Everything but the Coffee (3 page)

Responding to upper-middle-class consumer desires to attain quality and convenience, and, even more, to separate themselves from the pack by showing off their wealth and know-how, urbanity and sophistication, Starbucks experienced explosive growth in the 1980s and 1990s. From one store in 1971, the company grew to two hundred twenty years later.
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Ten years and two thousand stores after that, Starbucks went public and used the infusion of cash to push itself deeper into the American main-stream. Between 2003 and 2007, Starbucks opened two thousand outlets each year—or a new Starbucks every five hours each day for half a decade. By the start of 2008, Starbucks operated sixteen thousand stores in forty countries. The previous year the company generated $7.8 billion in revenues, resulting in a $564 million profit.
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The desires that Starbucks identified, packaged, and turned into mesmerizing profits grew out of shifts in daily routines for those in the United States (and around the world) with decent jobs and educations.
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Rising incomes for people already in higher earning brackets through the 1980s and 1990s combined with lower costs for everyday items (think Wal-Mart here) to free up extra money for four-dollar lattes. The go-go lifestyles of stock analysts, drug company reps, and suburban moms translated into chronic sleep deprivation and an ever-present need for sugary, caffeine-laced pick-me-ups and a place to go between business meetings, sales calls, and errands. With more people traveling, working from home, and telecommuting, fewer people had offices, but they, too, needed a clean and predictable place to meet and talk. At the same time, affordable laptops and the Internet made it easy for chemistry students, short-story writers, and middle managers to take their work with them, wherever they went, including the coffee shop. Higher rates of education—more than half of all Americans enroll at some point in university or community college classes—generated a desire to keep learning and discovering new things, especially if they weren’t too new or hard to find.

Fueling its growth even further, Starbucks gave yuppies, bobos, and their imitators a way to show off their wealth (or their desire for wealth), sophistication, and continental tastes. Who else could afford to spend so much time and money on coffee, except people with money to burn and an appreciation of life’s finer things? But Starbucks offered more than simply a platform for conspicuous consumption. In the class pecking order of the Starbucks moment, higher-ups wanted to demonstrate not just that they had money but also that they had the education and knowledge to distinguish quality from dreck, the authentic from the inauthentic. With these buyers in mind, Starbucks designers decorated their stores in earth tones and equipped them with cozy fireplaces that mirrored the natural upscale aesthetic of the 1980s era and beyond. Marketers crafted a corporate language that featured Italian-sounding words and lots of talk about handcrafted beverages made from ethically sourced beans to showcase their customers’ desire for a worldly and caring public image. For a finishing touch, the human relations staff fashioned scripts for workers that provided the men and women in line with a reassuring sense of importance, individuality, and, perhaps most valuable, belonging—a key promise for all successful brands in the post-need, civically starved marketplace.

In 2006, sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears published a widely read and troubling study. A quarter of the fifteen hundred people they interviewed claimed to have no close confidants, and less than half reported having even two good friends. Both indices, moreover, were falling fast. The sobering data suggested to these scholars a significant growth in social isolation. Suburbanization, car culture, fear of crime, and constant movement away from hometowns, friends, and family added to feelings of disconnectedness.
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No groups have been more mobile over the last two decades, and thus more isolated, than yuppies, bobos, and creative class types—the core of Starbucks’ customer base.

Americans used to hang out at corner bars and groceries and gossip at butcher shops and on front stoops. We belonged to close-by churches,
synagogues, temples, school boards, ethnic lodges, neighborhood clubs, local political parties, trade unions, extended family circles, softball teams, and weekly bowling leagues. Each of these organizations and alliances shaped who we were, how we saw the world, and how we represented ourselves. They provided others with clues to our beliefs, backgrounds, and loyalties. Yet over the last two generations, what we might call
everyday associationalism
has receded in the United States, especially in upper-middlebrow circles, even as social networking and virtual community building have intensified. Few Yale or Berkeley graduates return to the streets or cul-de-sacs of their youth. They move on to new jobs and new places. Detached from neighbors and worried about the unknown, they socialize (when they do) in fenced-in back yards or at pricey restaurants with valet parking. They shop in enclosed malls or online. From the 1970s onward, as Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam noted in another widely read study,
Bowling Alone
, club membership in the United States fell along with attendance at town hall, Cub Scout, and PTA meetings. Fewer people, he found, signed petitions, went to campaign rallies, or showed up to vote on Election Day (a trend that might be reversed with the last presidential election). While college graduates tended to cast a ballot, they liked to think of themselves as publicly self-reliant individuals and political “independents.” Although this self-concept preserved their sense of impartiality, it isolated them yet again from others, even those with similar political views, and from the political system in general.
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The drift from the public to the private has left many of us feeling bereft. “It’s the sense of touch,” says Graham in the opening scene of the Academy Award-winning hit film
Crash
. “In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you.” But in Los Angeles, he comments, talking about the prototype of the detached, privatized landscape of today, “nobody touches you. We’re always behind metal and glass. I think we miss the touch so much, we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”
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Brands like Starbucks, underlining again its typicality, have stepped in and offered us a way to bump into others (while, of course, maintaining,
though not making explicit, our contradictory impulses for individuality and personal space). None of these culture-hawking companies engineer community as a gift or as a social service. Business leaders know that if they match—or appear to match—our deepest needs, we will pay more for what they sell. Scott Bedbury, Starbucks’ chief brander during its first massive growth spurt, wrote, “We all want to belong to something larger than ourselves.” In this context, he continued, “it means that the mere possession of a product can make consumers feel as if they are somehow deeply connected to everyone else who owns that product, almost as if they were together in a family.”
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Brands, in other words, promised to make us more connected and less alienated. While Bedbury’s pledges added value to the products he pitched, these same promises simultaneously reinforced the very trends that have left us on our own in the first place. Go down the list of widely shared wants, and you’ll see that brands have developed narratives to meet our desires. It doesn’t matter what the need is—they vow to make it right, yet only through private, market-based solutions. When their messages get boiled down, Bedbury and his band of consumer persuaders sell promises. That is the key to business in the postneed order. We live in a world, then, where companies make all kinds of promises on all kinds of fronts. And Starbucks, like a lot of the newer, hipper firms on the NASDAQ, makes a lot of promises, maybe more than just about any other company in the post-GM economic order.

Don’t have enough community? Starbucks will manufacture some for you. Having a bad day? Starbucks will pick you up and be your friend, too. Wish that our foreign policy helped out the poor and that people around the world—especially after 9/11—liked us better? Starbucks can do that as well. Who needs government or partisan politics when there is Starbucks? Starbucks can clean up the environment, engineer diversity, and, for a finishing touch, splash up our lives with a little art.

Starbucks’ success turned not just on promises or clever manipulation or even civic retrenchment, but also on us. While we aren’t dupes of the
market, we have become somewhat complicit in our own ensnarement. Schooled by the nonstop promises of branders and other consumer persuaders, we seem convinced that buying can be transformative, for us and for society. Want to change your life? Pick up a new and improved product, and you’ve done it. It is that easy. Of course, we know it doesn’t really work that way, but the endless repetition of the message shapes us in our age of growing social isolation where there is so little to push back against the persuaders. This dearth of options has left us in a gray zone. We want solutions to everything from our own sense of detachment to global warming to economic inequities. Responding to these needs, branders have told us that we can have what we want and get it as easily as getting a new flavor of coffee or a low-fat scone. It is not just that they assure us that we can easily fulfill our needs; they also have trained us to expect to get these things with-out giving up too much.

When Starbucks told us, just like Bono and his Gap associates did, that all we had to do to fix the world’s problems was to buy from them, many of us said OK and kept drinking our lattes, content that we had done something, which was better than doing nothing. We can, we are told, look better and alleviate our guilt about the thinning ozone layer by getting our coffee from a company that insists it is doing its part to save the environment. Starbucks thrived on selling this sort of political gesture or nod, this easy-to-swallow form of what I would call “innocence by association.”

This behavior isn’t quite as innocent as it looks, though. As buying burrows deeper into civic life, the voices of reform and dissent, of doing something other than buying, get muffled. Like other purveyors of good works, Starbucks speaks so loudly and insistently about belonging, recycling, and global poverty that it becomes harder for truer agents of change to be heard. No one in favor of implementing a comprehensive system of fair trade or junking take-away consumption has sixteen thousand multimedia outlets to broadcast its views and promises, as Starbucks does with its stores.
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All the flash and all the noise, moreover,
make it harder for us to see the costs of buying and the sort of private masquerading as the public that Starbucks does so well.

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All the promising worked for a while. Starbucks’ stock price climbed to head-shaking heights, and revenues piled up. Still, Wall Street wanted more—more stores, more profit. To reach deeper into the American mainstream, the company watered down its products. Coffee got replaced at the top of the menu by adult milkshakes with as many calories as a Big Mac. Speedy push-button espresso makers edged skilled coffee artisans to the side. Global justice got trumped in favor of a steady supply of beans purchased from middlemen rather than small farmers.

As the compromises multiplied, consumers didn’t get the same psychological high and boost in esteem from their lattes as they had in the past. When Starbucks first opened, it sold the promise of genuine European coffee to urban pioneers brought up on suburbia’s bland little boxes and processed foods. But it couldn’t build stores everywhere, rush customers through the line, and still appear authentic. Sensing an advantage, local coffee shops offered less mass-produced, more genuine-seeming products. This happened over and over again with the everyday desires and status symbols Starbucks had originally identified, packaged, and sold. Each time this took place, a chunk of Starbucks’ customer base broke off. But even more significantly, the company’s cultural worth—its value in the postneed marketplace of everyday image making and emotion management—dropped. Each time that happened, the cost of the drinks rose, even as the price remained the same.

Starbucks promised endless choices and individualism (everyone could have their very own Starbucks drink), but how could it deliver on this when every store looked so similar? Customers in search of some-thing that would distinguish them from others drifted to one-of-a-kind local places with mismatched furniture and vegan cookies. In its mission statement, Starbucks pledged to serve the “finest coffee in the world,” but its need for mountains of beans have made this impossible.
Consumers looking for a truer coffee experience can now head to a “third wave” place (the diner was the first and Starbucks the second), where they roast the beans in the store and employees don’t smile on demand but know about the subdued berry and coca tastes of Guatemalan beans. Starbucks talked about creating community, yet it quietly discouraged conversation, setting tables apart, turning up the music, and making itself into a laptop alley. Connection-seeking customers went elsewhere to discuss the issues of the day with actual people, not just read banal quotes from pop stars and television personalities stamped onto cups.

Even the company’s much-touted bluish values of doing good got spread thinner. Starting in 2007, Ethiopian officials accused Starbucks of something close to coffee colonialism. On the home front, judges charged the company with putting its hand in the tip jar and trying to buy off prounion workers with baseball tickets and, if that didn’t work, firing them. Starbucks vowed to make the world cleaner and more just, but other coffee companies came along with fairer trade policies and greener products, and they won over customers who believed in these issues or thought they made them look better, especially better than Starbucks patrons.

The defections ate into Starbucks’ profits and standing. The company was losing its hold on cultural leaders, the kinds of people others emulate. As bobos and creative class types left the stores, carrying a Starbucks cup no longer represented elevated status, and customers started to complain about the cost. In a 2008 survey, 73 percent of the people questioned said that Starbucks was overpriced.
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As consumers recalculated the brand’s value, the company opened itself up to comparisons with McDonald’s, the antithesis of buying for cultural cachet in the postneed economy. Nobody heads to the functionally geared Golden Arches to rub elbows with the successful or look good to others. “It’s just like they’re churning it out, like McDonald’s . . . there is nothing special about it [anymore],” noted
Emily, a sociology graduate student and regular at a fair-trade independent coffee shop.
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