Everything but the Coffee (22 page)

Neither was Seattle law student Kirsten Daniels. She dealt with the daily pressures of
Paper
Chase–like professors grilling her in class by heading to Starbucks for what she called “my comfort latte.” Like a good citizen of the postneed, pre–New Depression economic order, she usually paid for her three-dollar latte with a credit card. “A latte a day on borrowed money? It’s crazy,” said Erica Lim, the law school’s director of career services and a kindred spirit to Oprah’s financial advisers. Quantifying the craziness, Lim created a few charts and graphs. One showed that a five-day-a-week latte habit through three years of law school on borrowed money could cost as much as $4,154 when repaid over ten years. Another table calculated that if you made your own coffee at home for thirty years and refrained from buying three-dollar lattes, you could save $53,341 with compound interest. The numbers surprised Daniels, but it didn’t change her ways—not at all. She added things up differently in her day-to-day life. “I guess I never had done the math,” she confessed. “On the other hand, I would be a very crabby person without my comfort latte.”
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Like others, Daniels made a rational— for her—determination. Credit card purchases spent on feeling better outweighed the need to save money for a rainy day. Clearly for her, self-gifting had value. Even at three dollars a pop plus interest, it was an indispensable and affordable way to get a little daily solace.

SUPERSIZED STARBUCKS

Starbucks inflates everything. The drinks cost a fair amount. In fact, they can cost more than some meals at McDonald’s and KFC. And you don’t get much functional worth for your money at Starbucks except perhaps for the caffeine buzz. The
Wall Street Journal
, in fact, reported that Starbucks sold the most highly caffeinated coffee out there.
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When it comes to utility, though, there is no good reason to pay $3.75 for a venti Vanilla Latte. It doesn’t have much nutritional value; you can’t
really substitute it for a meal, although some try. (More on that later.) Starbucks’ lack of functionality is, in fact, why it stands out as a target for Oprah’s narrowly rational debt doctors. The stern warnings of stodgy financial advisers probably made venti lattes more valuable as showy, slightly illicit items. But Starbucks’ excess also explained why it worked not just for flashy purchases but also as retail therapy.

If the point of some buying is to give comfort or confer value or enjoy an occasional forbidden pleasure, then the product or service needs to be good, or at least appear to be good. Shorthand for “good” in the postneed economy is expensive. But good, especially in America, is also about things that are big and then bigger still. Starbucks delivers on that front as well.

Starbucks supersizes everything from language to calorie counts. Tall is the smallest drink on the menu board.
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The drinks themselves are usually laden with copious amounts of caffeine, milk, sugar, syrup, whipped cream, and fat.
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Fern Berke, remember, celebrated her paydays with a venti Mint Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino. This twenty-ounce beverage topped with whipped cream and a drizzle of chocolate contains 650 calories and 25 grams of fat. Fellow University of Georgia student Ana Garcia got the nonfat Vanilla Latte—230 calories and no fat—when she felt like being healthy, but her splurge drink—a Peppermint Mocha Twist Latte—came in at 450 calories weighed down by 13 grams of fat. That venti mocha that Louisiana housewife Meredith Lemmon ordered on the worst of her “bad days” carries with it 490 calories and 15 grams of fat. If things got even worse for her, she could go with a venti Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino that Starbucks advertises as an indulgent treat and has more than 700 calories and 30 grams of fat. By comparison, a Boston Kreme Donut at Dunkin’ Donuts contains what seems like a rather modest 240 calories and 9 grams of fat. A Big Mac comes in at 560 calories and 30 grams of fat. A Burger King Whopper contains even more calories, but not as many as that Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino.

Without knowing it, a friend of a blogger named “LegWarmer” went on an “accidental Starbucks diet.” At the time, she hadn’t heard any of
those reports on the calorie and fat content of Starbucks Frappuccinos or lattes. She was, instead, trying to save money. When she started her fiscal belt-tightening regime, she had a serious Starbucks habit. She went twice a day for grande-sized milky, whipped-cream-topped concoctions (which contain about five hundred calories each). But she kicked the habit to take pressure off her bank account. After only two months, she saved a hundred dollars and lost—unintentionally, at first—eight pounds.
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England’s Aileen McGloin thought she faced a clear choice: “Starbucks or Big Butts.” Keeping trim didn’t mean giving up coffee, she explained, just getting rid of the extras: the sugar, milk, whipped cream, and flavored syrups. To make her point, she got her calculator out and started pressing the keys. “Vanilla, hazelnut, orange, mint, liquors, chocolate, almond, cinnamon. Mmm, mmm, mmm,” she hummed. Yet each serving, she determined, “add[s] 51 calories, . . . for a heaped teaspoon of these delicious Italian flavours.” “Doing that five days a week,” she continued with her math, “adds around 1,000 calories a month and could add around three-and-a-half pounds to your otherwise perfect bod within a year. That’s half a stone [i.e., seven pounds] in two years and a whole stone in four.”
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In her messages about self-respect and personal responsibility, Oprah also focuses on dieting. Over the years, she herself has gone up and down in weight and tried all kinds of ways to keep fit, trim, and happy about herself and her body. Diet doctors, nutritionists, chefs, and physical trainers regularly appear on her show and in her magazine. Like the financial gurus, they advise viewers on the best ways to work out, cut calories, and keep costs down. Not surprisingly, several of Oprah’s body experts exhort her fans to start intentional Starbucks diets. The growing awareness of exactly what’s in a venti latte or grande Frappuccino certainly could explain why some Starbucks customers drifted away from the stores after 2006. But this probably accounts for only a small number of detractors.

For some Starbucks aficionados, the calories in the drinks don’t matter, or they don’t want to know about them. Others “need” them as part of their own private retail therapy strategies. “I’d never give up
Starbucks for anything!!” writes one woman with a touch of the retail militancy that Faith Popcorn has noted. Others suggested not thinking about the milk and sugar too much when ordering a Frappuccino or Mocha Latte. Another weight control plan was to limit but not give up on Starbucks entirely. “I’m not a straight coffee drinker but have become addicted to the espresso drinks and the frappuccinos,” confessed Chicago’s June B. “I don’t care,” she continued, “if they are fru fru
[sic]
drinks—I love them and I’ll get extra whipped cream on them if I want to! It’s a treat I give myself every week!”
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Jane Austen fan Deb Richardson joined a 2005 online discussion on “guilty pleasures.” When she first started thinking about it, she didn’t imagine that she had any of these questionable indulgences. But then it hit her. “I DO have a guilty pleasure! I’m sure it’ll seem like a let-down after all the life-and-death stuff above, but here it is. My guilty pleasure is a Starbucks Caramel Frapuccino
[sic].”
For her, the guilt came in part from the cost. “They are hideously expensive. I mean, comeon . . . approx. $4 for a coffee slushy???” What’s more, she didn’t like the fact that the company grew so fast and acted as a “plague on the earth.” But she didn’t care, she wrote, about the “bazillion empty calories.” As long as someone else made the drink and cleaned the blender up afterward, she could easily tell her “conscience to shut up about the money and plagues and just order, dammmit. And it tastes soooo good.”
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I talked with thirteen-year-old Jenna Foreman about Starbucks. Years earlier, I went to college with her dad. These days he is a partner in a New York law firm with an office high over Times Square. The family lives in tony Westchester. Most days, Jenna stops at Starbucks after school. She gets a Frappuccino or a latte, always decaf. Why not McDonald’s, I asked her? “Yikes,” she said. “I saw that movie,
Super Size Me
. I won’t go there.” But, I told her, there are just as many calories in a Frappuccino as a Big Mac. “I don’t care,” she declared. “It is just different at Starbucks.”

I was still puzzling over this perception—that some calories are different from others or not as bad—when I went to see my dentist. “I read
about you,” Johanna Morgan, a hygienist, called out to me from across the room. She had seen a piece about my research in the
Metro
paper and wanted to talk. She told me that she regularly went to both Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts. But then she smiled and said about Starbucks, “I do go there for my Iced Vanilla Lattes.”

“Do you go every day, every week?” I asked.

“I go on Fridays.”

“Why, because that’s payday?” I responded, thinking of Fern Berke.

“No, no,” Johanna said. “It’s a treat . . . not because of money, but because of the calories.”

The calories, it seemed, heightened the pleasure of Starbucks for Johanna and Deb. It was like stealing something otherwise forbidden and getting that rush that psychologists talked about from acting against narrow economic and personal self-interest.
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It was also like declaring your freedom, saying that you will not live in denial every minute. For some, like the woman who dieted and rewarded herself with a Frappuccino, the calories represented the gift. “If you are holding it in all week and holding it together,” social psychologist and marketing professor Jackie Kacen said of the connection between high-calorie drinks and dieting, “then you need a break.” The appeal of Starbucks, in other words, rested with the supersized drinks, heaps of whipped cream, and pumps of syrup. Perhaps, too, buying a pink Frappuccino or a Hazelnut Latte represented an act of defiance. Enough advice about what to eat, these consumers said. Enough about saving money. Every once in a while you have to let go. You deserve it. Maybe a big drink was an assertion of control and even small act of rebellion against the image-conscious, denial-peddling segments in society. It was valuable retail therapy. But danger lurked here as well.

•  •  •

Britney Spears lives only minutes away from a Starbucks, and that’s the way she likes it. She will brave the crowds and cameras and sprint from her car to the store, to get her fix.
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Not long after the birth of her son Sean Preston, the pop star went on a Starbucks run. Suddenly the
paparazzi swarmed in, and she had to beat a hasty retreat. She jumped into her SUV with an oversized cup of Starbucks coffee in her hand and dashed off with Sean Preston unbuckled on her lap in the front seat. The next morning TMZ.com and other sites buzzed with talk of Britney. Some labeled her an unfit mother. Her then-husband, Kevin Federline, rushed to her defense, proclaiming, “I’d say she plays mama real well.” Hitching up the pants in the family, K-Fed added that his wife had his permission to race away from the press with Sean Preston in her lap any-time cameramen chased her at Starbucks or anywhere else.
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Even after their separation got nasty and Britney went through a public meltdown, she still went to Starbucks. After one stint at rehab, it was her first stop on the way home, although she allegedly gave up on Frappuccinos in 2009 when she went on a comeback diet.

Britney is not the only tabloid star with a serious Starbucks self-gifting habit. Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Mary-Kate Olsen seem to carry Starbucks coffee cups everywhere they go right alongside their fancy bags. In almost every photo (all forms of indirect advertising for Starbucks), these famously young and painfully thin women clutch venti-sized cups; their fingers barely big enough to get around the containers. For wannabes, venti consumption operates on several levels. Some are certainly emulating, once again making Starbucks an aspirational product. They drink what the stars drink, driving up Starbucks sales. But for some stars and their fans, I suspect, drinking profuse amounts of coffee is seen as a safe and legal weight loss technique. Many teenagers, among Starbucks’ most loyal customers, see caffeine—wrongly, according to experts—as an appetite suppressant and fat burner, and thus as part of an overall body control program. When it comes to consuming food, too many young female stars, with their fans following their leads, live in perpetual denial to keep thin. Venti coffees with whipped cream and pumps of caramel syrup are, again, one of the very few food areas where celebrities and their followers let themselves splurge because, as some have told me, they think the caffeine will kill their appetites and the drinks will fill their stomachs. To them, coffee has
the added possible benefit of working as a laxative. (Informants have told me this as well, which is presumably another part of the drinks’ personal, and emotional value.)

Drinking Starbucks for the calories or as part of a weight reduction plan represents another form of retail therapy, soothing the psyche through the stomach. By now, many customers certainly know what is inside a Starbucks cup or in one of the brown paper pastry bags. They know the drinks and food are loaded with milk and sugar, fats and carbohydrates. Frappuccinos and flavored lattes become rewards for getting through a hard day or a bad date, but it doesn’t bring negative attention like a Big Mac and large fries would. If Mary-Kate Olsen, with her history of an eating disorder, sat down with two all-beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and special sauce on a sesame seed bun, the preying paparazzi would fire away, and the tabloids would howl. But she can drink a venti Frappuccino without anyone saying anything. Starbucks has emerged as a culturally sanctioned form of consuming excess and feeling good about it.

But how long can the good feeling last? Many women and men can’t just drink five hundred calories and a couple dozen grams of fat and forget about it. A visit to Starbucks might be followed up by a visit to the gym, a moment of regret, an hour of guilt, or, worse, a secret trip to the bathroom.