Everything but the Coffee (21 page)

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Adding to the indulgent appeal and value of its drinks, Starbucks laid out its stores to operate as live, three-dimensional environments for self-gifting. University of Houston professor Jackie Kacen, who conducted the studies on gender and self-gifting mentioned in the opening, pointed to Starbucks’ melodious soundtrack, soothing color scheme, and homey fireplaces. They evoke calm, comfortable feelings, she said. By contrast, “You don’t get rap music and screaming twelve-year-olds there.”

“But,” I asked, “how can coffee—coffee loaded up with caffeine— make for a soothing environment?”

“It’s like the cigarette break,” she declared. “Cigarettes, of course, are filled with nicotine, which is a stimulant. But by going outside to smoke, it slows you down mentally and you feel relaxed.”

Same with Starbucks. When we have negative feelings, Kacen continued, “we know something is amiss and our goals are being thwarted.” One way to get back on track is to do something different or change environments. For lots of people, she noted, buying is the answer, and Starbucks has become that place to “relax and let go . . . because it reads as comfortable.” Consumers, then, pay the premium for access to this warm, safe, and reassuring space—just as second and third place seekers do.

At the start of the Starbucks moment, McDonald’s was the most visited retailer in America. As a place, the Golden Arches stood for value
and efficiency. It was not a site for self-gifting, except perhaps the occasional present to moms (and some dads) of not having to cook for the family. Close-up, in the details, Starbucks—the whole store, the whole experience—represents a rejection of the Golden Arches’ functional values. At Starbucks, there is no obvious plastic. No mascot. No Formica. No gray linoleum floors. No bright overhead fluorescent lighting. No blaring oranges and yellows. And seemingly no processed foods and products. McDonald’s, in contrast, doesn’t hide its rationality, even its artificiality. It is a place built with right angles and straight lines. Starbucks stores do just the opposite; they curve and bend. Few outlets are simple squares or rectangles. Some are round. Others look like
L
s or pie slices. Overlapping circles and ovals hang over the coffee bar. The counters swoosh and roll. Squiggly lines and loops dance under the counters and across the murals on the walls. James Twitchell, the author of
Living It Up
, a chronicle on the emergence of the luxury economy in the United States in the 1980s, described the inside of Starbucks stores to me as almost “inappropriately elegant spaces.” Elegance, he added, reads as a reward for success and helps turn these places into ideal built environments for self-gifting.

I talked about Starbucks’ design with experience architect Greg Beck. Broad shouldered and basketball player tall, Beck exudes a quiet, thoughtful command of things that belies his size. It seems to serve him well. Over the last decade, Beck has had a hand in designing interactive places like the CNN Center in Atlanta and the Sony Store in New York. I spent an afternoon with him in Manhattan going from one Starbucks to another. An effective teacher, he took me through a crash course in interior design. “What do you see?” I asked him as we walked into a crowded Starbucks store in the middle of the block across the street from Rockefeller Center in Midtown. After a second cup of coffee in as many hours, I started firing questions at him. “What’s that? What’s this? What does this mean?” He never appeared overcaffeinated, not for a minute.

Calmly, Beck talked about color first. He pointed to the wood floors, earth-tone tiles, and chairs and tables stained in light to medium shades
of beige, brown, and cherry. All of this, Beck observed, communicated informality, relaxation, and naturalness. Together, they turn Starbucks stores into respites from the city—places, just as Jackie Kacen had suggested, to give yourself the gift of time and a calm moment.

“What’s your overall impression?” I asked Beck as he strolled off to another appointment.

“Well,” he said, pausing as he looked around again, “everything is high quality, at least not too cheap. There is a kind of luxury to the place that customers get to drink in.”

Even in Manhattan’s packed confines, many Starbucks stores look spacious. It seems like the company only chose large, elegant Art Deco buildings with ten-, twelve-, even fifteen-foot ceilings for its coffee-houses. Sometimes the locations had multiple rooms and floors. But when you study the places, you see that no matter how big the footprint, Starbucks doesn’t put the tables and chairs in its stores too close together. Unlike a Parisian café, they aren’t pressed up against each other so tight that customers can smell their neighbor’s food and cologne. Instead, they stand apart, positioned so that users get a sense of privacy, making the stores, as mentioned in the last chapter, perfect alone-in-public spaces rather than third places. The soft sofas and chairs are often tucked in corners or face each other, forming their own little alcoves. When you add up the total number of seats, you discover there really aren’t that many places to sit at a Starbucks in proportion to the size of the space. All of this is, of course, intentional.

Laura Paquet studies not just what shoppers say about their urges to splurge but also what they do. For the “well-heeled,” as she called them, “lots of people say good things about a place.” Drawing an important distinction, she added that crowds send negative signals. Starbucks customers associate places crammed with merchandise and shoppers with the poor, down markets, and Wal-Mart. Space says something else. Room between tables and couches communicates opulence. Paquet talked about bathrooms to underline her point. Multiple toilet stalls behind a single door convey efficiency, while a single bathroom—like
every Starbucks has—implies money and status. A few extra feet here and there, Paquet laughed, “says we can afford empty space.”

Like Greg Beck and Laura Paquet, Michelle Isroff thinks hard about the details of consumer places. She works for Big Red Rooster, a design, marketing, and branding firm in Columbus, Ohio. As part of her job, she studies shopping patterns and retail design. Late one June afternoon, we walked into a bank converted into a Starbucks in Bexley, Ohio, an upscale Columbus suburb. The store was huge, with a wide glass chandelier and a high vaulted ceiling. It was easy to imagine the building in the past with a line of tellers, a waiting area, loan officers’ desks, and a thick door leading to the president’s wood-paneled office. But all that was gone. What stuck out to Isroff, just like it would to Paquet, was how few tables the store actually had. There were only forty seats in the entire place. I asked her why it seemed so empty. Gaps, she explained, help shuttle the take-away customers through the store. But, even more, the wasted space—and that’s really what it is—sends a message. Starbucks is announcing, in effect, that it can afford to throw away a few hundred square feet, and you deserve it. “It’s luxury,” she said.

The chairs, Isroff told me, also figured prominently in Starbucks’ staging of luxury. Just seeing them—extrawide and bursting at the seams with padding—announces to customers that Starbucks is an upscale place to sit and relax, both luxuries and indulgences in our go-go world.

Not only does Isroff study interior spaces; she also analyzes color. She imagines herself, in fact, as a colorologist in training. When she went to Starbucks for the first time in the early 1990s, America, she said, was draped in beige. Tan and khaki covered everything. Those colors spoke of Starbucks’ (and other companies’) moves to connect with people seeking authenticity and more natural products—and perhaps some respite. But, as she pointed out when we visited several Columbus Starbucks, the earth-toned chairs were not the only chairs in the stores. Many outlets by that time—2006—also had a couple of overstuffed purple velour Queen Anne–style armchairs. To Isroff, these bulky upholstered pieces of furniture made Starbucks into a “weirdly affluent, theatric space.”

“How can purple velour chairs mean so much?” I asked.

She chuckled as if to say, Oh, there is so much you need to learn. “Velour,” she explained, usually covers chairs in that “special room in the house—one of those rooms you don’t sit in very often.” But at Starbucks you do get to sit there. “It’s like a gift, a luxury gift,” she said, adding that “purple is an opulent and regal color. Historically, you see it in theaters or hotel dining rooms—places of affluent experience.”

From what I learned by talking to designers and architects, the varied and careful staging at Starbucks turned the stores into a kind of multiple self-gifting venue, perfect for repeat customers looking for different emotional boosts on different days. Need a quick coffee to go? Then the place is uncluttered enough to keep the line moving (plus you could always hit the drive-through). Need quiet or relaxation or alone time? Sit in one of the soft beige chairs set off in a corner in the back. Want a little luxury and indulgence? Then settle down in a purple velour chair by the front window. Different colors for different moods and different rewards. This strategy worked quite well.

CALCULATING COSTS

Oprah Winfrey, as her fans will tell you, does not believe only in every-day pampering and indulgence. She regularly delivers strong sermons to her flock about personal responsibility.
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Over the years, she has coupled her calls for self-gifting with stern warnings against overspending. Like most of us (except perhaps for Wall Street bankers), she has heard too many stories of people buying without thinking, running up credit card debt, and pushing themselves toward the brink of financial disaster. To help her fans out, she regularly invites guests onto her show to talk about financial planning, budgeting, and fiscal belt tightening. Long before the mortgage crisis of 2008, she produced a multiple-episode “debt diet” clinic to guide her audience toward a “clear path to financial freedom.”

As a focal point for the debt relief series, Oprah and her team of experts developed a nine-step plan. Step 1 instructed participants to
determine “how much debt . . . do you really have?” Once you figure this out, down to the very last penny, you are ready for step 2: “finding out where your money is going!” Oprah recommended starting with David Bach’s Latte Factor®—a trademarked term. According to Bach, a Steve Wynn lookalike and author of the best-selling
Finish Rich
books, this is a “simple concept that can help you get out of debt.” “If you put just $10 a day toward your debt,” he explains, “rather than spending it on fancy cups of coffee, cigarettes, bottled water or fast food, in one year you could put $3600 toward your debt!”
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Other financial experts offered similar advice. A group at bankrate .com pointed to possible “java jolt savings,” advising people to “make coffee at home.”
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Scott Burns got even more specific with his “Starbucks Solution.” “Giving up that daily latte,” he argued, “can make you a millionaire.” It works this way, said Burns: A Starbucks grande latte costs about $3.50. If you drink one every day, that would add up to $24.50 a week, $105 a month, and $1,260 per year spent on milky caffeinated drinks. According to Burns, if you put this money instead into a 401(k) for ten years and it grew at a rate of 10 percent per year, you would have $23,959 in your account. Fifteen years later, the latte fund would mushroom to $167,564. By the forty-second year, the account— by Burns’s pre–New Depression calculations—would be just shy of the target: one million dollars.
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Some Oprah fans followed the debt doctors’ advice to the letter. In 2004, Jacque was in trouble. Mired in debt, she told Oprah she walked around all day in a fog of anger and resentment. At night, she couldn’t sleep. During the afternoons, she couldn’t stay awake. Falling fast toward rock bottom, she decided to go on Oprah’s debt diet right away. Eventually she dug herself out of her deep financial hole. She even started to save some money and enjoy life. “My biggest sacrifice,” she admitted, “is giving up my Starbucks Caramel Macchiato every morning.”
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Other Oprah fans wondered if all the penny pinching and self-denial was worth it. For a few of these people, the debt doctors’ advice
backfired and only reinforced the sense of Starbucks as a luxury product and valuable experience. Neuropsychologists who study buying have repeatedly found that consumers experience a surge of good feelings— pleasure—when they act against their narrow economic self-interest. This kind of buying, then, creates a counterintuitive logic and value— one that could fuel luxury consumption in the face of advice about austerity and limits.
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“Do you believe that Starbucks is a waste of money?” asked the organizers of a yahoo.com discussion board. “I was considering this matter today,” answered one woman. She told the members of this virtual community that she used to go to Starbucks “only once or twice a week,” but then she started going even more. “Now I’ve gotten into a routine of getting up at 6:30 A.M., going to the gym and getting some Starbucks afterward.” She took out her calculator. Sounding like David Bach or Scott Burns, she figured out that going for a latte five to six days a week at $3.75 per day added up to $18.75 per week and $975 per year. Sure, she could do other things with that money, but, as she purred at the end of her post, “that wonderful concoction of sugar, caffeine, and whipped cream is so delicious” that it kept her going to the gym and feeling good. Wasn’t that worth something, she wanted to know. “For $975,” answered another member of the yahoo.com discussion, “you get a tremendous number of little luxury rewards every year, right?”
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“I just purchased a home,” Lisa Bree wrote in 2006 on Oprah’s discussion board, adding, “[o]bviously, I dont
[sic]
want to lose that.” Filling out the details of her story, she explained that she had some credit card debt, but the actual problem was cash—she didn’t make that much. “We do live check to check but dont have many of the ‘habits’ that need to be reigned
[sic]
in . . . thankfully. Such as, eating out, spending on clothing.” But lattes, they were a different story. She felt like she needed an incentive to keep going, to keep working and saving, and Starbucks filled the bill. “Okay,” she confessed, “I do go to Starbucks 1–2 times a week . . . but I’ve switched from coffee to decaf-tea (half the price of coffee). But as I fill out the tracking sheets, the only extra money I am putting out is
to the coffee bean ‘god’!” It didn’t seem like she was switching religions anytime soon.
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