Everything but the Coffee (18 page)

In another quote about safety for cocooners, Starbucks barred smoking at its stores. Company officials insisted that cigarettes threatened the flavor of the coffee. “Because coffee beans have a bad tendency to absorb odors,” lectures Howard Schultz, with his usual hint of the heroic, “we banned smoking in our stores years before it became a national trend.”
⁴⁷
But the prohibition was not just about principles or products. Like all things at Starbucks, it was also about drawing distinctions. By the 1990s, smokers symbolized something quite specific in health-conscious upper-middlebrow circles. They had become pariahs.
They were the undisciplined, the rough-around-the-edges, the unclean. Before Atlanta put a complete smoking ban into effect, each terminal at the city’s sprawling airport had a designated smoking area. These were bare-walled, glassed-in rooms with no TV and no place to sit, just a floor, a ceiling, and ashtrays. They looked like oversized cages filled with addictive freaks. You walked by and stared and felt better about yourself. By keeping smokers out, Starbucks did more than protect its beans: like the suburban mall, it marked itself as a clean, somewhat exclusive, healthy upper-middle-class universe—just the kind of place you could go to on your own and not encounter anyone too unlike yourself.

On the surface, with its gritty, bobo-chic style of exposed ceiling beams and bebop sounds, Starbucks designed its stores to mimic the look and feel of the urban coffeehouse. Closer to the ground, though, they were laid out to enhance a safe, alone-in-public feeling—a way to be out without having to talk or interact with strangers, just in case the wrong sort of person did slip through the door. At the old penny universities, customers sat on benches at long wood tables. Not at Starbucks.

Through much of the Starbucks moment, Arthur Rubinfeld worked as the company’s executive vice president for store development. In this position, he scouted out new locations and mapped out stores on ground. Like everyone at Starbucks headquarters, Rubinfeld spoke the language of third place, but this didn’t stop him from building solo-friendly, suburban-style enclaves filled with urban references. Round tables, rather than square tables, he advised, should be used in all seating areas. “A single person at a square table looks (and possibly feels) lonely,” he explained. In his book
Built for Growth
, he elaborates, “A round table is less formal, has no ‘empty’ seats, and the lack of right-angle edges makes the person seated at the table feel less isolated.”
⁴⁸
According to Rubinfeld, these same tables discourage people who don’t know each other from sitting together and talking. The signature furniture at Starbucks, then, makes cocooning in public easy and creating public spaces difficult.

I learned firsthand how this worked. If I needed to read a dense book, I didn’t go to my local coffee shop and risk a conversation—I went to Starbucks. I knew I wouldn’t be bothered there. At first this surprised me. Like others, I looked at the variety of people at Starbucks and heard the buzz of conversation and thought I saw a third place. Early in my research, I told a friend about the lack of interaction at Starbucks, and she said, “Hey, I know,” adding rather emphatically, “I don’t go to Starbucks to talk—I go to be alone.”

Pretty quickly, I knew the score and worked out my own Starbucks routine. Before ordering, I scoped out a corner, unoccupied table near an electrical outlet, put my stuff down, and went to get a tall coffee. Back at my table, I pulled out my computer, plopped my cell phone on the table, and plugged myself into my iPod. Each time, I created my own virtual gated community. I was alone in public, and that’s what I wanted. I rarely talked to anyone at these stores, and I didn’t recognize many people. By no means, however, did my public cocooning make me stick out.
⁴⁹
According to my own observations, people sitting alone occupied as many as 65 percent of the tables at Starbucks.

Idaho journalist Kathy Hedberg saw lots of people like me at Starbucks. When the company came to her neck of the woods around 2005, she went to explore the new coffeehouse on the block. “Caffeine,” she observed, explaining a fact of café life from the beginning, “gives a jolt to your system that is like an electric current, and after a couple of cups people just start talking whether they have anything to say or not.” The issue, then, is how to connect the talkers. After spending time at Starbucks, Hedberg thought its customers needed a little help. “I have noticed,” she wrote of the alone-in-public feel of the place, “that the folks who drink their coffee at Starbucks . . . are not big talkers. They’re more an elite, standoffish group, not the gabby sort you run into at your neighborhood diner.”
⁵⁰

Nevertheless, Starbucks portrays itself as a producer of coffeehouse culture—as a place for talk, debate, interaction, and the exchange of ideas. To mark Benjamin Franklin’s three hundredth birthday,
Starbucks launched the “Ben Franklin Coffeehouse Challenge.” Stirring up Habermas’s ghost, a press release called on the people of Philadelphia to rediscover the “civic generosity” of the city’s famous Founding Father. “This is a town of unlimited ideas,” an in-store poster proclaimed. “Let’s put them to use.” “Join our fellow community members, Starbucks, and the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary as we discuss the issues that face our neighborhoods and find solutions that create a better community for us all.”
⁵¹
Starbucks, in other words, promised more than coffee; it promised to set up discussions that could solve deeply rooted social problems.

Maybe this corporatizing of the conversation about social ills is an inevitable by-product of the retrenchment of government and deep cuts in funding over the last twenty years for public places like libraries, parks, and schools. Maybe this is the result of the post-Reagan, post-Clinton narrowing of the political debate in the United States and our declining faith in the political system and party leaders. In this stultifying climate, while our cities collapse and our economy crumbles, politicians wrangle over burning flags and lipstick on pigs. Maybe this is a side effect of the landscape of fear and the retreat of many upper-middle-brows, whether they like it or not, from public arenas to walled-off sub-urban (and urban) spaces. And surely this is another example of the spread of consumption. As nonmarket public space has shrunk, brands have stepped in to fill the void, giving us what we want and enhancing the value of their goods. Whatever the combination of factors, the corporate sponsorship of talk tends, in the end, to muffle debate and limit the range of participants. It doesn’t create Habermas’s public sphere or Beau Weston’s freewheeling penny universities or Elijah Anderson’s inviting cosmopolitan canopy or Ray Oldenburg’s chummy third place. Only Starbucks customers—those who can afford two-and four-dollar cups of coffee and don’t smoke—are included. Starbucks will not fund any programs that separate people from Starbucks. Somewhat predictably, then, the Ben Franklin program actually narrowed the discussion by leading only to private remedies for broader civic problems. It
urged Starbucks customers, for instance, to “plant more trees (and hug them),” but it didn’t encourage them to attack polluters or question throwaway consumption—the kind that goes on at Starbucks all the time. “Why can’t a vending machine,” an unidentified person asks on the back of a store handout announcing the Franklin conversation, “sell locally made art?” No one, though, asked about how standardized testing and George Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiatives have constricted curriculums everywhere or how trickle-down economics and federal budget cuts have choked off arts programs across the country or why Starbucks mass-produces its own paintings and closes off most of its stores from local artists.

Unlike the ideal of old coffeehouse where anyone could say just about anything, Starbucks stores, like the community boards, are not places where all speech is free. Political parties, campaign meetings, and candidate fund-raisers are not welcome; shocking or in-your-face art never goes up on the walls; and workers are not allowed to talk about unions or even chat with a writer without company approval. One time I approached an employee with a question, and she said she couldn’t talk without checking with her boss, and her boss said he had to check with Seattle. Another time I asked to interview a friend of mine who had become a Starbucks district manager. A PR person refused this request, saying in mangled prose that my friend was not “an official spokesperson for the company and you’ll be better served by us providing answers to those questions from someone in Seattle.”
⁵²
While the company carries the
New York Times
, it will not always pass out those what’s-going-on-around-town, slightly muckraking, free weeklies available in many places. Once in Seattle and once in Wichita, Starbucks officials removed these local papers from the stores.
⁵³
In 2004, Toronto supervisor Matthew Brown got fired the very day he was scheduled to start management training for complaining about his boss on his blog.
⁵⁴
Clearly unaware of the promise of free-flowing conversation at the penny university and third places, a Starbucks spokesperson explained, “We are
trying to promote respectful conversation, not incite controversial, taboo subjects.”
⁵⁵

•  •  •

Starbucks, then, doesn’t reproduce the English coffeehouse or any other sort of genuine public space. What it does, rather, is simulate the coffeehouse. French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard first developed the idea of simulacrums. Based on an idealized version, kind of like Weston’s version of the penny university, the simulacrum is a reproduction. Over time, the reproduction becomes less and less like the imagined original, so even though it looks like the first cut of something, it doesn’t function in the same way, for the same purposes.

Under Starbucks’ reign, the coffeehouse has become something to consume more than an actual public gathering place. You rent out space for work or a meeting or pay for a chair for twenty minutes of relaxation, or maybe you use it as a place to show off your good taste. In all these scenarios where something beyond the functional is involved, you drink up form rather than substance. Thinking about these same issues, though in a different way, a business blogger asked, “Why is Starbucks the giant they are? Sure, they have good coffee, but that’s not the whole picture. It’s the brand. It’s the barista experience. It’s being surrounded by jazz music and modern art and people wearing turtleneck sweaters.”
⁵⁶
In other words, it is the appearance of the coffeehouse that matters. Go to this place with art on the walls and jazz flowing out of the speakers, and you turn yourself into a witty, handsome, and urbane character from the TV show
Friends
. Or maybe you become a sophisticated, arty, and cosmopolitan individual. “You feel creative there,” adds a midwestern journalist, like you’ve “got metro style down, . . . like [you’re] writing an indie film script, starting a start up or composing a term paper.”
⁵⁷
But this isn’t necessarily who you are; this is an image you pay a premium to display. You spend money to say something about yourself. At the classic coffeehouse or at a real third place, you participate by talking and lis
tening; you don’t just sit there, and it isn’t just about you. At Starbucks, the coffeehouse quotes are there to sell Starbucks and to lend out, for a price, a sophisticated, cool image, but not really to promote free exchange, artistic engagement, or lasting community connections.
⁵⁸

Starbucks simulates the coffeehouse in another way. ABC Radio reporter Aaron Katersky lived alone in a small Upper West Side apartment. He went to Starbucks because he liked to spread out every now and then and, even more, because he liked to be around other people. But he didn’t necessarily want to talk to them. He picked Starbucks because the tables were set far apart and “protect[ed] his privacy.” Increasingly, for Katersky and others, the ideas behind the original coffeehouses have vanished. Starbucks was all that they knew of the coffeehouse tradition and how to act in these places. Now, Katersky expected to get his better-than-decent cup of coffee, find a seat, and be left alone. Actually, if someone did try to talk with him about the fall in New York real estate prices or the Iraq war, he might think, like I did with that conversation about race and Atlantic City’s development, that they had breached the boundaries of his individual coffeehouse space.

“Maybe,”
New York Times
reporter Anemona Hartocollis speculated after visiting a Starbucks, “we only wish to drown our sorrows in a strong cup of coffee in cushy chairs surrounded by strangers who will grant us the illusion of community yet respect our privacy.” Alfred Polgar, an Austrian writer and Viennese coffeehouse regular, noted in a similar vein that Starbucks was “a place for people who want to be alone, but need company for it.”
⁵⁹

Hartocollis and Polgar captured how Starbucks worked as a simu-lacrum, how it stamped out the real essence of the original ideal of the coffeehouse and, through proliferation and endless insistence, became itself the real thing for many bobo and creative class types. Just as Baudrillard suggested, this covering up takes place in the service of profit. At Starbucks, the coffeehouse quotes are there to sell the aura of Starbucks, to tell customers they can get what they want and be who they want, there
and only there. Heated exchanges and avant-garde art might invigorate democracy, but they also run the risk of alienating potential customers.
⁶⁰
So Starbucks, as a business aimed at the upper edges of the mass market, understandably shies away from the contentious and divisive. The problem is that once the fake proliferates—without admitting that it is a fake— it can overwhelm the original. We forget that an older ideal dedicated to meaningful talk ahead of the market ever existed. We never learn how to push past our anxieties and talk with people we don’t know, so we never hear their thoughts and opinions. Now many coffee drinkers think that solo-friendly, closely regulated, tightly scripted Starbucks, with its extra milky faux cappuccinos, is what a coffeehouse is and should be. As this happened, another chance for dialogue, the foundation of democracy and a potential counterforce against the privatization of everyday life and politics, slipped away as Starbucks consumed more space and more ideas.