looking like the Los Angeles suburbs.”

Martha’s spouse, Bruce Dorsey, grew up in Los Angeles. Whenever they visit, Martha asks him over and over again how he can tell the difference between one part of the city and another. “Street signs,” Bruce tells her. For Martha, these seem like artificial indicators. “In LA, you never know where you are. How do you know if you are in one town or another?” From her point of view, Starbucks helped turn New York into a similarly placeless place. “This has been such a visual transformation. There used to be markers. I’m in the Village. I’m on the Upper West Side. Now it all looks the same. It is so repetitive. It is so depressing.”

New Yorker
writer Adam Gopnik shares Martha’s concerns. He, too, remembers the 1970s when New York City seemed to be on its way to becoming an urban apocalypse. But then the fall stopped and the city came back to life, the tourists returned, and so did the Wall Streeters. Even after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, it’s still nearly impossible to find a closet-sized place to live in Manhattan for less than $1,000 per month or a block without a not-so-fancy restaurant charging $100 for dinner. In a 2006 “Talk of the Town” piece, Gopnik noted with amazement that the city’s present and past mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Rudolph Giuliani, were then both weighing presidential runs. He guessed that both would base their campaigns on “New York miracle” platforms, on how the city went on their watches from a dangerous and decaying place to a bustling and glittery place. But that wasn’t the whole story. As the murder rate dipped and condo prices jumped, Gopnik thought that New York looked less “like itself every day.” To him, the pattern unfolded with painful predictability: “Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence.” Perhaps his editor took out the line about a Starbucks (or another drugstore), but surely Gopnik had the coffee company on his mind, when he wrote this commentary.