Everything but the Coffee (13 page)

It is hard not to have Starbucks on your mind in Manhattan, where the company has more than two hundred stores and occupies two cor
ners of Union Square and just about every corner of Wall Street and the Upper West Side. To Martha Hodes and Adam Gopnik, this invasion makes New York less like New York and more like every other place. Talking about the corner grocery store and independent bookshop, Gopnik concluded his short essay by saying, “These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.” Pointing this out, he called for some push-back against the brands. He thinks his city—and all cities—should do something before it’s too late and their distinctive look is gone and predictability turns every place into the same place.
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Residents of Benicia, California, had the same fear, and it focused on Starbucks. When the coffee giant petitioned in 2007 to open a fifth store in this well-heeled Northern California coastal town with a population of twenty-seven thousand, some locals balked. “It’s a serious problem,” complained Jan Cox-Golovich, a former city council member and owner of an independent café serving organic, fair-trade coffee. Sounding like Gopnik, she continued, “People need to wake up to it. When you drive through a town and everything is so homogenized that you can’t tell where you are anymore, that’s a problem.” She had an idea. Limit the number of chains. Ban them, even. Pretty soon, her idea gained support, and the local government began to look for ways to curtail the opening of more chain stores without violating anyone’s legal rights. When the city council started to debate a temporary ban on all “formula” businesses, the talk on the streets concentrated on Starbucks, and not just among parties like Cox-Golovich with a direct stake in the legislation. City manager Jim Erickson heard the buzz around Benicia. “It is about  . . . fast food restaurants and supermarkets,” he reported, “but the business most frequently associated with the discussion has been Starbucks.” “Some say,” he continued, “it’s about protecting the unique character of the commercial areas of Benicia, and there’s nothing unique about a store that has the same look and style, not just here, but everywhere.”
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What was at stake in Benicia and New York City and everywhere else was the value of place. By selling predictability, one part of their appeal,
brands also act as homogenizing forces, capable of erasing distinctive local details. If you think about it, place rests in the details, in the mundane and prosaic, in the things that make where you live or where you grew up unlike other places. It is about smells, sounds, sights, and texture; and it’s about history—what happened there before to whom and why. It is that sense of place that often makes us who we are. Think about the number of books, paintings, and photographs, and the rap, country, blues, and rock-and-roll songs that conjure up a sense of place. Place makes art. Place creates identity, even our sense of individuality. And that’s the deeper threat some see in chains, in sameness, and in Starbucks. When things started to tip toward placelessness, some started to push back and take a few more risks, gambling even on the unpredictable.

Predictability has eaten into Starbucks’ promise of personal individuality and just plain cool. Cool and status always depended on a certain scarcity. Tyler Immerman grew up in suburban Philadelphia and attended Emory University. She was a Starbucks fan; she liked the soft couches and Sheryl Crow soundtrack. And she liked
her
drinks, Vanilla Lattes and the occasional Frappuccino. When I asked what her twenty-something friends thought about her liking Starbucks, she said, “Uh, they would say I’m a conformist.”

Conformists are, of course, the opposite of individuals. Most people want to be around unique individuals (as long as they aren’t “too” individualistic or “too” unique) and go to different-looking places. Difference is what makes people and places cool. As one person told filmmaker Adam Patrick Jones, “The real people don’t like [Starbucks], only the robots like it.”
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In March 2007, Pittsburgh newspaper columnist Ruth Ann Dailey declared war against Starbucks-style conformity. She labeled the company an “evil empire” out to “destroy America.” Unlike Martha Hodes, though, she wasn’t uniformly anticorporate or antichain, nor was she worried about fair trade or labor issues. About Wal-Mart, she wrote rather glowingly that it brought “life’s necessities to market at a lower
cost than previously imaginable.” However, Starbucks made Americans “bigger and poorer and more conformist by the day.” She begged her readers to break free of their addictions to “adult-size sippy cup[s].” Going further, she urged them to patronize “locally owned restaurants and coffee houses.” That was the only way to save the country. “Wake up, America,” she urged, “and smell the coffee—somewhere else.”
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In one last twist on the themes of sameness and placelessness, authenticity and consumer desire, Starbucks, in some ways, has begun to consume itself. During the company’s early years, coffee customers associated the brand with its hometown, Seattle. They bought Starbucks drinks thinking they were getting with them a whiff of Pacific Northwestern laidback cool accented with a little grunge.
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But now the company seems almost nowhere. Once when I was in Seattle, I overheard someone say to a friend, “Oh, come on, let’s go to a local place, not a Starbucks.” They headed down the street to an independent coffeehouse—another indicator of the fading Starbucks moment.

It Looks like a Third Place

Like a lot of people,
Boston Globe
columnist and seasoned Starbucks watcher Alex Beam thought Howard Schultz coined the term
third place
. He didn’t—retired University of South Florida sociology professor Ray Oldenburg came up with the term to describe sites where people gather other than work or home. Still, it is easy to see why Beam would make this mistake. Every chance he gets, Schultz uses this expression to describe his company’s often busy and bustling stores. When he does so, he makes yet another implicit promise from the brand. He links its outlets to the coffeehouse traditions of connections, conversation, debate, and, ultimately, the ongoing and elusive desire for community and belonging in the modern world.
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Lots of brands these days sell the idea that a shared sense of buying— or taste—adds up to community.
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Schultz, however, grasped that his consumers wanted something more than just a nod of the head between buyers of pricey, specialty coffee; that is, he understood how brand communities work. Customers wanted a throwback to the past—a sense of touch, the sound of voices, and the noise and intimacy of laughter and conversation. So that’s what he promised latte drinkers. Yet his stores offer less belonging and fewer real connections than they do a quick cup
of coffee and a predictable and safe meeting place, a retreat from the world and from other people.
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Nonetheless, Schultz repeats his third place community-building promises all the time. His stores, he tells talk-show hosts, journalists, and stockholders, are places between work and home where people can meet, unwind, establish connections, and deepen their sense of community. Asked once how Starbucks differed from McDonald’s and Burger King, the two-time company CEO and majority stockholder said, “We’re not in the commodity business. We’ve created a third place.”
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In his memoir, he boasts, “Almost everywhere we open a store we add value to the community. Our stores become an instant gathering space, a Third Place, that draws people together.”
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Starbucks didn’t start out creating third places or even getaways. This was a case where the customers, not the company, drove the changes. At first, Starbucks sold bulk coffee, and then it sold espresso-based drinks, but it turns out people didn’t just pick up some beans or grab a cup of coffee and go. Sometimes, they lingered. Employees here and there put in a few stools, and then a few tables, and more people stayed. Starbucks’ more deliberate building of third places was really something of an accident of real estate.

When Starbucks tried to break into the New York area, it shifted its growth model. In the late 1980s and early 1990s in Chicago and Washington, DC, the company established itself downtown with the high-earning grab-and-go crowd first and then moved outward like the spokes on a wheel to the suburbs. In New York, however, the company couldn’t get into the downtown market right away, so it opened initially in the suburbs. Store managers, and then executives, noticed that profits at these stores were high in part because customers stayed longer. Soon an employee got the idea of putting a couch in the corner, and people sat there—and the people in line liked the look of things and the promise of comfort, connections, and conversation. So Starbucks had a new template: it was not just a repository of coffee knowledge or a dispenser of
authenticity or a producer of predictability; now it was also a maker of socially vital third places.

Once again Howard Schultz had a sense for what people wanted. He gave them a taste, a somewhat contradictory taste, of community. “If you look at the landscape of America,” he observed in 1992, “we have an opportunity to change the way people live.” Twenty-five years later, Schultz proclaimed, “I think we have managed to, with a simple cup of coffee and a very unique experience, enhance the lives of millions of people by recreating a sense of community, by bringing people together and recognizing the importance of
place
in people’s lives.”
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COMMUNITY IN THE BRANDED WORLD

Marketers often talk about shared consumer tastes as virtual communities unbounded by geography.
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All Saturn owners belong to the Saturn nation, and all Starbucks users belong to the Starbucks nation. Membership comes through buying. But Schultz sensed, again, that his relatively isolated customers wanted something more immediate and tangible than imagined connections. At a glance, Starbucks seems to have delivered on this promise of community. Quite often, the coffee shops are busy and buzzing places, filled with all kinds of people, students and retirees, white men in jeans and African American women in business suits, religious Jews and Muslims, and suburban dads and city moms. But it is not just the presence of different people or even the arty murals on the walls that makes Starbucks feel like busy third places; it is also the chatter and the easy movement of people through the stores that make them sound and look like public gathering spots, important community-building sites, and answers to the widespread feelings of disconnectedness that Schultz sensed back in 1992.

In 2005,
New York Daily News
reporter Jonathan Lemire spent an entire day at an Upper West Side Starbucks and came away amazed by what went on at the store. As the sun rose he saw businessmen grabbing coffee on their way to the subway and long-distance runners getting
juice on their way back from Central Park workouts. He watched as a middle-aged man quizzed a young woman about her résumé between bites of a blueberry scone. By midmorning, the stay-at-home moms came, cramming strollers into tight corners and trying to talk while keeping an eye on wandering toddlers. “Sadly,” a twenty-nine-year-old mother told him, “this is the highlight of my social life.” As the day went on, college students arrived and pulled out their fat physics textbooks and notebook-thin laptops. A man napped for an hour in a corner. As night fell, couples stopped in for cheesecake and cookies. A single man lingered over a magazine. As the baristas swept up, a pair of women discussed Kevin Bacon films. The store closed before they could agree on his most compelling performance.
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On a hot July afternoon—not exactly coffee weather—in Washington, DC, I stopped in a Starbucks on Dupont Circle—one of four stores in the immediate area. This one stands at the pointy edge where 19th and M streets meet. The front of the store follows the contours of the intersection so that it looks like pie wedge, wider as it moves away from the tip. It is a small room, and it was easy to observe what was going on. In it, there is space for only two soft chairs, six round café tables, and one four-seat rectangular library table. When I walked in at 3 P.M., the hum of the air conditioner and the buzz of conversation nearly drowned out the Starbucks soundtrack of Ray Charles and Joni Mitchell. Despite it being the middle of the workday, every single seat was taken, and the coffee shop had, like the store that Lemire had visited, that third place feel.

Two gay men sat in the front talking to each while they also each talked on their cell phones. Next to them an Asian student pecked away at a BlackBerry and read over anatomy notes. Across the room, two women, clearly friends, laughed and talked; every couple of minutes they got so loud that they shushed each other and then burst out laughing again even louder. A German-sounding woman flirted with an American-looking man. A Latina woman taught a freshman how to order food in Spanish. Across the room, a couple—a white woman and her African American boyfriend—sipped lattes and gently brushed
hands while pretending to read stray newspapers. Just behind them, a gray-haired woman studied the pages of
The Economist
. As soon as the boisterous friends left, someone took their place. The same thing happened when the Spanish tutor and the magazine-reading woman packed up.

Some of these scenes from Starbucks get duplicated at other fast-food places. Certainly people hang out and do different things at different times of day at McDonald’s. What makes Starbucks different, beyond the decor and pricing, is that Starbucks makes a promise of time to its customers. You can stay as long as you want. This is company policy and this guiding principle gives Starbucks stores a casualness and an open-endedness that lends to their third place feel.

A couple of months after I visited the Dupont Circle store,
Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter Alfred Lubrano called me. He wanted to do a story on my coffeehouse research. “Is Starbucks a third place?” he asked me as we sat down for a tall coffee at the Starbucks near the Philadelphia Art Museum. Yes, I answered, thinking about that diverse and wired crowd I had watched in Washington, adding that it is nearly “a perfect third place.” Feeling for a moment like a White House press agent, I even coined my own sound bite. “Starbucks,” I told Lubrano with steady confidence, “is the corner bar of the twenty-first century.”
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