Read Everything but the Coffee Online
Authors: Bryant Simon
Everything but the Coffee
Everything but the Coffee
Learning about America from Starbucks
Bryant Simon
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2009 by Bryant Simon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simon, Bryant.
Everything but the coffee : learning about America from Starbucks / Bryant Simon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26106-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Coffee—United States. 2. Coffeehouses—United States. 3. Starbucks Coffee Company.
I. Title.
TX415.S523 2009
641.3'373—dc22
2009006142
Manufactured in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.
To my friends
Libby McRae and Bill Deverell
Introducing the Starbucks Moment
II. Predictability the Individual Way
III. It Looks like a Third Place
IV. Self-Gifting and Retail Therapy
V. Hear Music for Everyday Explorers
VII. Sleeping Soundly in the Age of Globalization
I just keep finding myself with debts no honest man can pay. Luckily, no one seems to want to collect, but they deserve some acknowledgment, even though they would never ask. This wasn’t an easy book to write. A lot of the time I felt like I was chasing a moving target. Just when I had it in my sights, it was gone. I couldn’t have kept up this frustrating search without the help, kindness, advice, indulgence, patience, warmth, grace, and warm cups of coffee from friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family.
Just about everyone I know helped out on this book in some way. They listened to my Starbucks stories and told me their Starbucks stories. And lots of people I didn’t know took time to hang out at Starbucks with me or to write me an e-mail or talk to me over the phone about what they saw and what they knew about the company and its products. Their insights fill every page of this book. A few—like John Moore, Michelle Isroff, Greg Beck, Dave Norton, Symbol Lai, and Laura Paquet (who met with me on her anniversary)—deserve an extra shout-out. Tom Sugrue, Josh Cole, Steve Kantrowitz, Sharon Zukin, David Grazian, Beth Hale, Marisa Chapell, Keith Brown, Barry Altman, Beth Bailey, David Farber, Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, Heather Thompson, Moshe Sluhovsky, Sarah Igo, Susan Herbst, Elizabeth Royte, Paul Sutter, Beau Weston, Jonathan Morris, Bing Broderick, Michael Goldberg,
Andy Lewis, Kathy Walsh, Craig Thompson, Lily Geismer, Malcolm Murfett, Ian Gordon, Michael Goldberg, Margo Borten, Mark Huddle, Charles Fishman, Peter Coclanis, Robert Devens, Cathy Staples, Anne Marshall, and Jimmy Giesen recommended books and articles and read and commented on chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, and fragments of this book. Diego Del Pozo and Jose Alvarez went with me on far-flung research trips and helped me to make sense of what I was hearing. Naomi Schneider at the University of California Press guided this book through its final stages, while Geri Thoma stayed with the project from start to end, and even in the rocky middle.
I needed all of this advice and encouragement. But I also needed the trust and faith of good friends like Stephanie McCurry, who never pretended things weren’t bad when they were bad. And like Libby McRae, who can’t be matched for her perfect pitch and loyalty. And like Bill Deverell, who I knew I could always, and then always again, count on. And like a new friend, Matt Wray, who helped me to see what I had and how to talk about it. And like Joe Lorenc, Jeanne Sokolak, Jon Ellen’s best friend, Jeffrey Lutzner, Jessica DeGroot, John Shanley, Rachel Shanley, and all of their kids, whom my kids call their cousins, because, as my kids say, “they really are.”
Never, not while writing this book or ever, did I need a light to get home. My family has never wavered in their support and their love. Not my brother and his family, Bradley, Sharon, Rebecca, and Max. Not my in-laws, Tom and Maria Reardon and Christina and Tom Grimes. And not my mom and dad, Bob and Susan Simon. It is hard to explain, and even harder to understand, just how true and steadfast they are in their love.
For me, this book had a soundtrack, the music that played in my head and out of my computer as I wrote. It was Springsteen, Marah, Miles Davis, the Smiths (that was the difficult middle part), and the late, great Snooks Eaglin, but mostly it was the Drive-By Truckers. To me, they make rock-and-roll sound the way it should sound—sad, hopeful, triumphant, unrepentant, and loud. In a slower song that came out during the last year that I was working on this book, one of Patterson Hood’s
not-so-simple characters wonders about heaven and whether you take the vengeance of this world with you there. But then he thinks for a moment that maybe heaven is Saturday morning with his “two daughters and his beautiful wife.” I’m not sure about heaven, Mr. Patterson Hood, but I think I know what you mean. My two sweet, sweet boys and Ann Marie have given me—through all the drafts and false starts of this book—that quietly radiant, perfect gift of Saturday morning—that time when nothing spectacular is going on other than the play-by-play of an imaginary basketball game, the rustling of the newspaper, the groaning of the coffee pot, and the spinning of the dryer. Even more than the Truckers’ insistent rhythms and layers of guitars, it was this music, the warm tunes of Saturday morning, that pulled me through the cuts, rewrites, and missteps of this book. These songs are the answers to my prayers, my reason to believe, my faith. I live for Saturday morning and my two beautiful, funny, creative boys, Eli and Benjamin, and my kind, generous, smart, and, yes, beautiful wife, Ann Marie. Thanks so much to them for that gift, a gift I don’t mind chasing after, catching, and wrapping my arms around every day.
In January 2009, as the United States waited for a new president to take office and tried to make sense of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression,
Esquire
published a short interview with Alice Cooper. “It used to be said: As GM goes, so goes America,” declared the early shock-rocker and voice behind the anthem “School’s Out.” “Now it’s: As Starbucks goes, so goes America.”
1
Leave it to some-one from the cultural realm to detect this larger transformation in the American economy. During GM’s reign as the nation’s financial bell-wether, business in the United States revolved around production, employment, and consumption—making things, creating good jobs, and selling big-ticket items. While Starbucks would never matter as much as GM—it never generated as much income, employed as many people, or sustained as many related industries—it was equally emblematic. During the days that the nation moved in tandem with Starbucks and latte sales, the American economy turned almost entirely on buying alone, not the trio of production, jobs, and purchasing. Through this epoch, buying drove the nation’s economic engine, and even more, it shaped the daily lives, identities, and emotions of the country’s citizenry.
During the years that America went as Starbucks went, a period spanning roughly 1992 to 2007, most business analysts remained tied to the
past, wedded to a GM-era kind of thinking. At no time was this more evident than when Starbucks itself started to falter. As the coffee company’s stock price dropped and foot traffic in its stores fell in 2006, two years before the full onset of the “New Depression,” commentators on MSNBC and in the
Wall Street Journal
explained the changes by relying on traditional, straightforward economic logic. They did so again in 2008, and in 2009, when Starbucks announced that after a fifteen-year uninterrupted run of nonstop growth, it would close hundreds of U.S. stores and lay off thousands of employees. Pundits blamed Starbucks’ reversal of fortunes on the rising price of gasoline, competition from McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, the mortgage crisis, and a new frugality bred by rising joblessness.
2
But the experts had it largely wrong, in terms of both the timing and the causes of Starbucks’ decline. That’s because they repeatedly fell back on culturally uninformed, old school economic reasoning to explain Starbucks’ slip. More than they might be willing to admit, they expected buying decisions to revolve around utility, cost, and the physical qualities of a product, but, as Starbucks’ spectacular success had demonstrated, buying in post-GM, postindustrial America turned on more than price or functionality. During the twenty years before the latest Wall Street crash, as the economy went the way of Starbucks, buying became more than ever before not just a way for people to fulfill basic needs but an expression of longing, a source of entertainment, a strategy for mood management, and a form of symbolic communication about class and social standing. The value of a particular good, therefore, depended on how well it met this broad range of needs, not on the physical qualities of the good itself.
In this book, I explore how Starbucks served as the apotheosis for the exploding meanings of buying in our possibly fading consumer-saturated culture. To do this, I tell the story of the rise and fall of what I call
the Starbucks moment
. By “fall,” though, I don’t mean to suggest that Starbucks suddenly disappeared toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, but that by this time it had lost the central place it once occupied in our culture. During the Starbucks moment, the
company popped up in airports and malls, in parking lots and on street corners everywhere, on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook pages, and in
Shrek 2
and
Meet the Parents
and episodes of
The Simpsons
and
Sex and the City
. Forty-four million of us each week willingly, even eagerly, paid a time and money premium for what Starbucks sold. This had little to do with coffee and everything to do with style and status, identity and aspiration, the environment and foreign affairs—with the desires of every-day life for a broad cross section of Americans. Although Starbucks spread across the globe in the Starbucks moment, this is a study of Starbucks in the United States and of why so many in this country used and embraced the brand.