Everything but the Coffee (23 page)

Retail therapy—buying to rub out negative feelings, improve your mood, reward yourself, show that you have money, and/or assert control over your body—can work for some people, maybe better even than face-to-face meetings with a therapist. It can provide comfort, self-worth, affirmation, and a general feel-good sensation. And that’s well worth paying a premium for, no matter what the advice doctors say. But for others it adds up to little more than a short-term buzz. Once the sugar wears off and the caffeine loses its edge, the gnawing feelings of want, need, and inadequacy that led some to the Starbucks counter in the first place come roaring back. Next time, they may need more whipped cream, a third pump of caramel syrup, and an extra shot of
espresso. And the high won’t last as long, and their debts might mount. The needs will flow right back. The cycle might get started, and no amount of buying can stop it.
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Nevertheless, the very private nature of self-gifting keeps folks coming back to Starbucks. But how long will self-gifters keep going to Starbucks? As the stores got replicated again and again, they certainly lost some of their luxury feelings. As the fatty contents of Frappuccinos got reported in newspapers and on blogs, can you still hide indulgences behind a plastic cup? As Starbucks’ star fades and the cups don’t look as good, can they really provide the same self-affirming, advice-defying lift that they once did? And with 401(k) plans tanking and unemployment rising in 2009, will Starbucks still be worth it? Will insistence—posters bragging about silky textures and easy-to-find indulgence—work in the face of declining status? Will it work against the push-back of a declining economy? As U.S. automakers teetered on the brink of collapse and unemployment threatened to hit double digits, a new frugality made self-gifters reassess. But it wasn’t so much that they didn’t turn to the marketplace to manage their moods anymore—they just exercised a little more caution. They made sure what they bought could still deliver status, luxury, and an emotional boost. With its glitter dimmed, Starbucks didn’t work as well as it once did on these fronts. It wasn’t a deal even for somewhat free-spending self-gifters. That’s because it had lost its cachet and because it didn’t seem so luxurious or like such a treat anymore. It couldn’t make people feel as good as it once did—even in a venti-sized cup.

Hear Music for Everyday Explorers

In 2006,
New York Times
columnist and linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg published a book called
Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
. Nunberg’s long list captured the attention of NPR media reporter Brooke Gladstone. “Hmm,” she thought, “this sounds like a profile” of her listeners. She set out to see if, in fact, it did fit. Using internal documents, she discovered that while NPR listeners refrained from body piercing, they did like movies and sushi. They were 173 percent more likely than other Americans to buy a Volvo and 310 times more likely to read the Sunday
Times
. They liked
West Wing
, not
Fear Factor
, and yes, she determined, they really did go to Starbucks.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. In many ways, NPR and Starbucks sell similar products. Both package themselves as authentic: real news, real coffee. NPR, it likes to remind its listeners, doesn’t run crass commercials; and Starbucks, it likes to tell its customers, doesn’t rely on Budweiser-type advertisements. NPR reporters and anchors speak in muted voices that match the earth-tone shades of the walls and chairs at Starbucks stores. But both sell, actually, what Gladstone called
a desire to “understand how the world works.”
¹
Indicating once again the expanded meanings of buying, they offered their customers an easy way to absorb and project a sense of learning and discovery. Both were kind of like
National Geographic
without the text. Beyond the hourly updates and drip coffee, the NPR and Starbucks experiences turn on the easy acquisition of adventure and knowledge. Both promise to take customers to new and different places, and the customers in turn get to use the knowledge they gain from these adventures as a kind of currency— as yet another way to make distinctions and show that they are, in the words of a Starbucks marketing representative, “everyday explorers.”
²

The best thing about these explorations, though, is that the adventurers don’t have to travel by themselves. NPR and Starbucks organize the tours for them. Everyday explorers don’t have to spend hours online researching flights or looking for clean hotels or encountering any of the unpredictability or griminess that comes from seeking out something truly new and foreign. Yet they can still get regular doses of discovery through their purchases.

“I want to come in and be surprised,” Hazel Delgado, a thirty-three-year-old regular at a San Bernardino, California, Starbucks said about her favorite coffeehouse.
³
Customers will pay for discovery—with pledge drive calls and return visits for high-priced coffee—because the idea and feeling of discovery has value. Listening to a radio report from Myanmar or drinking a cup of coffee made from Sumatra beans can be like traveling to a far-off land. Both Starbucks and NPR make this kind of “virtual touring” accessible and easy while still slightly foreign and exotic. Among creative class types, travel or discovery translates into cultural capital. Knowing something or going away can earn you the respect, admiration, and the dinner party envy of friends and associates. The farther you go, at least in higher education and higher earning circles, the more capital you get. Think about the esteem and admiration someone earns at a get-together in a New York City loft apartment for venturing to Laos or Chile. You get points, too, for discovering a new
Burmese or Brazilian restaurant. Sensing this dynamic, Starbucks offers a watered-down version of this transaction, taking its less adventurous patrons away from the glass towers and enclosed malls of the developed world. The coffee company promises to escort customers on voyages to the most rural, underdeveloped, and authentic spots on earth, places with lots of vicarious cultural capital in bobo and creative class social networks. Starbucks and NPR, then, create package tours for those on breaks between their own overseas trips, and smooth sailing for the less adventurous, those who want discovery but want it close by, clean, and not too far outside the mainstream.

Coffee anchors the Starbucks discovery experience. “Look at the world through the eyes of Starbucks coffee,” the company Web site suggests. “Geography is flavor,” according to another of the firm’s favorite taglines. With each cup (even if it is loaded with milk and sugar), Starbucks promises to take its customers on journeys to distant, exotic lands. For a time, Starbucks even issued coffee passports. With every bag of single-origin beans purchased, you got a stamp, certifying that you had been to Ethiopia, then to Colombia, and then to East Timor. Of course, you didn’t need a visa or vaccines or to take your shoes off at air-port security to go to these places, and that is a big part of the appeal.

While the Starbucks discovery aesthetic begins with coffee, it gets sounded out with music. Any Starbucks regular during the height of the Starbucks moment—say, from 1998 to 2005 or so—was sure to have heard Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club and Brazil’s Sergio Mendes while waiting in line for a tall Caffè Verona or grande Guatemala Antigua coffee. Starbucks’ musical project sold the foreign and unfamiliar, exploiting yuppie and upper-middle-class desires for discovery and knowledge. That’s been a constant with the company and its music. But that doesn’t mean that Starbucks’ musical project hasn’t changed. Over the years, Starbucks has packaged its music and its explorations of the larger world in different ways, moving from the quest for discovery to sell the unfamiliar to using the aura of discovery to sell the familiar.
⁴

SEARCHING FOR THE NEW

I still remember him slumped over the record rack, the back of his checked thrift store jacket riding up and pinching him where his arms met his shoulders. He looked like an underwater diver. After staying bent down for a long stretch, he would pull up and call out across the crowded eight-by-twelve-foot store right off the pages of Nick Hornby’s
High Fidelity
.

“Bry, do you know this band?”

I learned long before then not to say yes to Bing, unless I really did know the band, and I usually didn’t.

“No,” I called back softly, trying to hide my musical illiteracy from the store’s other well-informed record divers.

Then Bing—his parents named him Justin—would turn to me and tell me about the band and its lineup changes, its history and back-ground, and who they sounded like. A mix between the Smiths and Big Star, or maybe the singer reminder him of a younger Eartha Kitt— another Bing favorite. After a few rounds of this, he would pick out an album or an EP, and we would head home.

Later, in the living room of our second-floor walk-up apartment, we would make a pot of coffee and listen to the new music on our portable flip-top turntable with the sounds coming out of three-inch-high red plastic speakers.

“So what do you think?”

It went like this every week. Bing would read papers and magazines, listen to the radio, and talk to his friends, and then on Saturdays, we would go record shopping. Usually Bing came home with something I had never heard of or hadn’t heard in a long time. He loved turning me, or anyone else who stopped by the apartment, on to new stuff. I got to know some of my favorite music this way—Chris Bell, Curtis Mayfield, the Modern Lovers, the June Brides, the Replacements, the Stars of Heaven, the Shangri-Las, and Solomon Burke.

Bing became, in a sense, my music editor. He picked through the record racks and chose the tunes. I handed him this role because I trusted him. I trusted his taste and judgment, I trusted that he wanted to extend my musical reach, and I trusted that he believed that music, just on its own, could make our lives better—more fun, more soulful, more meaningful, and more melodious. From there, I trusted him about other things. I read books that he suggested, went to movies that he recommended, and saw plays that he had heard about or seen. Bing served as a culture broker for me in those days.

Through Bing, I discovered new music and the vocabulary to talk about it. I could then take that knowledge and share it (or show it off) to others. As I did, I gained cultural capital myself. I appeared like someone who had valuable insider information on music, and I gained, in some people’s eyes, a bit of esteem because of this knowledge. I knew something that they didn’t know; I could help them make a discovery. Knowledge and information have currency in the postneed economy—people who know stuff have value, and we gravitate toward them to get their tips and insights, and then we absorb what they teach us and make it our own (sometimes with, sometimes without, attribution). This informal transfer of new knowledge goes on all the time, and it’s exactly what Starbucks sought to commodify through selling music, and later books, packaged as discovery.

PACKAGING THE NEW

To his friends, Don MacKinnon played the same role as Bing did in my life. As a Williams College undergraduate, he spent hours making mixed tapes for his dorm mates. From there, he went to Harvard Business School. When he graduated with an MBA in 1990, he joined with two other classmates to start Hear Music, a kind of commercialization of his college role as the guy who turned others on to new music. What Hear Music really sold was cultural capital through discovery—the value of the chance to learn something new and then show it to others.

At the outset, MacKinnon and his associates ran the company as a mail-order catalog. They introduced people to largely unknown regional acts like Texas legends Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Along with these releases, Hear Music put out compilations of a number of talented singer-songwriters—symbols of authenticity in the age of hair bands—like Nanci Griffith, Ricki Lee Jones, and Bonnie Raitt. From there, Hear Music opened record stores in Berkeley, Chicago, and a few places in between. Bing explained to me, “These were tastemaker shops,” forerunners to Amazon and hundreds of Internet retailers, “that used the ‘if you like . . . Cowboy Junkies or Lyle Lovett . . . , you will love [fill in the blank]”—something, he added, “you can see in today’s Starbucks marketing.” Hear Music offered a limited stock of products (say, one thousand records), and the staff—usually people who knew music—felt a certain ownership over these artists. They embraced the idea that it was their right, their duty, to turn people on to
their
artists and
their
songs. “Nothing came cheap at Hear Music,” Bing added. Most CDs sold for the full manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Like the value proposition Starbucks offered in its earliest days—pay them and you get a little of their coffee knowledge—people paid a premium to Hear Music to gain access to the staff’s musical expertise and a chance at discovering something new.
⁵

When a store plays music, though not Muzak or mainstream pop, it signals that it is a place for discovery. Less commercial music went hand in glove with the idea of the twentieth-century coffeehouse experience. At those smoky, basement beatific places, scratchy jazz and blues records played during the day, and folk musicians strummed their guitars and blew into harmonicas at night. When Howard Schultz opened Il Giornale, he played opera. At one of the very first Starbucks, located across from the University of Washington campus in Seattle, Timothy Jones made cappuccinos and spun records like a DJ. So did other baristas.
⁶

As the company grew, though, Starbucks didn’t want to leave any-thing to chance. It wanted predictability in the sounds as much as the drinks. It didn’t want customers greeted by the roar of metal at 6 A.M. or
bubbly synthetic dance music in the middle of the afternoon. To ensure sameness and keep every store on the same musical page, the company at some point installed special CD players that would only play company-issued CDs. No worker could drop his or her own tunes into these machines.
⁷
But as Starbucks grew, it needed music; moreover, it needed someone to pick the music. Flush with cash and confidence from its initial public stock offering in 1992, Starbucks started to assert itself more on the music front, in many ways modeling itself after Hear Music, which it eventually purchased in 1999 and made its official sound source.