Everything but the Coffee (2 page)

Starbucks’ success in the United States pointed, for starters, to the ever-expanding meanings of buying in America. That expansiveness, as this books shows, explains why the coffee was worth it. For a fifteen-year stretch from 1992, when the company first went public, to 2007, when its profits started to flag for the first time, Starbucks delivered much more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better. Studying Starbucks, therefore, tells us what millions of Americans, in the last days before Lehman Brothers imploded, cared enough about to pay extra to get.

Starbucks’ hold on many in the United States grew out of another more fundamental and far-reaching transformation: the nearly whole-sale replacement of civic society by a rapacious consumer society. Under the post-Reagan era, Milton Friedman–inspired free-market political economy of neoliberal, deregulated capitalism, brand-induced consumption oozed into every aspect of daily life. Yet hefty doses of buying, advertising, and marketing certainly weren’t new to America in 1995 or 2005.
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Neither was the branding of everything from fun runs to urinal covers to rock concerts. Nor was the commodification of consumers’ deepest anxieties, desires, and aspirations all that new. It wasn’t even that Americans suffered, in business writer Lucas Conley’s telling phrase,
from “obsessive branding disorder.”
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What’s new, and what makes our world both more alienating and more susceptible to the seductions of buying, is the withering of nonmarket relationships and the public institutions that in the past had pushed back against the market and brands to challenge them for people’s allegiances and identities.
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The pullback of community, the state, and other binding agents allowed brands like Starbucks to sell more goods and garner greater profits by reaching deeper into our lives and consciousness and claiming spaces that civic institutions, including the government, had occupied in the past. But while Starbucks occasionally talked and acted like an NGO or a political party, it never existed for the larger good; it worked for Wall Street and for shareholders. Everything from the posters about health care for workers to the brown java jackets that promise to save the planet to the oversized drinks that conjure up notions of extravagance is there to get us to buy more. Yet by making claims to serve the larger good, the corporate players made it even harder for our already hampered civic institutions to reclaim legitimacy as vital actors in domestic reform and foreign policy. This corporate takeover of state functions carried with it costs well beyond the Starbucks price premium. We might consume Starbucks, but as we do, Starbucks consumes part of us—part of our environment, our culture, and even our politics.

Obviously this is not the first book about Starbucks. In the past few years, journalists have pointed to the “Starbucks effect” and detailed how we have all been “Starbucked.” Business writers have marveled at the entrepreneurial savvy of the company’s rock star CEO, Howard Schultz, and scoured the marketplace looking for the next Starbucks. One left-leaning author “wrestled” with Starbucks, while a former adman explained how the company “saved his life.” All of these books, though, point to Starbucks’ remarkable exceptionalism.
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And the company has, no doubt, had a broad and lasting impact on American life. It turned millions from Alaska to Alabama on to whole bean coffee and espresso-based drinks, mainstreamed the coffeehouse, and taught legions of people to pay three and four dollars for what they once got for only a dollar. It
helped to gentrify neighborhoods and gave many people places to meet and restrooms to use when out on a run. And it became for many over the last fifteen years the most popular everyday form of luxury.

While highlighting the company’s strong impact on daily life in the United States, my book sees Starbucks and its success as more fundamentally typical—typical of how business and branding work and how we, as consumers, navigate the waters of our civically challenged world. If Starbucks went out of business tomorrow or five years after that, we could still learn from the company’s success and its stumbles. We would better understand how consumption and culture, the public and the private interact in our society because Starbucks epitomizes and typifies how Americans encounter the marketplace and each other. It is Starbucks’ ordinariness, this book argues, that matters. The company’s headline-grabbing fame and profitability sprang from broad-based social changes experienced by tens of millions of Americans and from the spread of buying into nearly every corner of daily life, abetted by the steady and alarming shrinking of the public sphere. In a sense, Starbucks is us, the product of large powerful social forces combined with millions of mundane and prosaic choices. But if it is us, that’s something we need to think hard about. Is this who we want to be and how we want to live?

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Even now, following the Wall Street collapse of 2009, the broad American middle class still lives in a postneed world.
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Most have food, plenty of clean, drinkable water, and roofs over their heads. The bulk of our spending, then, is devoted to things that we don’t really need to survive. But that doesn’t mean our marketplace decisions are irrational or only about showing off. We want happiness, connections, and the respect and admiration of our peers. While some have turned to faith or the hope for change or the security of family to satisfy these wants, most of us almost without thinking still opt for the market to fulfill our most pressing needs. Serving business at the critical juncture where consumer desires and the push for profit meet is what
New York Times
columnist
Rob Walker has called the
consumer persuasion industry
.
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Made up of marketers, branders, advertisers, and the occasional psychologist and sociologist, this powerful and cunning economic bloc studies us to cater to our wishes and get us to buy the things they sell by making us think we need them and promising us that the goods they peddle will make us feel all right, have more fun, and look better.

From the influential, European-based, and Marxist-influenced Frankfurt school onward, many who study buying see consumers as dupes of the system, deliberately distracted from group consciousness and political engagement by the false promises of shopping and material abundance. But we are far more complicated in our behavior.
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As the consumer outcry against the well-financed and hyperadvertised “new Coke” campaign in 1985 demonstrated, we don’t just gobble things up because a Madison Avenue huckster (or a jeans-wearing brander in a retrofitted Seattle warehouse) whispers in our ears and yanks at our purse strings.
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We weigh our options and buy things because we think that we need them or that they will make our lives better or will close the gap between how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. Yet while we aren’t blindly led to car lots or vending machines or coffee shops, it might not in the end really matter. Without vibrant public institutions to counterbalance the consumer persuaders and their products, we remain, hostages—or default devotees—of the market. Many of us put our faith in consumption, in the absence of anything else, to deliver us from tedium, sadness, and even sin.

With consumption as our main channel of entertainment and wish fulfillment, we determine a product’s worth based on how well it fits our desires—sometimes contradictory desires—for convenience, comfort, individuality, belonging, public statement making, and social standing. Think of this as a sliding scale.
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The farther a product takes us up the ladder, the more we will pay, with utility at the lowest rung and status and esteem at the very top. We willingly shell out extra money for things that make our daily comings and goings easier, and are thus broadly functional. But those aren’t the most valuable items. We pay even more for
products that give us an emotional lift. And we pay the highest premium for goods that express something about ourselves, that allow us to communicate how we want to be seen, and that distinguish us from others. When a product does all of those things—gives us what we need, want, and hope to convey—we pay yet another premium for the total package.

That’s what that other turn-of-the-century icon, the iPod, did. It merged convenience, pleasure, and identity making. So did a Starbucks latte. But what Starbucks did was even more remarkable because it did it with a thousand-year-old commodity as the raw material and it did it rather cheaply. Beginning in the 1990s, Starbucks got read in the larger culture much like a BMW coupe or a Kate Spade handbag—as a status symbol. And like the iPod, it was also seen as cool, as an “I got to have it” item. But it was nowhere near as expensive as the portable music player or a designer purse.
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That made Starbucks not just an affordable luxury, as some have called it, but an even more affordable form of status and identity making.

Starbucks created a product that allowed doctors and lawyers, architects and Web designers, college professors and students, and their throngs of emulators to portray themselves as they wanted to be seen. It became a kind of cultural shorthand, a way to read, and be read by, others. That’s how the most successful products work in the new economy. We buy things to say something about ourselves. The products that rack up sales and gain the most ardent following are the ones that communicate most effectively. Just by carrying a Starbucks white cup encased in a brown java jacket and speaking the company’s made-up Italianesque lingua franca, customers identified themselves as belonging to, and got the value of membership in, a group of successful people with hip, urbane tastes; an understanding of the finer things in life; and concern about the planet, the less fortunate, and the global order. For much of the Starbucks moment, customers believed that their grande lattes demonstrated that they were better than others—cooler, richer, and more sophisticated. As long as they could get all of this for the price of a cup of coffee, even an inflated one, they eagerly handed over their money, three and four dollars at a clip. Because of Starbucks’
relative bargain pricing, people in the middle with aspirations to move up the social ladder regularly joined mainstream trendsetters like the bourgeois bohemians (bobos) whom David Brooks wrote about and the well-educated creative class that Richard Florida identified in line at Starbucks.
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“Successful people go there,” a first-generation college student explained to me about her Starbucks latte habit, “and I hope it rubs off on me.”
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This helps to explain Starbucks’ rapid expansion. Once the firm established a beachhead with bobo and creative class high earners and tastemakers by the late 1990s, the imitators followed. Company spokesperson Frank Kern broke it down for me in an e-mail. “Five years ago,” he explained in 2007, “about 3 percent of Starbuck’s
[sic]
customers were between the ages of 18 and 24, 16 percent were people of color, 78 percent had college degrees, and overall they had an average annual income of $81K. Today however about 13 percent of the company’s customers are between 18 and 24, 37 percent are people of color, 56 percent are college graduates and they earn on avg. $55K a year.”
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“We’re offering a lifestyle product . . . that transcends the usual barriers,” Roly Morris, who helped to bring Starbucks to Canada, informed a reporter. “Maybe you can’t swing a Beamer or send the kids to Upper Canada College [an all-boys high school where the nation’s elite went], but most people can treat themselves to a great cup of coffee.”
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Morris and other coffee company officials’ understanding of cultural shorthand and the appeal of emulation through buying fueled Starbucks’ massive growth. Lots of people, it turned out, wanted to look like they had a Beamer parked at home and swanky schools on their résumés.

•  •  •

I met Sara Halterman in Montgomery, Alabama, halfway through her college-sponsored tour of southern civil rights sites. We chatted at Chris’s Soul Food Restaurant, not far from Dexter Street Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. had rallied bus boycotters in the 1950s. Talk of the movement and sweet tea soon led to talk of Starbucks and
Sara’s telling me that she had hung out there only a few years before as a mark of coolness and maturity in high school.

“It made me feel older and more studious,” she said about sitting on the cushy couches and drinking Frappuccinos. Thinking about it for another moment, she added, “I felt like I was cultured.” “McDonald’s,” she continued, making the kinds of razor-sharp distinctions that load consumption with meaning, “just doesn’t make you feel cultured.” But Starbucks, Sara added, had “the stigma of being upper class.” Sitting there listening to jazz and looking at the wall-sized murals, she added, “You feel like you are connected to affluence, like buying a Gucci bag. I say, ‘I can afford that.’ ”

As the waitress poured more tea, I asked Sara what associations she made with Starbucks. “You got your latte,” she remarked, sounding like Roly Morris; “you got your BMW. You are a bona fide yuppie.”

The angry Kansan Thomas Frank, interviewed for his eye-opening book on the rise of social conservatism and the culture wars of the 1990s, made the same connection. If these heartlanders saw someone with a latte in hand, they thought they knew all they needed to know about the person. Starbucks customers, they believed, made decent money (or inherited a chunk of it). Like the characters sitting around the café on the TV show
Friends
, they didn’t have a real job—the kind that left your hands calloused and the back of your neck baked a deep brown. They sat in front of laptops all day. When they weren’t answering e-mail or reading film reviews, they yapped into cell phones. They liked sushi and Brie, Birkenstocks and white wine. They didn’t hunt, and they didn’t care if gay men married. Mostly the people living in the middle of the United States that Frank spoke with were convinced that latte drinkers thought they were better than the folks sipping coffee down at the truck stop and over at McDonald’s. Turns out, they had it right. Starbucks customers liked Starbucks because, they thought, it did in fact draw distinctions between themselves and the vast American consumer sea of middlebrow tastes and sensibilities—that is, until it became rather middlebrow itself.
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