Everything but the Coffee (36 page)

I could see this transformation taking shape in the informal polls I conducted. When I talk to groups about Starbucks, I usually ask them what percentage of Starbucks’ coffee, they think, comes from fair-trade
sources. Before 2006, audiences would answer, “Forty percent,” “No, 60 percent,” or “All of it.” Most overestimated Starbucks’ fair-trade purchases, which during those years stood at around 6 percent. When I asked the same question in 2007 and 2008, the responses flipped. People would now say, “One percent,” “Half a percent,” or “None.”

This sense of Starbucks’ ordinariness—that is, its lack of ethics—led to the peeling off of yet another segment of the Starbucks market. People who read news reports about Ethiopia or cared about fair trade would not look at someone carrying a Starbucks cup and think that he or she cared about the least fortunate. They might even see them as The Man, as a source of oppression. And in many places by 2007, there was a clear alternative: a coffeehouse down the same street—usually a local place—with a better global story to sell. Typically these cafés sold only fair-trade beans, and every once in a while they had farmers from far-away places in the stores to testify in person to the benefits of ethical consumption. Starbucks was out of that circle—a circle it had helped draw at the beginning of the Starbucks moment. By 2009, others stood in the center and weren’t about to yield the high ground. Foreign policy was now their competitive advantage.
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When Starbucks’ star started to fade in 2007 and 2008, it was easy to see this as a modern-day refrain of Nero playing his fiddle during the fall of Rome. In October 2008, the
New York Times
headlined on the front page of the business section, “Goodbye Seduction, Hello Coupons.”
¹
The two writers suggested that marketers better get with the times and redo their pitches to stress the affordable over the aspirational. With foreclosures on the rise and reports of layoffs popping up every day on CNN.com’s breaking news ticker, it was easy to see Starbucks’ struggles—a shocking 97 percent drop in profits in the fourth quarter of 2008—as symbolic of the larger economic malaise and the collapse of luxury consumption.
²
A Seattle cartoonist pictured the company’s siren icon begging for quarters on a street corner. Certainly people started to pinch pennies and cut back on four-dollar lattes as they watched the value of their 401(k)s cut in half. Tastes changed as well. Ostentatious items and overspending didn’t seem so hip in the face of soaring unemployment. Marking the changing aesthetic, twenty-something New Yorkers began to hold Great Depression parties for the New Depression era.

In truth, though, Starbucks had begun to stumble a couple of years before Washington had to rescue Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac and Manhattanites started donning Tom Joad hats and humming Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads.
³
Even as the deluxe economy crumbled,
consumers continue to consume and express themselves through their purchases, including coffee purchases. Like so much about Starbucks, its stumbles at the end of the Bush era served as a reminder of its ordinariness and as an indicator of broader trends, even continuities.

In the civically challenged world of endless buying, which propelled latte profits, consumers bought coffees for comfort and solace and to make public statements. But in this same world, all products were ephemeral. Nothing was enduring. In the first days of the New Depression, luxury was out; 1930s-style frugality was in. Corporate coffeehouses weren’t cool; independent ones were. Despite the desperate financial news, people in the United States were still buying coffee, they were still getting it to go, and they were still paying three and four dollars for their drinks. While some insisted that the days of self-gifting and over-the-top spending were over, it was hard to make a direct correlation between the larger economy and everyday consumption patterns. To be sure, brands and products have terminal shelf lives, and the sell-by date is determined as much by cultural value as it is by price. When an item loses its usefulness, in terms of both utility and cultural resonance, consumers stop buying it. That doesn’t mean, however, they stop buying altogether, even in the midst of a huge economic meltdown. For better or worse, the postneed economic order has endured.

Based on my observations and conversations, it didn’t seem like independently owned coffee shops and local places, where four-dollar lattes were as commonplace as at Starbucks, took much of a hit in 2008 as world markets tanked. Again, this continuous business reflects the same relentless, remorseless cultural logic of the postneed economy. It was Starbucks that was hurting in 2007 and 2008, not the coffee business or the business of expressing yourself through your beverage choices. That is not to say that the loss of trillions of dollars in stock values and surging rates of unemployment didn’t make it harder for Starbucks to get going again. But that’s the point. Starbucks was already down, even as the luxury coffee market remained viable. Starbucks, remember, was already discounting its goods and offering “members-only values” to
“coffee superlovers” when the whole economy started to sour in the fall of 2008.
⁴
It had already become so ordinary that it had lost its cultural and symbolic value to its customers. Its shelf life as a high-end good was over. Because of that, by the start of 2009, if not before, it wasn’t a bargain anymore, not in the way that consumers calculated worth with culture, status, and self-image in mind. Why would people who still had money in their pockets go out of their way to stop at Starbucks, when other brands sold cheaper coffee or drinks that tasted just as good (or just as milky and sugary), and other stores told better stories about what their products said about you, the consumer? Again, the larger story is as much about Starbucks’ troubles as it about the endurance of the post-GM order way of thinking where consumption trumps everything else.

I didn’t start researching this book, however, to explain Starbucks’ fall. I began trying to make sense of the company’s success, which, in the end, has allowed me to see the reasons for its fall even more clearly. When I look back now, the origins of this book can be traced to New Year’s Day 2003 and to a Starbucks in a strip mall parking lot in suburban Atlanta. The night before, friends invited us for dinner and a sleep-over. We brought with us to the party a forty-dollar bottle of French champagne. After tangy Spanish cheeses, creamy pâté, provolone-stuffed mushrooms, a pasta course, a main course, salad, two different desserts, martinis, wine, and scotch, we waddled over to the television and watched the ball drop over a soggy Times Square. Just after Dick Clark called out, “Happy New Year,” I popped the cork. Just about everyone, however, put their hands over their flutes or asked for just a sip. One person didn’t feel well—a stomach thing from all the food and drink; another had a long run scheduled for the next day. So staring at me only twenty minutes after midnight was my first dilemma of the New Year. Do I toss about twenty-five dollars’ worth of champagne down the drain or drink it? I drank it.

Early the next morning, the sun poured through the blinds, shining a bright light on the rhythmic banging in my head. Unable to sleep any-more, I pulled on pants and walked downstairs. Everything was quiet.
With no one up, I climbed into my car and went in search of coffee, and of course I found a Starbucks.

Inside the coffee shop, the world was awake. People came and went. A few seemed to recognize each other, and the coffee slingers behind the counter kept up a constant, cheerful banter.

“Imir, do you need a Tylenol with that latte?”

“Baxter, hey. Happy New Year. I’ve got your venti coffee right here.”

“Hi, Joanne. I didn’t expect to see you this morning. How are you doing? Feeling OK?”

“Not bad. I went out, but I came home pretty early.”

Something was happening here. I sat and drank my coffee with a shot of espresso—I needed an extra boost—and watched the comings and goings and listened to conversations and chitchat for about an hour and a half. This was the moment I started to study Starbucks and the moment I realized that the company sold more than coffee. It was also the moment I started to think that I had been wrong about Starbucks, though I would have lots of moments like this over the next few years.

Only a couple of months before, I had signed a petition circulating around Athens, Georgia—where I lived at the time—calling on city leaders to keep Starbucks out of downtown. Like a lot of my neighbors in this college town sixty miles northeast of Atlanta, I worried that the corporate colossus might put local coffee shops out of business. But even more, I feared that the opening of a chain store could signal an end to the funky, laid-back, slightly hip (and hippie-ish and punkish) character of our Main Street areas. But on this New Year’s Day, I started to rethink the role of Starbucks in everyday life. As the women and men, twenty-something and fifty-something, white-and brown-skinned customers came and went, I thought maybe Starbucks could be a new kind of public space. Maybe this was where Americans gathered to talk and find out what was going on in the age of malls, gated communities, and oversized cars. So, I wondered, if Starbucks was in fact a new form of public space: What did it mean that our public spaces were corporately controlled and conceived? That’s where I started this book, with that question.

In the earliest stages of my research, I defended Starbucks against what I saw then—and what I still do, to a certain extent—as knee-jerk attacks against bigness and sameness (kind of like the ones that led me to sign that petition in Athens). Where could we gather, I would say in the company’s defense? Who else is building these kinds of places in modern America, I would ask rhetorically? And who else takes care of their workers’ health care costs and pays decent prices at the source? Starbucks, I would answer, adding, “It isn’t that bad.” What’s more, there was a lot to learn, not in a business sense, but in a sociological sense from the company’s success. Clearly, it gave people what they wanted. That’s what I thought then. But as I sat at more Starbucks stores and read more about the company, my views started to change.

Pretty quickly, I stopped seeing the company as an engine of community. Instead, I saw it as a mythmaker offering only an illusion of belonging and meeting its customers’ desire for connections in form, maybe, but surely not in substance. Once I came to this conclusion, I started to dig deeper into the company’s other promises—great working conditions, musical discovery, fair treatment of farmers, and concern for the environment. Every time I went excavating, the stories turned out to be more complex, more heavily edited, and more ambiguous than I had first thought. Each time, it became clear that Starbucks fulfilled its many promises only in the thinnest, most transitory of ways and that people’s desires went largely unfulfilled.

Things tipped for me, as I said in the last chapter, when I started to investigate Starbucks’ policies in Rwanda. The anger I felt over what Starbucks did—or, more precisely, what it didn’t do—started to color my thinking across the board. After my Rwandan moment, the tone and substance of my writing started to change. From that New Year’s Day in Atlanta, it had moved from a rather sympathetic account to a detailed examination of the sociology of the company’s success and appeal to something of an exposé. By this point, I started to criticize the company. People from inside the firm picked up on this, and that’s why, I guess, they wouldn’t talk with me as I finished the project. “Again Bryant,”
Frank Kern, vice president of global communications, scolded me in a kind of breakup e-mail (after this he didn’t answer my messages), “it’s clear you feel there is some ‘hidden agenda’ with us, which is simply not true.” Alienating Kern—who got let go from Starbucks within the year—wasn’t the problem (he was pretty defensive from the start), nor was the emphasis totally off, but the real issue was that the focus of the book was changing and moving too far from a study of consumption and what one remarkably successful company could reveal about what many of us cared about and desired, and how these needs and wants could be fulfilled, to a rather one-dimensional account of corporate greed and manipulation—an old yarn, really.

The book’s focus changed again in 2007 when Starbucks started to stumble. I felt like I had to go back and explain where it went wrong, why it consumed so much of itself, and why it had little chance of reclaiming its cultural capital. But that was in many ways a story about Howard Schultz’s maneuvering more than anything else. This wasn’t, however, the book I wanted to write; it wasn’t about those people at the Atlanta Starbucks that New Year’s Day. I was spending too much time on the company and losing sight of the customers and the larger everyday culture of buying and the pull-back of the public—the things I truly wanted to understand.

I didn’t realize I had lost my way until I sat down and talked with my friend Heather Thompson. When she’s not teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she walks the halls and searches the libraries of Attica prison. She’s not out on some new work release program, however. She is busy finishing an essential book on that penitentiary’s furious and deadly 1971 uprising. On a fall night while she was visiting Philadelphia, she made the mistake of asking me about my Starbucks project. At the time I was between my exposé phase and trying to explain the company’s fall. I guess I started to rant. I talked about the cups and the music, and I went on and on about Rwanda and Ethiopia.

“Do you know how much fair-trade coffee Starbucks actually buys?” I asked. I didn’t let Heather answer.

“Only 5 or 6 percent of their total purchases,” I proclaimed and rolled my eyes. Continuing the lecture, I carried on about how, nonetheless, Starbucks lets its customers believe that every single bean it purchases comes from fair-trade sources. “Bastards!” I might even have said to punctuate my tirade.

“You know there is another way to look at this,” Heather suggested when I finally took a breath.