http://www.everythingbutthecoffee.net Commentary and thoughts from Bryant Simon, author of Everything But The Coffee Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:57:43 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net A version of this blog originally appeared at http://www.fastcompany.com/1772410/the-true-cost-of-cheap-goods-debt-ceilingLast weekend, my oldest son played in a baseball tournament at the somewhat misnamed venue, "Sports at the Beach." A quick internet search revealed that the fields were nearly twenty miles from Rehobeth Beach. Thinking that we wanted to be closer to the games, we decided to stay in Georgetown, Delaware. The only hotel there with a pool -- a must for kids -- was at the Comfort Inn. Of course, the price wasn't bad and the room included, as the website boasted, a "free hot breakfast." After two days of making our own waffles, serving your own microwaved sausage and pre-made perfectly round egg circles along with donuts, danish, and Fruit Loops, I began to think -- with the debate over the debt ceiling blaring on the televisions in the background -- about real costs of free and cheap. Everything at the Comfort Inn was disposable. The cups and dishes were paper or plastic and the flimsy white utensils were also plastics. For my family of four, we went through at one breakfast, three large paper plates, two small paper plates, three paper bowls, two paper cups (plus two more in the room), two plastic lids, four plastic cups (plus three more from the room), five forks (two broke) , three knives, three spoons, and one plastic yogurt cup. We had a small spill so that used more than 10 napkins as well. So what were the costs of this free and cheap meal I wondered? Well, in some ways, the first thing is jobs. In the old days before the Comfort Inn and the automated check out at the Rite Aid, I guess we would have stayed at a Howard Johnson (or something like that) or a family owned motel. We probably would have gone our for breakfast and spent in today's dollars $40 for our pancakes, juice, coffee, and omelets. Instead of us doing the work including the cooking ourselves as was the case with the waffles, someone else would have cooked the food and served the meals and got paid. Now these aren't, and never were, glamorous jobs, but there is a way in which the culture of cheap is closely related to the really dangerous culture of cutting jobs. Paying might mean breakfast costs more, but it also circulates money and generates revenues (the part of the debt ceiling debate that some would say got far too little attention). What about all the trash generated by our free breakfasts? As we all know from watching any buffet line, the psychology of "free" means we all take more, way more than need or often will eat. This adds to the trash we produce (and the calories we consumer. More on that below.) Now who pays for that? All those paper plates and cups and half eaten waffles have to do somewhere. First stop is the trash. All this waste,in turn, weighs down the plastic trash bags (a petroleum product by the way.) These in turn weigh down garbage trucks (again requiring more gasoline). Each time we use gas or petroleum we are implicated in our costly foreign policy, no? Another cost. And then there is all that trash that goes into the landfills or gets burned up and floats through the air. Cities, counties, and states pay for this and have deal with the trash and the pollution, In a sense, we are all subsidizing cheap here.Same with the food. Except for a few sad looking apples and maybe the Raisin Brand like cereal, there wasn't anything at the Comfort Inn breakfast table that you could confuse with healthy. Belgian waffles from a mix, donuts, sausage, and those strange looking little egg saucers the size and thickness of air hockey disks -- these are all high fat, sugar-laden foods, just the kinds of foods that add to the our growing national health crisis. As numerous commentators have pointed out, we are, as a nation, growing bigger all the time and there is nothing free here. By some estimates, a fifth of the nation's health care costs go towards paying for the illnesses and treatment related to diabetes, heart disease, and obesity related ailments -- and this too is a cost we all surely share. Really the allure of cheap isn't just a Comfort Inn thing or a Wal Mart thing. As the debt ceiling dialogue revealed, it has saturated our political culture. Cheaper government now, many clearly think, won't entail costs later. But are they right? Isn't everyone indirectly paying for my Comfort Inn "free hot breakfast"? Isn't cheap just a form of deferred spending? Shouldn't this be the basis of a new national conversation -- a real honest discussion of the long-term costs of cheap and if we can afford them? Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:57:43 GMT Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:57:43 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net This will be short. I went to the franchise -- e.g. not company owned -- Starbucks in Margate, New Jersey with my good friend and shoobie for this week, Rudy Fuller. As we waited in line, I looked up and saw a sign behind the counter that featured a large picture of bright red coffee berries. The copy on the sign read: "Ethically sourcing and batch roasting for you since 1971."Point One: As I told, Rudy, there really was no such thing as ethical sourcing in 1971. Fair trade labeling didn't get started until the 1980s. Starbucks didn't start selling fair trade coffee until activists pressured the company into doing so. In other words, it didn't jump on the bandwagon, it was pushed on. Still, what the company means by ethically sourcing is anybody's guess. They have simple declared themselves ethical. Today, Starbucks is the world's largest consumer of fair trade coffee beans, but that only represents only 10 percent of its total coffee purchases. Point Two: Starbucks hasn't batch roasted unless you count by the tons since 1971.And remember, Starbucks is doing this for "you," for us. Okay Rudy, I know that is more than bargained for while getting a early morning vacation iced coffee, but I couldn't take that sign's (deliberate) misrepresentation. On to the beach. Tue, 2 Aug 2011 08:41:03 GMT Tue, 2 Aug 2011 08:41:03 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com: More Green Fatigue?This isn't a riddle. But the question is how does corporate America celebrate Earth Day? The answer, it seems, is take out an advertisement in the New York Times. On April 22, 2011, Coca Cola announced in the paper its new water battle made with 30% plant-based plastic. A few pages later in the front section, TD Bank proclaimed that, "Green is in Our Nature. Macy joined in the celebration, offering half-off discounts to customers who recycled their cosmetic containers. Despite the expensive ads, all isn't well with green commerce. Just below the fold on the front-page, the Times reported on Earth Day: "As Consumers Cut Spending, 'Green' Products Lose Allure. The headline pretty much gave the story away. The article argued that the "love affair with green products, from recycled toilet paper to organic foods to hybrid cars was ending, "faded like a bad infatuation. As one analyst quoted in the article said, "if it's one or two pennies higher in price, they're not going to buy it. But this is a rather narrow to see buying green buying or any other kind of buying. American consumers, especially the middle-classes, who were initially the largest block of green purchasers, don't really buy all that much based on price alone. They carefully spend their money to establish an image and identity. They spend the most to distinguish themselves from others, not to keep up with the Joneses, but to separate themselves from the Joneses. This kind of distinction through buying requires a little scarcity. If everyone can get it, whatever it is, it isn't worth as much. If we think about buying this way, there is probably another way to account for the drop in spending. As early as 2008, some analysts started to notice what they called, "green fatigue. By this time, lots of people and organizations started to act green. Cities were going green. Universities were going green. Soft drink companies, banks, and cosmetic makers were also green. Even Fritos, then Walmart, went green. In this climate, consumers couldn't distinguish themselves from others the less informed or less caring by buying green anymore. Caring about the planet has lost some its scarcity. Perhaps the overabundance of green things and ideas explains even more than a few pennies here and there why some New Recession-era consumers are taking their business elsewhere. They are themselves tired of the environment and they don't see its utility anymore as an image-maker. That of course doesn't bode well for the planet and the long-term lightening of carbon footprints. Wed, 11 May 2011 05:43:19 GMT Wed, 11 May 2011 05:43:19 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Reading Between Latte Lines By Bryant Simon Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's bestselling new memoir about bringing the coffee giant back from the brink of collapse strikes a non-partisan tone. Little of the Brooklyn-raised business man's blue-ish past is on display here. He says nothing about latte liberals or cappuccino conservatives or even macchiato moderates. He gently applauds Barack Obama's election hailing it is a moment of racial progress, not as a repudiation of the Iraq war or failed conservative policies. He doesn't discuss the President's health care initiative or his attempts to stimulate the economy. Nor does he grapple with several recent moments when Starbucks got pulled into the political crosshairs like when ill-informed rumor mongers in the Middle East charged the company with aiding Israeli defense forces or when pistol-packing coffee drinkers tried to draw Starbucks into the gun control debate. Schultz brews up a product in his book, Onward, much like his brand these days, aimed at the solid middle of the mainstream. The book is kind of like a vanilla latte--it offends no one--unless of course you are put off by business titans trying to sound the average guy in a Starbucks line. Read another way, though, Schultz's book can be seen as a deeply political, even troubling, treatise on the current state of civic life and political engagement in America. In the preface to Onward, the rock star CEO, as a cable show called him one time, contends that in recent years, "a seismic shift in consumer behavior was under way, and people became not just more cost conscious, but also more environmentally minded, and ethically driven. Customers were holding the companies they did business with--including Starbucks--to higher standards." (p. xiv) Later on, he remarks, reflecting on a conversation he had with rock star and famed go-gooder, Bono, "People want to do business with companies they respect and trust, especially in the current climate." (p. 200) Schultz adds another revealing clue to what's happening in the larger political realm as he discusses one of what he calls Starbucks' "courageous" moves that led the firm back to profitability. In the run up to the 2008 election, Schultz lamented that only 54% of Americans "cared enough"--his words--about the state of things to vote. Hoping to change this--in a nonpartisan way of course--he decided that Starbucks would offer a free tall, meaning small, cup of drip coffee to anyone who came into one of its 11,000 plus U.S. stores on Election Day and said that they had voted. When the ballots were tallied, it turned out that 62% of eligible voters participated in the election and 2 million of them went to Starbucks for a coffee that day. (Of course, these are rough numbers, and at the last minute, the Federal Elections Commissions ruled that Starbucks couldn't create an incentive for people to vote, so anyone who asked for a cup of coffee got one.) Still, Schultz declares in Onward, that this was a "seminal day" for his company (p.215) as a "sense of community enveloped the stores." (p.216) When Schultz's seemingly contradictory statements about people looking for socially responsible companies and not caring enough to vote without some liquid incentive are lined up next to each other, we get a clearer sense of the state of current American politics. Social commentators, like Harvard sociology professor and author of the new classic Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, have talked about how Americans have lost faith in their political institutions. That's the turn-out issue. But many people haven't stopped looking for solutions to big problems. As Schultz notes, and numerous polls back him up on this, more and more Americans want a cleaner environment and better treatment for the people who grow and serve their food. Yet because of their dwindling faith in politicians and political institutions, they have, in a way, outscoured their politics. In those long ago days of the New Deal and Great Society, consumer citizens looked to the government to solve pressing problems. Not any more. As Schultz's book implies, many of us now express our politics principally through consumption. In other words, we look to corporations to do what we used to expect the government to handle. This, of course, presents companies like Starbucks with new challenges and new marketing opportunities. (Schlutz, though, would call this doing the right thing.) If a brand can offer, or credibly say it offers, a solution to the big problems people care about the most, it can win and retain customers in an intensely competitive market where there is little product differentiation between firms, like the U.S. coffee market. If it wants a larger share of that market, though, it has to present its solutions as non-partisan, because partisanship, except in the country's most faithful Red and Blue corners, is probably the most discredited stance in our current political moment. Schultz is right. There has been a seismic change. Even as talking heads chatter away from morning to night on Fox and MSNBC, the center of political gravity in the U.S. has shifted from the electoral realm to the buying realm. In this arena, politics, not surprisingly, have become by design easier and less contentious. What company wants to alienate a segment of the market right off the bat? Why would any large firm sell divisive politics? Even as it enters politics, why would it call what it does politics? It is doing right. Like everything, though, there are costs associated with the change to corporate generated non-partisan politics. While informed buying can lighten carbon footprints and provide relief to farmers in the developing world, this form of civic engagement can also make more genuine politics fade away. When a company like Starbucks takes up political action, it tells its customers that they are making a crucial difference through their buying choices. Essentially its allows customers, and customers allow themselves, to wash their hands of the problem with a single guilt-free purchase. Buy a shirt and help AIDS-besieged Africa. Done. Buy a vanilla latte and save the planet. (It says that on the cups.) Done. Clearly, the idea of lending a hand has value, and keeps customers coming back for more khakis and lattes. But this isn't something companies like Schultz's Starbucks want to talk about too much, even in ceo memoirs (Starbucks, by the way, doesn't capitalize this abbreviation, so that's the way Schultz writes it throughout the book), because if they do, buyers might see, for instance, that purchasing a latte served in a to-go cup made from recycled material that isn't itself recyclable, isn't really a solution to the problem, it is a cover up. It is a band-aide that doesn't sting. But it is also, as Howard Schultz suggests between the lines, good business in this de-politicized political moment. Follow @FastCoLeaders for all of our leadership news, expert bloggers, and book excerpts. Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:42:10 GMT Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:42:10 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net As insiders have long predicted, Starbucks is looking to snatch up Peet's. Obviously this filled with irony, since Gerald Baldwin, one of Starbucks' three original founders, is the owner of Peet's.But really this will be a bad deal for Starbucks. That's not because Peet's doesn't have value; it does. Actually its coffee credentials and credibility are much, much stronger than those of Starbucks. Even though, Peet's sells mostly dark roast coffee, no one calls it, "Charbucks." And no one, gives out bumper stickers that say, "Friends Don't Let Friends go to Starbucks." Yet the day that Starbucks buys Peet's is day that Peet's real and cultural value falls. Just the association with Starbucks at this point will turn off and turn away Peet's most loyal customers. One of my friends posted the article hyerlinked above about Starbucks thinking of buying Peet's on her Facebook page with this simple message attached, "NO!" Again, this suggests that a Starbucks association would have a negative impact on Peet's -- in many ways undermining the very strong image that Peet's possesses and making the company worth less it is acquired by Starbucks. That just the way it is and this state of the Starbucks brand these days. Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:43:55 GMT Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:43:55 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net In the land of Big Gulps, Super-Sizes and extra larges, Starbucks is giving birth to its own larger -than-life cup. By Alexandra Oliver Come March, Starbucks will begin serving its 31-ounce cup: Trenta. Coffee might not be the equivalent of a super-sized Kit Kat bar, but the new Starbucks size reflects the sad reality of our culture's focus on living "larger than life, by having expensive things and enjoying things, such as food and beverages, in excess. It's amazing that U.S. citizens are told to fight obesity, yet a new 31-ounce cup full of empty calories comes to fruition around the same time Michelle Obama's "Let's Move campaign is well underway. The talk of fighting against obesity in the U.S. appears to be just that talk. "For a long time, people bought Starbucks because it made them look better, said Bryant Simon, the director of the American studies department and author of "Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. "You pay a little bit of money and get some status. You look like someone who has money to make you look better. Starbucks has become a little more mainstream, with its coffee shops scattered throughout major cities. It has lost its novelty status and has become a franchise that is more expensive than Dunkin' Donuts. Starbucks is catering to the "Super Size Me culture that has gripped the U.S. and refuses to let go. It's present on Main Campus, too. Although there is a healthy-balanced option and salad bar on Main Campus, they are outweighed by Wendy's, McDonald's, Wingstop and food trucks that are easily accessible through a swipe of an Owl Card. This is troubling for Temple students trying to maintain a healthy diet. This popular trend of fighting obesity is seen in TV shows, such as MTV's "I Used to be Fat and NBC's "The Biggest Loser. This fight is fought half-heartedly if you're adding skim milk to an iced coffee to lower the calorie count but pairing it with a brownie or coffee cake. For some, this oversized cup is good because it's something that can last the whole day. For others, the new addition to our super-size culture is undesirable. During midterms, finals and regular all-nighters, Temple students frequent the Starbucks located in the TECH Center. This new cup will give students the extra-caffeinated boost needed to get through those cram sessions. The sweet treats, sandwiches and soups also give Starbucks a competitive edge over its rivals as it fights to remain a No. 1 choice. "Sometimes we buy things like Starbucks as a little treat. We try to make ourselves feel better so we buy something a little bit more expensive as a way to reward ourselves for studying, basically managing our moods, Simon said. "Trenta offers a kind of greater indulgence. After we indulge in a Venti coffee for a number of times it loses its thrill. Now Starbucks is providing a Trenta to reawaken the thrill. As we strive toward a leaner, healthier U.S., it appears new outlets of unhealthy living continue to sprout up. McDonald's has its different specials, such as its 20-piece chicken nuggets for $1.99. Now there's Trenta, which experts estimate could have up to 300 milligrams of caffeine. Overindulgence and excess is an American pastime that is innately a part of our culture that we don't realize how it has negatively affected us. And if we fail to recognize this, we'll never change. Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:54:05 GMT Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:54:05 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net After watching the documentary, Food Inc. the other day, one scene stood out. It wasn't any of the film's most shocking, arresting, or appalling moments. It actually unfolded in a rather quiet setting. A Walmart dairy buyer stands just inside the fence of an organic farmer's lush green fields. He is there to buy as much hormone free milk as he can gobble up. "We won't be here," he admits, "if it wasn't for customer preferences." The Walmart buyer's statement says a lot about how the post-need consumer economy works. Even the largest retailer and supermarket chain in the world has to bend to "customer preferences." This points to an essential aspect of the nature of transactions. Despite all the Mad Men and Madison Avenue manipulation, consumption, especially of relatively cheap, faddish items like food and fashion, represents what might think of as a rough democracy. Walmart and other companies need to give us -- consumers -- what we want, or we will go elsewhere. The rough democracy of desire means, then, that we vote with our money and credit cards at the point of purchase. What's popular sells, what isn't doesn't. (Remember the New Coke.) It also means that we can use our buying muscle to shape purchasing policies at the top, what or how the companies we patronize operate in the global marketplace. While I was doing the research for my book, Everything But the Coffee, I traveled around the world going to Starbucks. The results were, in some ways, rather disappointing. For the most part, a Starbucks in Singapore looks, runs, and tastes exactly like a Starbucks in Seattle. Except for one thing. Starbucks devotes different amounts of signage and beverage and shelf space to fair trade coffee in different parts of the world. In China and Japan, Starbucks stores said nothing about fair trade, no signs, no brochures, no messages on the back of cups. When I asked a Starbucks in official in Japan -- an American who didn't speak Japanese -- why there weren't any fair trade drinks or signs with fair trade coffee farmers on them in Tokyo, she paused for a moment and said, "on one asked." No one asked. Well British customers must have asked. On a visit to a Starbucks in Norwich, England in 2009, there were signs everywhere about fair trade. Grizzled, happy, handsome hard-working farmers -- imagine Latino versions of the Marlboro Man -- looked down from the posters on the walls and bathrooms, reassuring customers concerned about where their beans came from that their purchases improved the daily lives of growers in Central America and beyond. Sixteen months later, I went to that store again and found out that Starbucks in the United Kingdom had dramatically changed its policy. "Every Latte, Every Cappuccino," the cups promised, was "100% Fairtrade coffee." In the US, the status of fair trade is somewhere in the middle between Japan and the United Kingdom. Less than 10 percent of the beans Starbucks uses here where the companies operates more than 10,000 stores come from fair trade farms, though at least a quarter of the company's signage seems to talk about Starbucks' modest fair trade purchases. On college campuses, where fair trade support is ostensibly the highest, the company regularly features Cafe Estimo (estimo means esteem in Spanish) -- its fair trade blend -- as its coffee of the day. Thinking back to the comment from the Walmart buyer featured in Food, Inc., the differences in fair trade at Starbucks can be read as a poll, as a barometer really, for support for global awareness and fair trade consciousness in different countries around the world. These disparities also tell us something about the rough democracy of buying. Companies will, as the Walmart man tells us, shape their products to meet consumer desires. Consumers, then, need to be more aware of their power. If they raise their voices, or withdrawal their purchases, firms will respond. That's what happened with Starbucks. Japanese customers haven't asked for fair trade coffee, so they don't have a choice. But in the UK, the customers wanted it and got it. The realm of consumption may just be a new -- or renewed -- front for justice. Perhaps it is here -- even more than the political realm where Senate seats are going in this election cycle for between $10-$141 million -- that consumers can have the greatest efficacy and be heard the clearest. But this remains only a rough form of democracy. Corporations aren't the most publicly minded or trustworthy of allies. Like crafty centralist politicians, they want to co-op and de-politicize issues. They are interested in more votes -- in more customers -- not justice, or even fair trade. But they can be moved. Mon, 1 Nov 2010 15:51:33 GMT Mon, 1 Nov 2010 15:51:33 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net USA Today ran an interesting piece today on Starbucks turning forty -- on the company hitting middle-age. (Here's the link to the article, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2010-10-18-starbucks18_CV_N.htm?POE=click-refer). In the comments to article, buyers renew a long standing class warfare in the US being foght over coffee -- and even though Starbucks' star may have fallen in recent years, the battle over taste and status rages. Check out these comments to the article:I love Starbucks!!! Let the second class people line up at Dunkin Donnuts and save a few pennies. ************************************************ ************************************] Why yes, sir...the poor, pathetic second class people. Why, they should not be allowed in a Starbucks! The rabble must be kept out, so that you may be served in the manner not only to which you are accustomed, but which you, sir, rightly deserve! I am certain that witty way you spelled "Donnuts" was actually a dig at those second class people who actually think its spelled that way! Oh yes, absolutely first class, indeed! *****I love Starbucks!!! Let the second class people line up at Dunkin Donnuts and save a few pennies. Bet the guy at the counter hardly speaks english!!! ****The government should raise the taxes on Starbucks coffee.............it's grossly overpriced and isn't better than Dunkin Donuts..............definitely rates a luxury tax. Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:08:31 GMT Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:08:31 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net I have blogged a couple of times already about Starbucks and its use (misuse) of language, about how it creates a sense of belonging that customer pay for, and about "resistance" to this talk. Well, a Columbia professor really didn't want to talk Starbucks, so she got mad and railed against a worker. Eventually, she got tossed from an Upper Westside store. I suppose this was bound to happen. The question is now what? Will she becomes this week's Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant, who exited his plane after taking enough flack from a passenger and becoming a momentary national celeb? Is something else at work here? What is Professor Rosenthal really saying and doing here? Is her anger -- against the worker -- warranted or misplaced? (And why is there nothing about the workers in the coverage of the incident?) Is there also an element of elitism here? (Am I defending Starbucks?) Language has always been a way to create insider and outsider groups, right? Well then what is Rosenthal saying by not speaking Starbucks, by insisting on the company and its employees speaking "correct" English and correcting people who don't speak properly -- even when they are paid -- not very much -- to do so? Also there does seem to be an element of the downmarketing of Starbucks in this story. In the past the company's language stood for a kind of inflated sense of self and one's class position, but now it isn't correct or proper enough. Interesting. And by the way, the story says that Rosenthal had run into "trouble" before at Starbucks for not saying venti. Fair enough, but why did she keep going back? It isn't like there aren't a number of really good alternative coffee (or bagel) options in New York where you can say tall or medium or no butter. What's the worker in this story -- who is at this point remain silent -- up to? Was she trying to defend the company's language? Defend herself (or himself)-- like Slater-- against an overbearing customer? Here, by the way, is the full story about the incident from the New York Post: Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts. Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor from Manhattan, said three cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson -- make that barista -- for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain's rules. Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel -- and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?" "I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want. "Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English." Rosenthal admitted she had run into trouble before for refusing to employ the chain's stilted lexicon -- balking at ordering a "tall" or a "venti" from the menu or specifying "no whip." Instead, she insists on making a pest of herself by ordering a "small" or "large" cup of joe. Yesterday's breakfast-bagel tussle heated up when the barista told the prickly prof that he wouldn't serve her unless she specified whether she wanted a schmear of butter or cheese -- or neither. "I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said. "The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' " But Rosenthal, on principle, refused to back down. "I didn't even want the bagel anymore," she said. The bagel brouhaha escalated until the manager called cops, and responding officers ordered her to leave, threatening to arrest her if she went back inside, she said. "It was very humiliating to be thrown out, and all I did was ask for a bagel," recalled Rosenthal, who said she holds a Ph.D. from Columbia. "If you don't use their language, they refuse to serve you. They don't understand what a plain multigrain bagel is." A Starbucks employee who witnessed the incident blamed Rosenthal. "She would not answer. It was a reasonable question," the worker said. "She called [the barista] an a- -hole." An NYPD spokesman confirmed that officers were called to the coffee shop but said he was unaware of anyone being tossed out. Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:27:55 GMT Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:27:55 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Last week, the Harvard Business Review published a long interview with Howard Schultz. The Starbucks CEO talked about the coffee company's many moves to win back customers and battle against the ill winds of the recession.As evidence of Starbucks' rebound, Schultz pointed to the biggest of the social networking sites out there. "We're the number one brand on Facebook, he boasted.Starbucks, in fact, was the first brand to top the 10 million-fan mark. Just to put this in perspective, that's more fans than the entire population of New York City (8.2 million) and all but seven states in the U.S. That's more Facebook fans than its closest rival, Coca-Cola (8.3 million fans) and way more than other large global brands.McDonald's has 2.5 million fans. Target has 1.43 million, Abercrombie and Fitch 1.37 million, and the trendy teen clothier Forever 21 totals 1.27 million. Among high-end food and food-related brands, Ben and Jerry's has 1.35 million Facebook fans with Whole Foods lagging behind with just 296,152 fans.The other day, my Facebook page (I have 302 friends) told me that many people who like Barack Obama also like Starbucks. Turns out the President is one of Starbucks few Facebook rivals. He has 10.9 million fans, a few more than Starbucks. But Starbucks still has more fans than Sarah Palin (1.93 million), Mitt Romney (460,832), and Bill Clinton (353,583) combined.Most pop culture figures don't reach Starbucks' level of fans either. Apart from Facebook leader Michael Jackson (16.6 million) and Lady Gaga (12.9 million), the coffee giant has more online backers than Bruce Springsteen (880,459), Adam Sandler (5.44 million), and even teen idol Justin Bieber (7.88 million).When it comes to coffee companies, there is no contest. Starbucks' closest competitor (in terms of its number of cafes across the U.S.) Caribou has 154,754 fans. Peet's has 45,497. Not long ago, Time Magazine wondered if the famed Portland, Oregon independent roaster Stumptown might be the next Starbucks. Not on Facebook. It has only 10,780 fans.BEHIND THE FACEBOOK NUMBERSFrom the business side and from the side of studying culture what do all of these numbers mean? Clearly, brands and personalities have turned to Facebook to market their products, enhance their image, and communicate with their customers. But beyond that what does this new form of fandom mean, beyond a sort of crude measure of popularity?"I signed up because they do promos through Facebook, a high-school friend, who is also a Facebook Starbucks fan, wrote to me in a Facebook message, "I just wanted a free soy latte once in a while. When you do click on Starbucks' Facebook page, it doesn't go right to the wall to the message board like most individual accounts do, but to a promo page. There you can find out about new drinks, new social responsibility programs, and the many advantages and discounts associated with a Starbucks card.Facebook is also a place for Starbucks, and other brands, to solidify brand communities. I asked another of my Facebook and graduate school friends why she clicked on the Starbucks fan button. She told me, "I am a genuine fan of Starbucks and don't mind letting folks know that. Back in the 1990s my husband and I were introduced to the coffee by friends and former Seattle residents … We ordered Starbucks coffee by mail for years until they opened the first NYC store near us on the Upper West Side … So I guess we were, I don't know, pioneers? Early adopters? The wall on Starbucks' Facebook page is an easily accessed and widely used electronic bulletin board for brand shout outs. Posts come in every ten or fifteen seconds. In a matter of minutes, fans from across the globe trumpet their favorite drinks, their favorite stores, and their favorite baristas. Even though there are 16,000 Starbucks around the world, this isn't enough for some."We need a Starbucks in Adairsville, GA … Sigh, one fan submitted.Facebook helps, then, to affirm brand loyalties. And Facebook does serve, as Howard Schultz suggested, as a barometer of Starbucks enduring value and its customers' fidelity. So do the numbers. Last week, Starbucks announced a 9-percent quarterly jump in sales and 6-percent hike in store traffic. But these numbers pale in comparison to the company's soaring fan count on Facebook.So the question is how deep is that Facebook commitment? What does it mean to click a fan button and how valuable are "fans to brands?Perhaps my friend who called herself an "early adopter is typical of this new form of brand loyalty. "I signed up to be a ‘fan' of Starbucks on Facebook, she explained, "back when I first started using the networking site. I was pretty enthusiastic and perhaps a tad indiscriminate back then. In other words, Facebook fan numbers surely serve as a rough indicator of popularity, but this is still only a "weak commitment. Just ask Starbucks' closest Facebook competitor, Barack Obama. He has lots of fans, but that hasn't stopped his approval rating from falling.Bryant Simon is a professor of American history and culture at Temple University and the author of "Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:30:51 GMT Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:30:51 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net One-of-a-kind businesses still hold powerful attraction for consumers Bryant Simon 6 July 2010 A new day: India's Café Coffee Day challenges Starbucks STRATFORD-UPON-AVON: Shakespeare's birthplace is not immune from a common complaint. When Jim Hyssop saw a Starbucks open up several years ago in downtown Stratford-upon-Avon, near the McDonald's and Pizza Hut already there, he grimly forecast: "If someone blindfolded you, put you in a helicopter and set you down in a town somewhere in England, you wouldn't be able to tell where you are anymore. Like many scholars and residents of places with a past, Hyssop fears that global brands will erode national, regional and neighborhood distinctiveness. As chains deliver the same products, designs and exteriors everywhere, they could, Hyssop worries, create a soulless Generica, "a land where all the high streets look identical. Although McDonald's serves 47 million customers each day in 119 countries around the world and Starbucks serves about the same number each week in 51 countries, that one-world Generica has not taken control. Instead, the spread of these branded symbols of globalization raises the value of the local.Everywhere multinationals go, they generate a grassroots pushback, an assertion of the enduring value of particular places, tastes and traditions. Yet this nearly universal assertion of the local is much less widely noted than the fears of the global. Everywhere multinationals go, they generate grassroots pushback, an assertion of enduring values of particular places. Opened in Seattle in 1971, Starbucks initially seemed more local than global. In its early years, it sold whole bean, freshly roasted coffee out of one store with the owners often standing behind the counter. Even after the company opened a second, then a third store, it retained a small mom-and-pop kind of feel. As much as those first Starbucks looked and acted local, they were enmeshed in the global. The original logo with a bare-breasted siren imitated a Norse old-world Norse woodcut. And the beans came from far-off places like Guatemala, Sumatra and Ethiopia. Indeed, this remaking of coffee from everyday commodity into an imported, slightly exotic affordable luxury gave Starbucks products their cultural value. When Howard Schultz took over Starbucks in 1987, he thickened its global networks opening the company's first international outlet in Vancouver in 1987, then in Tokyo in 1996, Qatar in 2000, Paris in 2004 and Buenos Aires in 2008. By 2009, Starbucks had 16,120 stores on five continents. As he tells it in, Schultz experienced a coffee epiphany in a Milan espresso bar in 1983. Hearing the melodious clanking of saucers and hiss of steaming milk, he decided Americans would pay a premium for a facsimile of the Italian coffee bar. Despite Starbucks' message of high-end universalism, its global expansion did not go uncontested. Schultz did more than just introduce Americans to espressos and cappuccinos. Seeking to enhance brand value by associating it with Europe the center of coffee culture and knowledge in the minds of most Americans he and his colleagues sold grande and venti mistos and macchiatos prepared by baristas. Continental references were just one part of Starbucks's global posture. The company strived to create a transnational setting, distinct from any one locale or nation that was nonetheless still everywhere, everywhere globetrotters, creative types and the upper-middle-class convened. Whereas McDonald's sells an idealized, consumer version of America as a fun, efficient place, Starbucks sold itself as a predictable destination on an increasingly flat global landscape. Starbucks is the same everywhere, everywhere erasing differences and suggesting that we those who can afford pricey drinks are well-informed, sophisticated customers who appreciate quality, yet still care about the environment and the least fortunate. Thus, it became the brand for a new global middle class of the 21st century. Despite Starbucks' message of high-end universalism, its global expansion did not go uncontested. When the World Trade Organization met in Seattle in 1999, protestors vandalized a Starbucks, accusing the company and other multinationals of polluting the environment and exploiting cheap labor in the developing world. Besides street and internet protests, consumers rebelled against sameness with their feet and pocketbooks. In 2003, Singapore's Chua Chin Hon wrote, "I'm no anti-globalization protestor, but admitted a change of heart, triggered by a Starbucks opening in Beijing's Forbidden City. He wrote about understanding "the rage against the global capitalist machinery's relentless and oft-times, senseless drive to sell a few more cups of coffee, burgers, or T-shirts. Four years later, Rui Chenggang, an anchor for Chinese Central Television, demanded that Starbucks leave the nearly 600 hundred-year-old former royal residence. Accusing the company of tainting "China's national culture, he organized a boycott. Eventually Starbucks vacated the location, and a Chinese company took its place selling lattes and cappuccinos in white cups with green logos. Besides street and internet protests, consumers rebelled against sameness with their feet and pocketbooks. As the branded world of Starbucks, McDonald's, The Gap and Disney, spread from North America to Europe to Asia, from cities to the suburbs, the value of traditional, neighborhood venues increased. The global had generated so much demand for the local that a global chain needed to look local to survive globally. Some teenaged Singaporean Malays have responded to the spread of Starbucks and other Western culture markers in their country by embracing Islam, eating and drinking only Malay products including traditional coffee instead of lattes and Frappuccinos. Starbucks failed to establish footholds in Australia and Israel, places that already had well-established and locally controlled European style coffeehouses. Despite Starbucks' presence in New Delhi and Mumbai, most Indian coffee drinkers prefer lattes from Indian-owned companies Coffee Day and Barista. Starbucks takeover of street corners in Hong Kong triggered a kind of consumer dissent. One-of-a-kind, owner-operated coffeehouses tiny and unadvertised sprang up in second- or third-floor apartment living rooms all over the city. "When it comes to cafe culture, wrote a Financial Times reporter, "above ground is the new underground. Perhaps the strongest resistance to Starbucks and its globalizing impact took place close to the brand's home base. Weary of the lack of choice posed by Starbucks, latte drinkers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, search for the local. Even as the economy tanked, they, like those Hong Kong hipsters, go out of their way and pay a little extra for one-of-a-kind items and local settings. Independent coffeehouses, like a farmers' markets or bring-your-own-bottle restaurants, have new appeal in the US emerging economy of the small. While Starbucks has struggled during the New Recession, closing 600 stores in the US and halting expansion abroad, sales at independents, according to industry sources, remain robust. In 2009, Starbucks responded to the shift towards the small by redesigning and retrofitting several Seattle stores and, later, several London stores. The new cafes didn't carry the Starbucks name or familiar green logo. One was named 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, another Roy Street Tea and Coffee. In other words, the company opened stealth Starbucks meant to look and sound like independent coffee shops. The message? The global had generated so much demand for the local that a global chain needed to look local to survive globally, at least in some markets. This marks a change in the appeal of the big versus the small. What's constant in the age of globalization is that the local and global co-exist, always in conversation and tension with each other. You can't have one without the other. Wed, 7 Jul 2010 05:37:03 GMT Wed, 7 Jul 2010 05:37:03 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net This made me recall a terrific article by the political reporter, Les Blumenthal of the News and Observer. In this 2006 piece, he talked about "Starbucks Republicans," though he really meant moderates, macchatio moderate. He said these people voted like the swing voters before them, Reagan Democrats, Soccer Moms, and NASCAR Dads. As he told it, these "Starbucks Republicans craved four-dollar grande frappuccino and values the politics of tolerance. Blumenthal says that the company's loyal customers back candidates who blend fiscal conservatism with social moderation. Breaking the group down further, he noted that they were largely well educated and church going, although rarely fundamentalists. Most lived in the suburbs, although some settled into gentrified urban enclaves. They made better than decent money and wanted to keep as much of it as they can, except when it came to schools, their children's schools at least. They were happy to pay for computer labs, lacrosse fields, and art programs, but not subsidize public housing or transportation alternatives for people outside their county or township. They care about the planet and worry about green house gases. They were pro-civil rights (although surely anti-busing), pro-choice (but probably wished that some people didn't have so many kids), and anti-anti-gay (they like Jack from Will and Grace).Really, what he was describing was better educated swing voters -- and these voters were crucial to Obama in states like Virginia and North Carolina in 2008 and to Starbucks everyday in business. No wonder that get paired together on facebook. Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:00:56 GMT Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:00:56 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Starbucks has finally decided to offer free wi-fi. Check out the article, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37689540/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/ Why? This has been the competitive advantage of independent coffee houses for years. People sough out the local places when they needed or wanted wi-fi. Starbucks held out for years. First, it had a deal with T-Mobile and you had to pay for wi-fi. (And they got away with this when the drink and the image still had so much extra value -- of making you look good.) Then the company's cultural capital took a hit and the economy tanked and Starbucks started to offer free wireless for two hours, and only after you registered with the company and it captured information about you -- and your e-mail. At this point, consumers expect to get wireless when they go to a coffee shop. This is what many in fact go for -- no the coffee -- and this is a key part of the value proposition. Now, Starbucks has to play along. Its image only no longer provides enough value. So something has changed in the coffeehouse business. For years, the independents were responding to Starbucks, creating products and spaces that drew a contrast between them and Starbucks. But what's important here is that the conversations started with Starbucks. Now the conversations are starting with the independents and Starbucks is being forced to make themselves respond to them and act more like them. Again as Starbucks tries to act more like an independent, we get more evidence of the pushback against brands -- of brand avoidance. Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:20:37 GMT Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:20:37 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Check out these words to the James McMurty song, "Out There in the Middle:"We got tractor pulls and Red Man chew Corporate relo refugees that need love too we ain't seen Elvis in a year or twowe got justification for wealth and greed~Amber waves of grain and bathtub speedWe even got Starbuckswhat else you need?(chorus)Out here in the middleWhere the center's on the rightAnd the ghost of William Jennings Bryan preaches every nightTo save the lonely soulsin the dashboard lightsWish you were here my loveWish you were here my loveAs usual, McMurty is on to something here. This song probes the tensions and contradictions of the fly over zones in America. But he also pinpoints a key part and largely unrecognized part of the Starbucks growth model before the company's fall in 2008. Now that profits have rebounded somewhat in the last quarter or two, perhaps Starbucks will return this to strategy -- what I call the company's frontier strategy. This is not just about location, but also about symbolic cultural capital. Beginning in 2004 or so, as Starbucks executives nervously watched the company's hip image fade in the cities, they moved the firm to the hinterlands. On the outer reaches of American consumer culture, the company found places hungry for the experiences and representative aura it has to offer. Take the case of Muskegon, Michigan. For years this small, moldering city in Western Michigan tried to get its own freestanding Starbucks. When a 1,600-square-foot outlet with a sit-down cafe and drive-through window finally opened in front of the Lake Mall in 2006, a country supervisor gushed, "It's the level of class that they bring that is impressive. "They serve a product that young, urban people want," said the president of the Muskegon Area Chamber of Commerce. "Having them locate in Muskegon is a signal we are a community of the future. Now we just need them to consider coming downtown." But Starbucks has refused. In fact, by locating their frontier stores in strip malls, as they usually do, Starbucks helped to accelerate the collapse of Main Streets everywhere. Yet still many middling communities want the coffee giant to locate in their towns. (Some higher-end towns are though resisting the pull of the Starbucks brand.) "Starbucks is just a great name, creating such recognition through the branding they have done," said marketing director for the Muskegon mall, adding that she believed that the company had transcended "trendy" and become a symbol of "quality." "Starbucks has passed the point of just being 'hip,"' she explained. "It draws all kinds of people because everyone likes the product. It brings a quality product to our market. There is an appeal to this brand." In other words, Starbucks has become the most mainstream of mainstream experiences, the McDonalds of the new luxury seeking middle-class. But once happened, how can Starbucks continue to create the kind of experience that the aspirational middle-class seeks to grab and hold on to in order to affirm their individuality, good taste, and middle-class-ness? What Starbucks did was expand the frontier. It opened in smaller cities in foreign countries, in the capitals of some less-developed spaces -- spaces where it hadn't gone and where it could produce a "buzz" amongst upper-middle-class, status seeking types. On a research trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, I watched as people paid more than an average day's wage in that country to valet park at a Starbucks. Once there, they didn't sit inside -- and it was a nice store -- they sat outside near the curb where they could see and be seen overspending on coffee. As Starbucks rebounds, look for a return to the "frontier strategy." Clearly, the brand has played itself out in the cultural centers -- that is why it is opening up stealth Starbucks -- prototype stores without the siren logo in Seattle and London. But on the Bobo fringes -- out there in the global middle -- a Starbucks might still mean something to conspicuous consumers. They might greet its opening with more than a yawn. They might pay to valet park and purchase a profit generating venti frappuccinos. All that is good for Starbucks. Good press and steady profits -- for a while, until the brands plays itself out and the firm needs to seek new frontier. A Starbucks in Reading, PA or Ottomwa, IA. (There are already two Starbucks in Dubuque.) Or maybe a Starbucks in Shenhzen, China or Penang, Malaysia, or Siberia even. Mon, 7 Jun 2010 06:30:53 GMT Mon, 7 Jun 2010 06:30:53 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Starbucks is making a new push to push its Via instant coffee. In today's New York Times, the company took out a full two-page advertisement in the front section of the paper. In all its promo efforts, the company is trying to pull off a two-part strategy. First, it wants to rework our notions of what instant coffee is -- and how it tastes. On urbandictionary.com -- the very best site for everyday sociological observations -- Sanka, the most famous brand of instant coffee is defined by someone as "something that is weak, lacking in substance, phony, a poor facsimile." In that ad in the Times, Starbucks fights back on the taste front. It insists that Via is "delicious, 100 % natural Starbucks." (How can instant coffee be 100% natural, is that the point that it isn't natural?) The ad continues, "An instant cup of coffee that tastes just like our fresh brew." That is the taste front, but consuming is rarely about taste, right? It is more often about status.Sanka and most instant coffee gets read in contemporary America as "low brow." This is the drink of our parents, or even our grandparents -- people who didn't, and if they still drink it don't, have the discernment, sophistication of contemporary, well-traveled food and taste savvy Creative Class types. This is the kind of everyday, industrial product that the initial Starbucks/Whole Foods movement revolted against. To dislodge instant Via from these low status roots, Starbucks is trying to associate its product with the successful. That ad in today's Times features a dialogue between two people on an airplane. Another ad features someone rushing through an airport with a roller-board bag and another in an luxury hotel without coffee. Without a lot of subtlety, these ads try to severe the connection between instant coffee and lower status. But the boldest and most interesting and political attempt to do so came last year, just as the Tea Party was on the rise. Remember, in the press, the Tea Party quickly became associated with a certain shrillness and intolerance. Tolerance, however, is one of the cardinal traits of cosmopolitanism -- something of course that Starbucks wants to be associated with and that it offers it customers. Check out the ad by clicking on this link.The ad goes by the title, "Town Hall Meeting" (and really represents a reworking of this central part of the American democratic myth and but it is for another blog.) Here's what the ad says:Narrator: "People who yell (and are thus I would editorialize intolerant) at town hall meetings can't tell the difference." Speaker one yells loudly, boorish, "I can't tell the difference." Speakers two blurts out the same line. Then the scene changes and the narrator ask, "Can you (tell the difference.)" Obviously if you can, you aren't a part of the town the intolerant and unsophisticated middle. Once again -- and see some earlier posts on this -- Starbucks isn't really selling coffee, it is selling a performance of class. Interestingly enough as the above link makes clear, conservatives picked up right away on what Starbucks was doing and they called for a boycott of the company. "In a recent television ad," Mark Gillar of the Conservative Consumer Coalition said, "Starbucks mocked conservatives by suggested we're too stupid to appreciate the difference in their new coffee."In the end, though, I'm not sure Starbucks can pull this off -- that it can, on its own, redefine the class symbolism of instant coffee. Mon, 17 May 2010 13:13:19 GMT Mon, 17 May 2010 13:13:19 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Virtual tourism. That is what Starbucks is selling in this ad from last week's New York Times. Really the selling of virtual tourism is quite common in the developed world, and has been for a long time. Beginning really in the 1920s, retailers regularly offered customers easily consumed cardboard cuts outs of Paris, Venice, and Tahiti. But what they were really selling, and what Starbucks continues to sell, is a combination of emulation and safety. Among higher end creative class types, travel or discovery -- themes clearly hinted at this add -- 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 often NPR and World Foods and lots of others), then, creates what we might see as everyday 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 Columbia, and then to East Timor. Of course, you didn't need a visa or vaccines or to take your shoes off at airport security to go to these places, and that is a big part of the appeal. You get to sip your OWN adventure -- once again, you get what you want from a brand and you get to hold onto your individualism at the same time. That's the promise in this ad. Mon, 3 May 2010 10:41:10 GMT Mon, 3 May 2010 10:41:10 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:45:23 GMT Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:45:23 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Last weekend, members of the Coffee Party met in coffee houses across the country. Formed through Facebook connections, and now with over 186,434 members and counting, the Coffee Party got together to counter the surging Tea Party Movement. Linking up liberals and moderates, the new group aims above all else to check the growing anti-government impulses of its rival. The Coffee Party asserts that Washington has a central and constructive role to play in solving the economic and social problems of the day. This is, of course, a worthwhile point to make. Yet as the Coffee Party moves forward, getting new members and expanding its agenda, it should make the revival of the coffeehouse tradition of debate and discussion its central goal ahead even of reigning in the Tea Party. That would be a bigger and more lasting contribution to the daily practice of American democracy. Hundreds of years ago, when the British poet, essayist, and biographer, Samuel Johnson, wanted to know what was going on around him, he went to the coffeehouse. Because of the combination of cheap coffee and robust debate, these places were dubbed "penny universities and they worked a lot differently than the $4-a-pop, frothy-drink-pushing corporate coffee shops of today. The English coffeehouse of Johnson's era operated as a place where strangers could talk to one another and debate the issues of the day. Morning and night, shopkeepers and bankers, ditch diggers and lawyers—just about anyone—came to these places for coffee. Everyone sat next to everyone else on plain benches, and together they talked about business and heard the latest news. Someone would literally read aloud from the papers. When the newspaper readers finished, the noisy, cantankerous debate started. Intellectuals damned the government. Conservatives damned the intellectuals. And wits spread rumors and gossip and made fun of everyone. Over time, the coffeehouse, as a result, became a gathering spot for men from all walks of life, but also a sort of classroom—not just for sharing ideas but also for learning how to discuss and debate pressing issues with strangers. "Informed men, some educated and some not, Centre College sociology professor and coffeehouse expert, Beau Weston, noted, "would come together and talk about stuff —literature, poetry, the economy, and politics. "Having a place to do that, he explains, "enriches a culture. It takes us out of the cocoon of private life and into the public world. Cafes are important for creating a public life, particularly in a democracy. Despite all of the Starbucks and other coffeehouses now selling lattes, we really don't have many of these kinds of places left in the US. Instead we have the "hard-ballization of American politics -- two people on the polar opposite ends of the political spectrum shouting at each across the split-screen divider of the airwaves confused for actual debate. Ultimately, then, the Coffee Party should claim as its mission the revival of meaningful and inclusive face-to-face conversation with the coffeehouse (and its stimulating beverages) as a central node. This might be the best defense against the Tea Party and the media distortion of the nation's politics. Tolerate talk on a coffeehouse scale will restore and invigorate civic life in this country. Another shouting match between two sides that will never agree won't get us any closer to the solutions we desperately need to deal with the tricky New Recession problems that we all face at this crucial moment in time. Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:19:29 GMT Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:19:29 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Here's what the company is saying on its website link dubbed, "Make a Difference":Join the movement. On April 15th, bring a reusable travel mug into your local Starbucks and get a free brewed coffee.One person can save trees, together we can save forests.For the good of the planet, Starbucks is encouraging everyone to switch from paper cups to reusable travel mugs. One day in March thousands of New Yorkers made the switch. Join them now by taking a pledge to do the same.So, Starbucks is asking us to join a movement, and it is encouraging everyone to switch from paper cups to tumblers. Good stuff. But what is really going here? What does this say about how consumption and politics works and intersect?My sense is that Starbucks has it wrong here. The movement has already started. Grassroots groups and green advocates have for a longtime been calling for the wider use of resusable cups. Starbucks' programs on this front are, then, a response to these calls and an attempt to shore up its green credentials for Bobo customers who care about the planet or want to look like they care about the planet. In the process, Starbucks wants the credit as a do-good -- see yesterday's post -- movement starter, when it is actually a movement follower.But this also says something about the new -- or possible -- democracy of consumption. As I have said a number of times here, there is a dwindling faith in the formal political system in this country. Yet people still want solutions to big problems -- problems like global justice and environmental degradation. Increasingly, they speak their minds through what they buy and sometimes -- like in this case -- corporations are forced to listen. And sometimes when they listen, they take credit for the original idea. So here's the problem. When companies take credit -- and mobilize their formidable PR resources to do so -- it downplays the energy and power of that grassroots action, everyday efforts and the power of ordinary people to make change -- and by making change, I don't mean simply saving a tree as an individual act, which of course is important, I mean changing the political agenda by putting issues on the table and forces those with power to deal with those issues. That is real power, the power to ACT and to FRAME discussions. Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:48:29 GMT Thu, 15 Apr 2010 06:48:29 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Along the bottom of the Arts section of today's New York Times, Starbucks ran one its ads with the burlap bag in the back ground -- insisting (pleading) for authenticity -- for its fair trade coffee blend, Cafe Estima. Just in case you can't see my picture, here is what the copy says: "A Taste GooderThat's a Do-Gooder Too."A go-gooder. It makes you wonder what Starbucks means by the name of its fair trade coffee, Cafe Estima. Estima means esteem in Spanish. But who gets that esteem? From the ad its seems that you, the do-gooder, gets the esteem. To quote another Starbucks ad from the back of its cups, "Way to go you." Even more on cups soon by the way. Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:39:27 GMT Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:39:27 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net This is Schlutz's best line:"I think people some people underestimated the resiliency of the brand, the emotional connection that we have to our customers. Our customers wanted us to win, they wanted us to succeed because of the importance that the physical environment of the store was in their life and also with 10 percent unemployment ... our stores became a very important resource for people, a place to go, a place to have a meeting, a place to do their work, a place not to be depressed." A place not to be depressed. Perhaps this is true, but only for some. (Other might find Starbucks depressing.) But really this is an interesting observation. As discussed before here, people need social interaction and they seek social interaction when they aren't depressed or without work. It would be interesting to see Starbucks really embrace what Schultz is saying and making itself into a central location for job seekers. (Jason Simon has talk about this possible new coffeehouse role in some of his blogs.) Schultz is right, people need a resources, they need a place to go, and they need a place to get information about jobs. That place used to be the public library (and still is to a certain extent). But yet again, we see how budget cuts have slashed library hours, and really the resources for the poor and underemployed. And yet again, we see how the re-treat of the state and of the older social contract can provide profitable opportunities for business. As public spaces like libraries go into retreat, private spaces have moved in and taken on some of these roles -- the roles Schultz refers to above. For the entire interview with Schultz and a few of my comments, go to the UC Press link.Note at the end of this segment, Schultz gets his coffee in a paper cup to go. Fri, 9 Apr 2010 13:52:35 GMT Fri, 9 Apr 2010 13:52:35 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net According Lori Brown at earth9911.com, a group of Starbucks shareholders wanted to see increased recycling efforts by the company. Only 11 percent of the shareholders supported the move at Starbucks glitzy annual meeting last month. Higher-ups in the company apparently didn't support this measure either. But they have been talking a lot about cups lately. Again as Brown reports, Starbucks currently uses a modest 10 percent post-consumer recycled fiber content in its cups, though these cups are mostly not recyclable. Starbucks has committed to making its paper cups 100 percent recyclable by 2012. In a few spots around the country, the company is already using recyclable and compostable cups and is looking, it says, to expand this program.Starbucks, moreover, is working alongside the U.S. Conference of Mayors to understand the recycling barriers with the cups in an effort to ensure consumers have access to recycling opportunities. (A start on this front would be to have easily visible recycling bins in stores for newspapers, java jackets, and napkins.) In addition, Brown writes, "Starbucks is currently preparing for its second annual Cup Summit. In response to its commitment to make its entire stock of coffee cups recyclable by 2012, Starbucks held the first-ever summit in Seattle last year, bringing together cup manufacturers, paper recyclers and employees among others to discuss the viability of cup recycling."Finally, Starbucks recently launched "the betacup" challenge, an online contest to engage creative thinkers in solving the disposable cup waste problem through open collaboration. Ideas can be submitted on how to reduce paper cup consumption, with $20,000 worth of cash prizes being awarded for the most innovative ideas.Here are my five suggestion and they might not be innovative, but they are simple:1 -- Have every employee -- barista/partner -- ask every customers, every time she/he comes in the store for coffee, "for here or to go?" This would signal that there is a choice. 2 -- Make reusable cups visible. That way customers will have a visual clue that they have a choice.3 -- Have some posters in the store, not about seasonal frothy products, but about the impact of paper cups on the environment. Point out the fact that Brown does in her article for instance. She writes and this could write up on a poster: "According to the Environmental Defense Fund, 20 million trees are cut down in the process of manufacturing paper cups, which could be used to power 53,000 homes with the energy used through our paper cup consumption."4 -- Push the tumblers and offer a real discount if people use tumblers for their to-go drink. Currently Starbucks only discounts to-go drinks in reusable cups by 10 cents. This is less the cost of a paper. The company needs to really incentivize the green choice. (And just to show that this would matter, if only two customers every of hour of the day used their own cups, each Starbucks store could to save over the course of a single year 1,631 gallons of water and reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 226 pounds and its solid waste output by 252 pounds. And that is just two cups an hour.) 5 -- Link up with savethecups.com. Let people compete and see how much they are saving each time they take the reusable option. Fri, 2 Apr 2010 10:07:48 GMT Fri, 2 Apr 2010 10:07:48 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net I live in West Philadelphia, a mixed race, mixed income neighborhood, going through a long and uneven campaign of gentrification. This hasn't been an over night thing, but since Penn built a public school in the neighborhood, property prices have climbed and some people have been pushed out (and priced out.) And a number of coffee shops, gastro-pubs and brew pubs, and BYOBS have opened to meet this demand.But the neighborhood doesn't have a Starbucks -- the nearest one (three actually) is on Penn's campus. Well at least there isn't a Starbucks yet.Today I received the following forwarded email. It is from a local listserve. The person who wrote this note owns a relatively new local market called Milk and Honey. This rather upscale store serves coffee and sandwiches and some prepared and take-away products. Again this is an upscale place and filled a spot occupied by a more corny storey, down market place called, and get this, "The People Market." A little more back-ground. This proposed Starbucks will open on the southern edge of the neighborhood, a bit out of the way, and it will be on the campus of the University of the Sciences. (And this store will probably be a franchise, not a full-blown company-owned Starbucks.)So here is what the note said: "Four Worlds Bakery just passed on the information below about a Starbucks coming to our neighborhood. Please join me to fight it! It is true that Starbucks is notorious for ignoring the wishes of its proposed neighbors but right now there is a clear opportunity to have your voice heard (whatever your opinion). Personally, as a community member and business owner, I will do whatever I can to keep our area national chain free. The Baltimore Ave business corridor and the Woodland Ave corridor are just beginning to change for the better. With this growth is attention from conglomerates and the risk of growing from a unique "traditional" main street to a junk food - junk store strip. I would hate to see that happen.Please read on and email USP or join me at the Spruce Hill Neighborhood Association meeting tonight.Thanks Annie The University of the Sciences is seeking a zoning action to put in a Starbucks at 42nd and Woodland There is a meeting at Spruce Hill Community Association (257 S. 45th St.) at 6:30 tonight (Tuesday); the Univ. is seeking the support of Spruce Hill for their zoning variance. Please come and be heard if you can. If you live in the neighborhood call Liz Bressi-Stoppe 215-895-1104 or email at ebs@usp.edu; Liz is the public relations rep for the University and wants to hear your opinions." [Unfortunately, I can't atten this meeting, though I will report back on what I hear.] ***** And I wanted to also share an edited note/rejoinder from a neighbor. An interesting response and take on development and patterns of investment: At this point, I think I'm basically just in favor of development in University City, Starbucks or otherwise. Compared to other Philadelphia neighborhoods where you pay half a million dollars for a house, the array of choices for my eating and shopping without getting into a car are disappointingly limited, even if they've improved over the past few years. I suspect a Starbucks would help telegraph to the wider world of potential businesses that this is a profitable place to open up. Which might, just maybe, mean that we'll be able to leverage their generic storefront for, say, a new bar that could compete with 44, or a non-BYO restaurant, etc etc. And there's nothing more grating to me than to hear people idolize the status quo—where large chunks of Baltimore are ugly and many of its storefronts are places I never go into—as some sort of stick-it-to-the-man ideal. Gimme a break. Wanna know how to stick it to the man? Build a neighborhood where I don't have to get in my car as often. More practically, though, I think Annie has nothing to worry about. Woodland at 42nd is the USP campus. I can't imagine going to a campus Starbucks there any more than I can imagine going to the one on Penn's campus. Maybe it'll eat into her student business a bit, but I can't imagine a whole lot of impact on her business or that of the other coffee joints. True, we may be reaching coffee shop saturation, but that's not Starbucks' fault any more than anyone else's. Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:59:35 GMT Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:59:35 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Years ago the Wall Street Journal did a study of caffeine and major coffee brands. Fast Company did a similar study recently. Both uncovered the same results. A can of Coke or Mountain Dew has about 50 milligrams of caffeine.A 16 oz. cup of McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts coffee has 140 miligrams of caffeine.A 12 oz. cup of Caribou coffee has 180 milligrams.And a "tall" Starbucks has a whopping 240 milligrams of caffeine, double what you get at McDonalds. The only drink on the commercial market with more caffeine is Jolt. By the way, caffeine intoxication -- the jitters -- starts to kick in at 300 milligrams -- right about what you get with a grande Starbucks. That means you would have to buy almost two full cups of McDonald's coffee to get to the same caffeine bang for your buck as Starbucks. Now, as I understand it, once you get used to elevated amounts of caffeine, you need to keep getting them. In other words, it is hard to go from Starbucks -- and 240 milligrams of caffeine -- to McDonald's -- and its relatively underwhelming amount of caffeine. This could, then, keep you coming back to Starbucks. And caffeine counts are no accidents. In other words, the amount of caffeine has little to do with the beans and everything to do with the preparation -- the grind of the beans and the amount of water used. Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:32:25 GMT Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:32:25 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net This represents an important turn-about for Starbucks and the ads say a lot about where the company is these days. Not until its star started to fade did Starbucks compete over price. For years, the company raised its prices, ten cents here, and ten cents there and no one grumbled. That's because the product that Starbucks sold -- really the image it sold -- was worth it to customers. They got value from what the company said about them to others.But now, a Starbucks coffee isn't what it used to be. It doesn't have the same cultural resonace; it does make the user look as "good" or as sophisticated and discerning as it once did, so customers are moving on (often to independents) for cultural capital and else where for their doses of caffeine. When people need a cup of coffee or quick pick me up, they are choosing their drinks based on convenience and price. So now Starbucks has to compete on price, in ways it never did before. And now it has lost some of the higher-end crowd to the independents, the Stumptowns and the Joes and the Greenlines, it competes more than ever against Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's and other price based sellers of utility and space.And that brings us to the coffee Starbucks is selling these days for $1.50 per cup. Here's what I say about this blend and its history (and relationship to the past) in my book: "In the middle of the slide, Starbucks tried to use its own history to revive its authenticity. In the spring of 2008, not long after the company famously lost a blind taste test to McDonald's coffee, it brought back a slightly covered-up version of the original woodcut logo to sell its new coffee. The Pike Place Blend, a "roasted fresh, ground fresh, brewed fresh coffee, relied on thirty-seven years of company know-how, Starbucks insisted. Reviewers, however, didn't see much of the past in the new blend. "It tastes awful, spat Fox News's David Asman. "It's like a watered down version of the old brew, which was strong and rich and left a wonderful coffee flavor in your mouth. To Time magazine's James Poniewozik, it tasted like a cross between coffee from McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. That was no accident. The medium-roast coffee, Poniewozik noted, contained nothing "risky or distinctive . . . [or] objectionable. So while Starbucks moved sharply away from its smoky, dark-roasted past toward the tastes of the broad middle, it still insisted that it had come up with a "coffee for people who love coffee." Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:27:38 GMT Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:27:38 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net In the spring of 2001, one woman the newspaper never got her name held up a sign in front of the Bismark, North Dakota Barnes and Noble. This was the only Starbucks outlet in the entire state then. She called on Starbucks to stop using genetically engineered food, especially milk from cows fed bovine growth hormones, and ripped the company for what she called its limited commitment to fair trade coffee. Ryan Zinn wasn't in Bismark that day or at the start of the Organic Consumer Association's (OCA) boycott of Starbucks, but now he coordinates the campaign. For the last few years, the grassroots organization has been trying to get the coffee company to stop using altered milk and start buying more Fair Trade coffee. In a phone conversation, I asked Zinn why his group zeroed in on Starbucks as a target. "You couldn't go after Folgers, he said. They didn't care. However Starbucks, he explained, preached corporate responsibility and promised "at least to some extent to protect the environment and care about labor conditions. The company could, in other words, be held accountable. But that wasn't all. Starbucks, Zinn maintained, had the right customer base. Lots of latte enthusiasts consider themselves progressives and worry on occasion about clean air and fair wages. They could, OCA organizers knew, be shamed into not buying Starbucks. Finally, Zinn told me, it is easier to organize around a store then it is an item in a supermarket. "You can leaflet a store a lot easier than an item on a shelf, he said. Beginning in 2001, OCA backers regularly stood outside Starbucks locations across the country and handed out fact sheets detailing the ill effects of milk from cows fed bovine growth hormones and complaining about Starbucks greenwashing on the fair trade issue. The fliers called on supporters to boycott the stores, send protest letters to the company, and engage in a little guerilla consumerism. They urged backers to go into Starbucks and order fair trade coffee. If none was available, the company was supposed to make some. Zinn and the others at OCA, then, instructed their supporters to ask the baristas to brew some of the coffee or make it in a French Press. If enough people did it, they could the OCA reasoned gum up the assembly-line works in most stores. Another OCA flier pictured an altered version of the Starbucks logo. The company in this version underwent a sex change, morphing from an inviting siren, if there is such a thing, into a cartoonish Frankenbucks, a man with beady, over caffeinated eyes, a diabolical smile, and twisted wires sticking out of his head. Still Ryan Zinn insisted that the OCA campaign, from the start, was only partially about Starbucks. Mostly he and his colleagues wanted to use the coffee giant to initiate a conversation about genetically altered food, global trade, and the endless exploitation of labor at the bottom of each cup of coffee (and woven into every shirt and shoe.) In an e-mail follow up to our phone conversation, I asked him how he would assess the Starbucks campaign. He wrote back, "I think I would consider the SBUX campaign mostly ongoing. If we were to think of the Starbucks campaign as three (at least) concentric circles, the inner circle being internal policy change at Starbucks, the outermost circle being whole scale, structural change of the global trade system, the middle, and often overlooked circle, would be advancing the organic/Fair Trade market beyond Starbucks or single products, like coffee. Thinking about these three overlapping concerns, Ryan evaluated each one: "The demand and market for 'Fair Trade' items, from apparel to coffee, he noted, continues to grow. He added, "Fair Trade is a reasonably recognizable term and new industries are integrating Fair Trade practices, if not institutionally, then voluntarily. Unfortunately, this has not led to THE (!) question of, well if we have certain products that are fairly traded (.1%) than what does that say for the rest of the marketplace? In the end, I asked him to grade the campaign I am a teacher after all. Ryan clearly graduated from college before the advent of rampant grade inflation. He gave the OCA campaign a C+. He might have raised the grade if I spoke with him later. Towards end of 2006, Starbucks announced that it would no longer use milk from hormone fed cows. Since this time, Starbucks has started its own bean sourcing program, CAFE Practices. They company equates this with fair trade, but this isn't fair trade. Maybe another boycott is order to make things clear. For more on this see an earlier post. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:45:20 GMT Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:45:20 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Starbucks is back in the news, this time for not banning guns. Here is the background. Over the last month, organized gun owners have walked into Starbucks and other businesses to test state laws that allow gun owners to carry weapons openly in public places. Gun control advocates, including members of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, have protested. Earlier this week, the Brady Campaign came to Seattle and called on Starbucks to offer "espresso shots, not gunshots" and declared its coffee houses "gun-free zones." Starbucks announced, however, it is sticking to its policy of letting customers carry guns where it's legal and said it does not, according to the AP, "want to be put in the middle of a larger gun-control debate." Yet it is not like Starbucks isn't already involved in politics on other fronts -- the green front and the fair trade front, but it wants to stay out of this one. But another thing happened last and I'm curious to see how Starbucks will respond. In response to the growth of the Tea Party, some liberals and moderates have put together the Coffee Party.According to the New York Times, "local chapters are planning meetings in cities from Washington to San Antonio to Los Angeles (where there have been four in the last month.) The party (coffeepartyusa.org) is planning nationwide coffee houses for March 13, where people can gather to decide which issues they want to take on and even which candidates they want to support." Thu, 4 Mar 2010 06:53:24 GMT Thu, 4 Mar 2010 06:53:24 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Singapore's Chua Chin Hon wrote in the Straits Times in 2003, "I'm no anti-globalization protestor, nor am I about to become one. But after the "American coffee giant his words opened in Beijing's Forbidden City, he thought he could understand "a little of the rage against the global capitalist machinery's relentless and oft-times, senseless drive to sell a few more cups of coffee, burgers, or T-shirts. Yet he still believed in consumer power. "We can . . . send out an unequivocal message by voting with our wallets. No more Starbucks for him until it got out of the Forbidden City. In 2007, Rui Chenggang, a news anchor for Chinese Central Television, renewed the call to get Starbucks out of the 587-year old royal residence also known as the Palace Museum. He and his supporters accused the coffee company of tainting "China's national culture. Looking to pressure Starbucks, he called for a boycott of the company everywhere in China until it closed shop in the Forbidden City. This boycott actually worked, or sort of worked. The Starbucks in the Forbidden City is closed, but it has been replaced by a Chinese company selling pricey lattes and cappuccinos in white cups with green logos. Progress? Like Chua Chin Hon and Rui Chenggang, a large cross-section boycotters are trying to get Starbucks to stop doing something and thereby protect something they value. Forty-four year old James Hartline told me over the phone that he used to be gay. "I was in that lifestyle for thirty years, he admitted. He continued, actually he barely took a breath when we talked, that he knew first hand how destructive this gay world could be. Too many drugs, too much sex, too much pornography, too many men into S & M and "cold steal chains, and too many pedophiles. As a Christian, he declared, he wanted to save the children of his city. By sponsoring the San Diego Gay Pride Parade and other "homosexual foundations, he argued, Starbucks supported this "lifestyle of triple X pornography, causal sex, and the recruitment of the young. "I can't stand on sidelines any longer, Hartline proclaimed, "its like the Nazis taking the Jews away. I would stand in the train tracks. Lack of action is very dangerous. With this in mind, Hartline used a web page, blog, and speeches to call on all true Christians to boycott Starbucks and stop the spread of homosexuality.In 2008 Hartline, in fact, claimed that the boycott was starting to get to Starbucks. Check out his blog. He actually says that Starbucks closed its stores -- this was true, but it was to train employees to pull a better shot of espresso. Tue, 2 Mar 2010 21:42:55 GMT Tue, 2 Mar 2010 21:42:55 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Just like buying Starbucks tells a lot about America, not buying Starbucks communicates a good deal as well. Over the last few years, it does seem that consumer boycotts are on the rise. Perhaps this is a response to growing corporate power and maybe even to a perception of declining civic authority or faith in established politics institutions. Indeed to some big business seems to hold more of the cards than big government these days, so that is where the protesters focus their larger political and cultural energies and ire. Cultural critic Sharon Zukin writes in her book on shopping, Point of Purchase, that "the public space of shopping is a space of discussion and debate. By buying something and especially by consciously and publicly withdrawing their purchases, consumers are heard. Through their marketplace activities, buyers can, and sometimes do say, what they think, lay out their vision for justice, and explain how they see and imagine a fair and equitable society. They also talk about their place in the matrix of power in who controls things and makes the decisions. Not buying is also a way, as Zukin explains, for consumers to make the companies they buy from accountable "to the law, to morality, and to social justice. But it is not just companies. Consumer actions use companies as levers to talk to others in the marketplace, elected officials, and even diplomats. Indeed as consumption takes over more and more space in our lives and as companies like Starbucks promise to deliver not just products but experiences, then lifestyles, and then the fulfillment of our deepest desires, boycotts and other moves to stop buying have become more important, more prevalent, and more creative, more revealing, and more deeply political forms of expression. That's what those who stopped buying Starbucks were doing. They were trying to force their way, dragging Starbucks along with them, into a conversation about the meaning of buying and the distribution of power in the modern world of mass consumption. Starbucks attracted protesters like cheap beer attaches college students because it promises so much. As the firm's brand managers boast all the time, it sells more than coffee. Offering a third space, easily attained social status, and solutions to everything from bowling alone to global warming to reconciling the nation's racial past might get people in the door and keep them coming back, but it also raises expectations. As scholars sometimes note, the most dangerous people in society are not the truly beaten, but those with elevated hopes. When promises aren't met, they fire back with emotion, even anger. But it not just raised expectations that make Starbucks a target. The company's tone acts like magnet for protestors. There is a boastfulness about Starbucks, even a sanctimonious smugness. It definitely does good things it gives money to nurses associations in Oregon, literacy programs in Georgia, and clean water campaigns in New Jersey. But the company is also the first to talk about these things, to pat itself on the back. Implicitly, then, at the same time, they set themselves off from other companies. As they have done this, Starbucks has anointed itself as the corporate do-gooder king and put itself on a pedestal. As they do, others come along only too happy to knock them down. Along the way, the protestors turn the company's self-mythologizing and widely professed values into demands. In end then, drinking or not drinking lattes, is a way for ordinary people people without stock portfolios or political connections -- to talk back, to have their voices heard on a wide range of ethnical, community, political, and even ideological issues that they care about and want to fix. Really anti-Starbucks boycotts and protests serve as a window into very local and very global concerns and the connections between them -- of consumers everywhere. Boycott Story Number One -- in anticipation of March Madness: When Howard Schultz, boyhood hoopster, bought the hometown Seattle Supersonics in 2001, the local paper predicted the "rebirth of the franchise. Schultz fed these dreams, talking about returning the team to its "glory days. But things didn't go as planned. Star forward Shawn Kemp couldn't stay out of a courtroom or on a basketball court. Then, Schultz, the team president, traded the high-priced, fan-favorite, and lock down defender, Gary Payton, for next to nothing. By 2006, the Sonics hadn't turned things around and Schultz wanted a new arena to boost the franchise's prospects. When Seattle voters said no, he sounded petulant in public and promptly sold the team to an investment group almost certain to take the club to Oklahoma City. One disappointed fan wrote, "I should have know immediately that Schultz's promises for the team "were a trick, judging by the exorbitant prices he charges for his liquid sin. Sure enough, he continued looking back over the CEO's tenure with team, "it was all a farce. Not only did he turn the team's greatest player and most beloved player out of town, but he threw a temper tantrum when Seattle refused to charge taxpayers for another publicly-funded arena for his new toy. "God forbid, he continued, "that a billionaire be required to pay for his own private wetdream. Based on his reading of Schultz's actions, this man concluded, "any corporation run by this man is surely evil. No more lattes for him or a host of other Sonics fans. Local columnist Robert Jameson supported the boycott as well. He quoted from a Starbucks coffee cup that said, "voting is the method by which we purchase the right to be critical. His vote, no Starbucks. "Take that, Mr. Coffee, he wrote. Mon, 1 Mar 2010 09:31:16 GMT Mon, 1 Mar 2010 09:31:16 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Last month, Pop Matter ran an article adopted from my book that talked about Starbucks and its impact on the music business. The title was, "Starbucks and the New Age of Censorship." Obviously, this piece raised some criticism of the company, but it sparked an even more interesting conversation about fair trade. In response, Rob Ivan of Atlanta wrote, "There are many ways to be accountable to your fellow humans on this planet, and Starbucks has a good record in this area."Responding to Rob, Mark Kemp of Charlotte, a terrific music writer I cite in the article, wrote a really smart and perceptive critique of Starbucks and its Fair Trade polices. Check it out: "I need to take issue with this comment. Starbucks also has a record of misrepresenting itself in the area of accountability to its fellow humans. For example, the company's PR information suggests—though it doesn't say flat-out—that its coffees are all fair trade. And Starbucks does carry fair trade coffees—but only about one bag out of many at most stores is "certified fair trade, which is the only kind of fair trade product available that consumers can know came from workers in fields who were paid decent wages for their incredibly hard labor. Starbucks doesn't carry all 100-percent certified fair trade coffees because it would be more expensive to do so. Meanwhile, many small mom-and-pop stores really do contribute to fair trade practices by carrying all 100-percent certified fair trade coffees. But those stores pay an exorbitant amount of money for these coffees and have to raise their prices to get any kind of profit. If Starbucks used 100-percent fair trade coffees, it would cost the company much less than it does for mom-and-pop stores because of the volume of coffee it moves.The end result is this: Many well-intentioned people go to Starbucks and purchase their coffee at marginally lower prices than what they'd pay at mom-and-pop stores, thinking they are buying a certified fair trade product because that's how Starbucks effectively markets itself. Sure, people who want to contribute to fair trade practices should do more research and know this already, but many people trust Starbucks' cynically disingenuous marketing of coffee, just as they trust its marketing of "smart, "exciting new artists. It wants people like Rob, the fellow who wrote the note above, to believe it is a more socially and environmentally sensitive company than it really is. And I'm not sure that's much worse than not being socially or environmentally sensitive at all. It's certainly less honest." Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:14:31 GMT Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:14:31 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Maybe you haven't noticed it, but there is a class war going on out there on the television. It is a war being waged by middling brands (and allegedly populist politicians.) The key weapons in this fight are words about patriotism and American values. First into the fray was Dominos. Starting last winter in the opening days of the Obama era, the pizza giant launched a TV ad featuring its CEO David Brandon. In it, he walks forward with the nation's dome-topped Capitol Building in the background. He talks about how CEOs are descending on Washington begging for bailouts, but not him. In response, he announces his own bailout program: five dollars pizza. These won't, he says, help the "fat cats on Wall Street," but the "hardworking people" on "Main Street." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nggsJI6Aro Then came Dunkin' Donuts and the company's campaign, "America Runs on Dunkin'." (See my earlier post, Coffee Wars and Class Warfare.) Like the Dominos ads, these spots create a rather exclusive notion of America. In the company's most recent TV campaign, a cosmopolitan woman - a scientist in a white jacket who gets out of a yellow New York City taxicab - travels through iconic American scenes - a leafy suburb and a small town - and talks with an auto mechanic, a telephone repairman, and a bridal shop attendant. Each chooses Dunkin' Donuts over Starbucks in a blind taste test. "Definitely," says one. And the commercial ends with the line, "More hard-working Americans prefer the taste of Dunkin' Donuts over Starbucks." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1SMJOOxEw8  During the Super Bowl, Denny's joined the class warfare with its Mr. Chino spot. In this ads, a "regular guy" - a rather ordinary looking thirty something white guy -- talks directly into the camera with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" playing in the Background." He smirks, "I don't know who Mr. Chino is" - though this character is indentified as someone who drinks cappuccinos and mochaccinos - "but he doesn't know anything about breakfast." Our regular guys, who does know something about breakfast, proceeds to eat an artery- clogging meal of chicken fried steak, bacon, sausage, and hash browns. At the end of the commercial, he tells us: "Coffee and milk foam is NOT a meal!" and "Mr. Chino, I'm not a fan of your beverages, but I sure do love your pants."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gLSaowe5RQ  The language of patriotism, of hard working-Americans - really of dividing America along class lines -- isn't just being used by brands these days. Or maybe some brands are targeting certain audiences. "AngryTaxPayer," a pop sociologist writing on urbandictionary.com, defines a "hard working American" as "someone who repeatedly gets the f-ing SHAFT from the government." Then he uses the term in a sentence, saying and clearly dividing up America, "Joe is a hard working American, but Jose collects a welfare check because he has ten f-ing kids."  That famous regular American Sarah Palin said during her million-dollar book tour last year that she was not trying to reach "the liberal elites," but instead would focus on "everyday, hard-working Americans." And in address to the Tea Party convention last week, she declared, "Average, hard-working Americans need to be able to get out there, unrestrained, and fight for what is right. Fight for energy independence and national security, fight for a smaller government instead of this big government overgrowth that Obama is ushering in."  More in the next few days on the ironies of these branded campaigns to save Main Street and "hard-working" Americans. Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:14:36 GMT Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:14:36 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net By Ann Hornaday  Washington Post Staff Writer  Friday, February 5, 2010  "The Secret to a Happy Ending," which will have its premiere at the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre on Friday night, chronicles the life and impact of the Drive-By Truckers, a rock-and-roll band that may not enjoy fame on a mass scale, but claims an unusually potent connection with its fans. It's a connection the film's director, Barr Weissman felt first-hand when he saw them in 2003. One song in particular, "The Living Bubba," frontman Patterson Hood's high and mournful ode to a friend who had died, reduced Weissman to an emotional pulp.  Weissman, who lives in Takoma Park, had been working 80- and 100-hour weeks as a freelance video editor when he decided to take a break and see the show. And as Hood crooned the song's refrain ("I can't die now 'cause I got another show to do"), Weissman began to cry, right there at 9:30 club. He explains: "I think it says a lot about their art in general that they can do a song that Patterson clearly wrote for a specific person at specific moment in time, but that connects on a fundamental level of the human experience."  Weissman decided to make a movie about the band after seeing them again the following January, courted them over the course of a year, began filming their concerts in early 2005 and spent a rocky two years fitting his own documentary between editing assignments. He also found himself buffeted by the ups and downs of the Drive-By Truckers' own career, at one point being asked to leave a recording session in North Carolina.  "The Secret to a Happy Ending" honors many of the usual rock-doc conventions. It features interviews with DBT founders Hood and Mike Cooley, band mates Brad Morgan and Shonna Tucker, as well as former DBT (and Tucker's ex-husband) Jason Isbell. It captures the sweaty fervor and sacramental devotion of a typical DBT show. It includes the requisite music critic (Geoffrey Himes) and academic (Temple University American studies professor Bryant Simon).  But, like the Drive-By Truckers themselves, "The Secret to a Happy Ending" doesn't strictly obey the rules of the very genre it belongs to. Made by an unabashed fan, what it might lack in hard-nosed inquiry it makes up in conveying the ardor and near messianic belief that have made Drive-By Truckers a cult sensation.  Since self-releasing their first album, "Gangstabilly," in 1998 and especially with their audacious double-concept-album "Southern Rock Opera" in 2001, the band has gathered legions of admirers not only of its music, but of its steadfast do-it-yourself work ethic, grinding out endless tours and selling CDs after shows. "The Secret to a Happy Ending" pays homage to the DBTs' survival as a grass-roots, DIY operation; at its ragged best, the film captures the singular blend of grit, sensitivity, stamina and acute songwriting that have led admirers to compare them to Neil Young, William Faulkner, the Replacements and Robert Penn Warren.  The documentary also happens to chronicle the most parlous moment of the band's career, when Isbell and Tucker's marriage was beginning to fray and when the band itself seemed like it might not last. (Isbell left the band in 2007.) But its gravitational center is the fruitful and fractious collaboration between Hood and Cooley, who met in 1985 in Muscle Shoals, Ala. - Hood is the son of Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section bass player David Hood - and formed an early punk band called Adam's House Cat.  Their close-but-distant relationship remains something of a mystery even to themselves. "This is our 25th year," Hood says from his home in Athens, Ga. "We're having our silver jubilee this summer, I kid you not. And it's weird, because we couldn't be more different. We're total opposites. I think there just came a point in time when we both realized we respect each other. That's the bottom line."  Cooley, who lives outside Birmingham, Ala., concurs. "We tried to be roommates once and boy, that was a disaster," he says, adding that while they're terrific collaborators in the studio and on stage, "on a personal space level we're daylight and dark."  Director Weissman notes that the pair rarely speak when they're not on the road; whereas Cooley is "comfortable in his own skin, being alone," Hood is more gregarious. "He wants to do the right thing for everyone around him, and it runs him ragged," Weissman says. Musically, however, the two mesh with uncanny ease: "For better or worse, it's a perfect combination."  And as for the title of his film? "I think persistence is the secret to a happy ending," Weissman says. "It is for me, and I think it is for them."  The Secret to a Happy Ending will be shown Friday at 9:15 p.m. and midnight at AFI's Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. Weather permitting, band members Mike Cooley and Brad Morgan will attend the 9:15 screening. Call 301-495-6700 or visit http://www.afi.com/silver. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020404326.html Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:17:34 GMT Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:17:34 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net In a recent column in the Westport News, titled "I Flunked Starbucks," Judith Marks-White spoofs the language of Starbucks. In a familiar refrain, she talks about how she doesn't speak Starbucks.  Me: "I'd like a small regular coffee, please."  Barista (confirming my order): "One tall espresso."  Me: "No, a small coffee," I repeated. "Not tall."  Barista: "Tall is small," she said. "And, we don't say `coffee.'"  She keeps the joke going for a few hundred more words. She ends with a bit more dialogue: "Can't I just have a regular cup of coffee like a normal person?" I asked.  "This is Starbucks. We don't do normal."  While this piece is ostensibly about language and about an "unfortunate encounter," it is really about the role of the employee -- the barista -- in the brand socializing project. Starbucks talks a lot about customer service, but the baristas also work as teachers and gate-keepers.   What Starbucks sells, in part, is belonging, and creating its own language is a crucial part of this process. Several years ago Jack Skilkret, a psychology professor at Anne Arnudel Community College in Maryland, rightly observed of Starbucks, "People go there and they fell like they're getting membership in a little club."   Language helps to create the club.  In order to be a part of the club, you have to speak the language. That is how insider groups typically work. The "baristas" are there to let you know that you don't belong -- you aren't part of the club. That is what that barista is telling Marks-White. She doesn't belong. The barista though is trying to coach her, to give her some tips in talking Starbucks. That is the employee's role in this consumer narrative -- to isolate outsiders, but also to give them the tools -- and words -- to belong if they want to join the club. Marks-White declines and goes home.  So what Starbucks sells, in part, is belonging. Language is key to this proposition. Outsiders don't speak Starbucks' insiders do. (And some loyalists have gone a step further and posted on-line guides to speaking Starbucks.)  Finally, remember Starbucks sells a mass -- a mass customized product -- to a broad mainstream audience, so the barriers to entry to the Starbucks clubs can't be and aren't too steep. Really, it isn't that hard to learn how to speak Starbucks, and that too is part of the point. Tue, 9 Feb 2010 10:26:28 GMT Tue, 9 Feb 2010 10:26:28 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Check out this scene in a faux Starbucks from Role Models.  -- a scene about Starbucks language and protests against it. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkpDEn7mGVY) And here is another play on Starbucks order (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNHa4dPCH1k) And another (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFLs9RI8mSA&feature=fvw) I heard this again and again during my research.  I call it boycotting the language of Starbucks.    Lots of people have told me or wrote on-line that they boycott the company’s inflated, pseudo Italian language. "I sure as hell won't say Venti or anything," Scott Kinder wrote on his blog, "In fact, I go out of my way to say SMALL, MEDIUM, or LARGE.  I think it's just a marketing ploy."  When I first started observing Starbucks, a friend said to me, "Okay, I go, but I won’t say any of those stupid words.  What is it tall means small?  That's ridiculous." Since then, I have heard lines just like this again and again.  Brimming with nearly righteous indignation, another person told me, "I just go right up to counter and say, give me a small coffee." Sometimes, I imagine these language boycotters ordering their coffees in simple, clear, everyday words with their fists raised like Tommie Smith on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.  “A medium coffee, please, and by the way, stick it to the man.”   But in many ways this is really a protest against corporate power and control, an attempt to gain an everyday advantage over big companies and their spreading influence over business, politics, and even words.  At the same time, it says something about the limits of our politics, doesn't it? Tue, 9 Feb 2010 10:13:58 GMT Tue, 9 Feb 2010 10:13:58 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net In her column, McLaren tells the story of Zoots cafe in Toronto.  Trying to lure customers, the cafe owners offered free wireless.  And customers came, but they never left.  They turned the cafe into an office away from the office and tables into virtual study carrels.  "Ostensibly," writes McLauren echoing something a I say in my book, cafes are "public spaces, but they feel [like the] private sector."  But this was also something of business problem. "As more people plugged in, the energy of the cafe began to sink," reported Zoots owner, Melanie Jainsse, "People would turn up, buy a $2 tea, hunker down, and sit there for five or six hours not buying anything or talking to anyone. It really started to buy me." So Janisse covered up the plugs with duct tape. At first, customers hated the change.  They wanted their wireless. But eventually, Janisse claims, the cafe became more vibrant and even busier.  "We're packed all the time now," she says, "People take the board games out of drawers, they play chess, they write in notebooks.  They talk about art, it's great.  I'm providing an environment for people who to breather air, not a haven for some jerk in skinny jeans who wants to slouch over his e-mail all day." At some level, I'm down with Janisse.  Wireless helps cafe customers to create their private spaces within the coffee shop, and they do, it seems, sometime get in the way of talk.  They sometimes make cafes feel like study halls; you feel guilt if you talk out loud.  But there maybe Janisse is missing something, alternative forms of community.  Certainly twitter and facebook and even e-mails are the basis for other kinds of talk and exchange and much of this takes shapes in the coffeehouse.  But the question is, I guess, what kind of talk matters the most?  Does talk -- the kind of talk that nurtures community and connections and perhaps even democracy (nod to Habermas here and to the Penny Universities of England) -- need to be face to face?  Is this the most important talk, the most essential to community?  Isn't this the kind of talk that leads to other kinds of talk and can go in all kinds of directions?  Is twitter talk or facebook talk somehow less talk than face-to-face talk?  Is it just a prelude to face-to-face talk in person, perhaps a wireless, free coffee shop?  What kind of talk matters?  And where is the coffeehouse is this process?  Can it do both, be a place for real talk and virtual talk?  Any thoughts? Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:04:04 GMT Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:04:04 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Since the fall, Dunkin' Donuts has been running a new ad campaign and it is about Starbucks, but really it is about class and ideas about class in contemporary America. I just saw an advertisement during the Jets-Colts game for Dunkin' Donuts, announcing that Dunkin' beat Starbucks in a blind taste test. But the ad also makes clear this is about more than coffee, it is about class or really perception and pretention. In the ad, we are told that a majority of HARDWORKING Americans prefer Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks. Hardworking Americans. The idea links Dunkin' Donuts to ordinary Americans and to a common sense style of purchasing and of utility. Starbucks in this binary is linked to the rich and frivolous. The ads further suggest that Dunkin' Donuts is about coffee, while Starbucks is about "couches and music" - really it is about people more interested in the frills of the brand than the actual qualities of the product. "Our consumer profile is very strong," Frances Allen, a Dunkin's brand marketing officer - that's quite a job title - told a reporter, "It is hardworking Americans who are busy people. They don't have time to hang around. They want to get in the store, they want the product served fresh, they want it affordable, and they want it fast." Now what does that make Starbucks customers, not hardworking Americans or people lots to waste on an inferior product? This isn't the first time that coffee marketing in the Starbucks era wasn't about coffee, but about ideas of class. Last year, McDonalds launched a web-site to go with its new reasonably priced "premium" coffee called, unsnobby.com. Before Starbucks grew to what it is now, people didn't fuss over their coffee or read too much into it. There was no social stigma attached to fetching a cup of joe from a pot on the hot plate at the Mobil station or drinking instant at home or Folgers out at a restaurant. Coffee was fuel. It was a hot, caffeine-loaded, culturally sanctioned psychoactive drug. But nowadays, what you drink and where you drink it communicates something fundamental about who you are. Albany New York business writer Marlene Kennedy sensed the change. "When my daughter was younger," she wrote in 2006, "we had no Starbucks in town, so I couldn't gauge whether she'd grow up with blue-collar, drip coffee tastes or trendy, espresso-based ones." In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dunkin' Donuts paid a dozen loyal customers one hundred dollars each to go to Starbucks everyday for a week. At the same time, they paid twelve Starbucks customers to try Dunkin' Donuts coffee. What happened surprised Justin Holloway, the advertising executive who designed the experiment. No one switched teams, or "tribes" as Holloway dubbed them. But these allegiances did not revolve around coffee. They turned on status and class, and to a less extent, gender identities. Holloway reported that Starbucks customers didn't like Dunkin' Donuts' standardized decor or drinks. It felt too much like McDonalds to them and sliced into their sense of individual difference. They bristled, for instance, when employees - not baristas -- poured pre-determined amounts of milk and sugar into their drinks. "The Starbucks people," Holloway sneered, "couldn't bear that they weren't special anymore." One of Holloway's associates concluded that Starbucks patrons "seek out things that make them feel important." They could get coffee at Dunkin' Donuts (and McDonalds), but they couldn't get that sense of elevated status at these more utilitarian places, so they stayed away. Dunkin' Donuts devotes reacted just as strongly. They felt out of place at Starbucks. They didn't like being around all those serious-looking men and women banging away at their laptops. And why didn't they have jobs or offices to go to anyway, they wondered? Why do you have to say grande when you wanted a medium? And how do you pronounce grande? But mostly they couldn't understand why anyone in their right mind would pay four dollars for a cup of coffee. One customer told a researcher that hanging out at Starbucks made him feel like he was "celebrating Christmas with people you don't know." Dunkin' Donuts continued its ethnographic research in 2006. Like a lot of companies, they were trying to figure out how to compete with Starbucks. Despite its name, Dunkin' Donuts is now in the coffee business. Coffee represents 63 percent of its total sales. In the coffee industry, lattes and frappuccino-like drinks deliver the biggest profit margins. Dunkin' Dunuts, therefore, wanted a piece of this pie. But at the same time, company officials learned from their research that if they associated their brand too closely with the symbols of yuppiedom and the culture of trading up they would push away their core audience. At one point, Dunkin' Donuts officials toyed with the idea of putting couches in stores. But they junked the idea not long after one faithful customer told them, "if he wanted to sit on a couch, he'd stay home." When the company test marketed a sandwich on crusty, seasoned bread with peppered meat and melted cheese in between, they called it "panini." Customers recoiled, saying the name was "too fancy." In response, Dunkin' Donuts executives renamed the hot sandwich "stuffed melt," and it sold well. At the end of the day, Dunkin' Donuts marketers found out that its customers embraced the brands' straightforward, blue-collar, man on the street identity, so that's what they sold. "America runs on Dunkin," proclaimed one slogan. In a more direct shot at Starbucks, a Dunkin' Donuts advertisement decreed that it would bring an end to "the tyranny of long waits, high prices, and confusing sizes." "Why no wi-fi?" I asked Dunkin' Donuts vice president of marketing John Gilbert, in in 2006 in his office at the company's corporate orange-trimmed headquarters outside of Boston. I called him after I read a newspaper article that quoted him as saying with Starbucks clearly in mind, "We're not about music and WiFi and couches and fireplaces." Dunkin Dounts customers, he told me, are more self-confident than Starbucks patrons. But still, imagine, he said, a construction worker who comes everyday to get drinks for eight of his co-workers. "What happens," he continued, "when he pulls up and there is no place in the parking lot to park his truck and then he walks into the store he sees the place filled with all these people he doesn't recognize on their laptops." "What's wrong with people on laptops?" I asked, perhaps a little self-conscious. "Dunkin' customers," Gilbert answered, "see Starbucks people as people with nothing else to do." In other words, these aren't honest, hardworking people. They are posers. In an interesting twist, Dunkin' Donuts has started to put off its own aspirational glow. Some urban professionals with high incomes gravitate to the brand and its working-class coffee to demonstrate that they aren't "coffee snobs." (A whole bunch of others, however, are heading to independent, uber coffee shops run by self-described coffee geeks and connoisseurs.) By going to Dunkin' Donuts they try to show that despite their decent sized paychecks they identify with the New England company's "blue collar bona fides" and "working-class ethnos." Other go to show that they won't - or can't - be sucked in by Starbucks' class making appeals. My neighbor told me one day, for instance, that he goes Dunkin' Donuts just to be "contrary." Lily Geismer grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a part of the country where she explained to me, "Dunkin' Donuts verges on an obsession surpassed only maybe by the Red Sox. Over coffee a few years ago at the Espresso Royale across from the main part of the University of Michigan campus and down the street from the Starbucks, she told me about her fascination with "D and D." Boston, she reminded me, remains an "intensely class and racially stratified city." Except at Dunkin' Donuts, said Lily. She saw these shops as one of the city's "few democratic spaces." To illustrate her point, she told me about her father, a man she tenderly described as an "overeducated lawyer from Cambridge who is a snob about so many other and it is true (as I have now confirmed.)" But he prefers Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks "because he doesn't want a fancy drink" or a "milkshake." He just wants "a cup of coffee," not burnt and not over-caffeinated. Yet as Lily explained, this was about more than coffee. More importantly, this was a way for her dad to demonstrate his politics, a commitment to populism and broad-based equality. Denny Marie Post wasn't surprised by what the Dunkin' Donuts researchers learned or what Lily Geismer told me. For the last thirty years, she has worked in the fast food business. These days she's with T-Mobile, following a short sting as the senior vice president of global food and beverage for Starbucks, but before that and when I talked with her, she worked for Burger King and held the position of "chief concept director." Denny recalled for me over the phone an "uh-ha" coffee moment. Between flights at O'Hare or Hartsfield - one of those big airports -- she waited in line at a Starbucks. In front of her stood two soldiers, both in uniform. They stared up at the menu board. They couldn't figure it out. What did the drink names mean? What was with the sizes? Where was the coffee? "They are terrified," Denny told me, adding, "the person behind the counter wasn't very helpful." Even though she is a tea drinker, she decided to step in.  "Just order a venti coffee," she advised them. They did and wandered away with their drinks. Denny, however, couldn't get that moment out of her head. She kept thinking to herself, "They face life and death every day and they are scared. They don't know how to order. There's something wrong."  Over the next few months, she put her staff at Burger King to work on "Big Joe" coffee - a coffee according to advertisements that come in three sizes, small, medium, and large," and two varieties, regular and turbo. The only difference between the two kinds is that turbo contains more caffeine. With this coffee, Burger King doesn't tell a story about where the beans come from or the combination of flavors - hints of citrus with a touch of chocolate -- in the blend or how its products help to make the world a better place. Taking a jab at Starbucks, the sign for Big Joe says, "If you want expensive coffee buy two." Not long after Big Joe's launch, Denny told a reporter that the new product was the "anti-Starbucks." Burger King customers, Denny said, loved the new coffee. But again, it wasn't really about coffee. People who eat Whoppers and BK Broilers, Denny observed, "don't read the New York Times," and they don't want their coffee "complicated, like a chai half de-caf whatever." What they want, her focus groups, market research, and instincts told her, was "straight-forward" Joe, rather than "frou-frou" coffee.   That "fro, fro" line was a good one, I said to Denny when we talked, but what exactly did you mean, I asked? "The whole ambience" of Starbucks, she answered, "is continental, chic and skews feminine." She continued, "The need to know (or pretend to know) how to pronounce words derived from Italian or French - the feigned expert customization regarding levels of foam, types of milk - all of it adds up to making a public and rather superficial statement about oneself." To her, Fro fro, is "unnecessarily accessorized." "The whole experience," Denny concludes, "is a bit more than it really need be but that's what makes it special for the Starbucks devotee."   Once again, the negatives - the Dunkin Donut ad men and the anti-Starbucks people -- got it right. Starbucks is not simply a coffee thing or even an efficient caffeine delivery system. It became a form of expression - a way that people tell others about themselves and about how they want to be perceived. And others - that is the power of Starbucks - understand the distinctions and coded meanings about class and status, although they might not embrace them or make them their own. Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:17:46 GMT Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:17:46 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Coffee can't cure a hangover says my colleague Thomas Gould.  See what he has to say in the New York Post: "Coffee may reduce the sedative effects of alcohol, which could give the false impression that people are not as intoxicated as they really are," Thomas Gould, PhD, of Temple University told WebMD.com. Gould added that people who have only consumed alcohol are more likely to feel "tired and intoxicated," and more importantly, acknowledge that they're drunk.  The researchers, who published their findings in the journal "Behavioral Neuroscience," first compared the drunk behavior of mice to that of mice given only a saline solution. The drunk and sober mice were tested on their ability to learn a maze while trying to avoid bright lights or sounds. The drunk mice did significantly less well. After being drunk, the mice were given the equivalent of six to eight cups of coffee. While the caffeine and alcohol combination seemed to make the mice less anxious, it failed to reverse the negative effects that alcohol had on them learning the maze. Alcohol also calmed the "caffeine jitters," reports WebMD.com, which made the mice less able to avoid potential threats. In a press release, Gould concluded that "the bottom line is that, despite the appeal of being able to stay up all night and drink, all evidence points to serious risks associated with caffeine-alcohol combinations." http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/health/2009/12/11/2009-12-11_coffee_wont_cure_your_hangover_and_may_lead_to_poor_decisionmaking_study.html Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:27:42 GMT Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:27:42 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net The other day I got an interesting e-mail from a former Starbucks middle manager. He said that he had read my book and brought it up at a lunch with two of the early driving forces behind the company's growth. Specifically, he mentioned a section of the book where I talk about how Starbucks, especially in its opening phases of massive growth attracted a heterogeneous, largely up-scale crowd. When one of those early operators heard this, he scoffed:"I wish we'd been that smart." My contact, the former Starbucks middle manager, also brought up the recent New Yorker profile of Whole Food chairman John Mackey. In this essay, Nick Paumgarten paints Mackey as a mercurial and impulsive business leader, driven by his quirks and foibles as much as calculated acts of risk-taking and planning. The former middle manager suggested to me that the larger "net effect" of companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods was "significantly more dramatic and perhaps less intentional than it appears," adding “there was so much management by opportunity and aggressiveness -- surprisingly little real strategy." This raises some fascinating questions about intentionality and agency in business decision making. Much of the stuff written about corporations, particularly critiques of corporations and corporate culture, presume a kind of cold rationality to the way business operates. It is a largely de-asethicized or personalized version of motives and intentions, where the only thing that matters is marketing reports - often based on sneaky ethnography - and spread sheets. Surely people like John Mackey and Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, are driven to make money, but they are also informed by their own creativity. Still that doesn't mean that they aren't functioning within larger institutions and structures of knowledge (and knowledge production) that don't shape their decisions and thinking. Let's go back to the idea of intentionality and the comment, "I wish we’d been that smart!!" Well, maybe no one at Starbucks in the early to mid-1990s said explicitly, let's put our stores where we will attract a homogenous crowd, but the way they went about their business, priced their products, and gathered knowledge made sure the homogenous crowd was, in fact, the outcome. First Starbucks priced its coffee far ahead of the competition. Coffee never cost more than a dollar in the 1990s, but Starbucks priced its coffee at twice that figure. That meant that only people who had some money and wanted something better would go to the places. As I explain in my book, pricing acted as a filter keeping some people out and pulling others in (and thus narrowed the range of the crowd at Starbucks). Then, Starbucks, like Whole Food, quite wisely commissioned - or did so in house - its own market research. It located its stores at busy inter-sections and on the sides of the street where people walked on the way to work in the morning, but it also chose locations based not just on foot and car traffic but perhaps even more on average income levels of educations. Average income levels and home values these are social constructed numbers, the products of historic patterns of racism and class privilege that when combined tend to reproduce homogeneity. So led by this kind of knowledge gathering, Starbucks followed the money. The company intentionally did this because it made good business sense. They followed the data. Of course, Starbucks' decisions about where to put its stores speaks to the larger lie at the heart of the American Dream - for every Howard Schultz rising from public housing to the helm of one of the nation's most dynamic corporations there are millions of poor kids who attend lousy, underfunded schools and end up in dead-end jobs and there are millions of upper-middle-class kids who favored by birth go to gleaming schools with sparkling science labs and rooms full of brand new computers. They go to college, move to up-scale neighborhoods because they have the best chances at getting the best job and that gives them a choice of any number of Starbucks to go to on their way to work. Just to flesh this out a bit. Some of the first Starbucks stores were in Marin, California and in West Chester, New York, and not Prince George's County, Maryland or Oakland. (And Marin and West Chester were largely homogenous places - certainly in class terms.) Today, just to flesh this out a bit more, there are more Starbucks stores in Marin County (21) than Bakersfield County (21) despite that fact that Bakersfield has three times the number of people. (About 250,000 vs. 820,000, but the average per household income in Marin is about three times that of Bakersfield.) What I'm suggesting is that there just aren't that many accidents in economic life - kind of like the suburbs - they didn't just happen to develop the way they did. The logic of American consumer life produces largely predictable outcomes. High priced items start out in high-end neighborhoods. Once the upper-middle class adopts a product, it often becomes a status symbol. Once it does, those a few rung below start to consume the product, so that they look like they have some money. And then, the upper-middle class moves on to something new - another way to show off their wealth and status. That cycle - that cycle that Veblen pointed out over a hundred years ago -- fueled Starbucks growth and undergirded the business moves of the company whether clearly articulated that or not. Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:18:04 GMT Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:18:04 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Nick Reding's Methland may be my pick for the nonfiction book of the year.  It is, of course, a remarkably sad and disturbing tale of a small Iowa town caught in the throes of a full-on drug epidemic.  The characters are great.  The doctors, lawyers, and politicians are, in many ways, consumed by just as many doubts and uncertainties as the crank-heads.  And everyone bears the costs of this health crisis.  And of course, there is never enough help -- social workers are overburdened, the emergency room is at breaking point, and the mayor's office wants to build a call center.   It is all kind of a tragedy, because no matter they do, it isn't enough.  But those are the outlines of the story you would probably expect from a book like this -- a smart account written by a journalist immersed his subject and sensitive to his subjects. Yet it is Reding's ability to pullback and see the larger social forces behind the meth scourge that makes this book great, and so important.  He links the rise of Meth to broad economic changes -- to the transformation of the rural industrial economy; in particular, to the disappearance of good, union jobs and the emergence and consolidation of agri-business.  Actually, he show how monopolies in the drug trade and in the drug companies -- the legit ones -- have helped to create a fertile ground for the larger drug business and made drug laws almost impossible to enforce. So this is a big book about big economic and political forces.  And in the end, like a good Springsteen song, there is a little hard earned redemption and a few reasons to believe.  See this review from popmatters, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/117976-methland-the-death-and-life-of-an-american-small-town-by-nick-reding/ Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:44:16 GMT Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:44:16 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net A few months ago, Benjamin Barber, the author of Jihad vs. McWorld and Consumed, wrote a great piece in The Nation responding to the announcement that New York City would close off vehicular traffic around a few blocks of Times Square. Titled "The Art of Public Space," Barber rightly insists in this essay that public space is not natural, but has to be "made." (And it can be made from the top down or the bottom up, but always with the public, not profits, in mind.) "There is," he writes about top down kinds of places, "an 'art of public space,' which requires more than no-car signs, traffic cones, concrete barriers, tables and chairs. Happily, New York possesses an urban resource ideally suited to creating public space: artists." Thinking of the Ramblas in Barcelona and Millennium Park in Chicago, Barber wants to turn those New York pedestrian blocks into artistic spaces - places where artists are commissioned to do work that will generate public discussion or raise awareness of civic issues. In the end, Barber understands that public space must produce conversations. This is key. Again, these gathering spots need to be places not just for escape and respite, but places of engagement and discussion. Such places, though, need triggers - something to start the talk. Art has always fit this role. We need this sort of public investment in places and in art now more than ever. As the health care debate has painfully revealed, as if we didn't already know this, what our democracy suffers from the most is not the corrupting influence of money but from the diminished capacity for meaningful discussion. Thu, 7 Jan 2010 16:02:04 GMT Thu, 7 Jan 2010 16:02:04 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Last week, Roy Street Coffee and Tea, located at the corners of Roy Street and Broadway in Seattle, opened. This is another one of those stealth Starbucks - Starbucks stores without the Starbucks name over the front door - the coffee giant has been opening in its hometown and in London as of late. Like the other shops of this new vintage, this one is appointed with antiquey furniture, retro lighting, and a distressed looking table top salvaged from an old ship. The rough-hewed interiors of these not Starbucks Starbucks haven't really mattered to the journalists and bloggers who have been writing about them. They talk only about the naming patterns in Starbucks' most recent branding strategy. To them, the names of the stores represent a brand crisis. Quite rightly, they point out, when a brand hides its own identity, it is in some ways admitting defeat, saying that its name - a central part of any brand - has lost value. When it comes to Starbucks, all of this is true, but the question is why? Why has the Starbucks brand lost so much value that it has to hide from customers and act like a small business? The answer to these questions rests with communities and consumers, what they care about and desire the most these days. Over the last several years, a quiet but decided shift in buying patterns has taken place. Really, there is something of a velvet revolt or a quiet rejection of brands going on. In the early years of this century, the then mayor of Baltimore Martin O'Malley begged Starbucks to come to his city. He thought these big name stores would lend his de-industrializing hometown a much needed upper-middle-class sheen. Same with the residents of Landsdowne, Pennsylvania. In 2004, the town had several mom and pops diners and coffee shops. One day, though, a team of local residents lined up in three rows of forty an empty lot where a 7-11 used to be, h. When the photographer gave them the sign, they turned over the letters. They didn't spell out "Go Team!" Instead, they wrote, "Got Location! Need Starbucks!" Afterwards, the Greater Lansdowne Civic Association sent this "visual petition" to Starbucks headquarters. Landsdowne never got a Starbucks, but Benicia, California and a lot of other towns got plenty of Starbucks. By 2007, Benicia didn't want them anymore. When Starbucks tried to open a fifth store in the northern California coastal town some residents balked. "It's a serious problem," complained a former city council person and owner of an independent coffee house. "People need to wake up to it," she proclaimed, "When you drive through a town and everything is so homogenized that you can't tell where you are anymore, that's a problem." She had an idea. Limit the number of chains. Ban them even. Encourage, instead, small, one-of-a-kind businesses. Soon her idea gained the support of local officials looking for ways to curtail the opening of more chain stores without violating state and federal laws. When the city council started to debate a ban on all "formula" businesses, the city manager told a reporter, "it's about protecting the unique character of the commercial areas of Benicia, and there's nothing unique about a store that has the same look and style, not just here, but everywhere." This wasn't just about Starbucks. This was about a growing resistance to brands, and their dominance over the landscape, symbolized by Starbucks. That's what the Benicia residents were saying. They were nervous about how brands cut into the value of their local place. So they revolted. With their feet and their purchases, individual consumers are revolting as well. Scholars have started to call this trend, "brand avoidance," as consumers worried about the larger social and economic impact of brands on society look for other options, even if those options cost a bit more. In growing numbers, buyers are choosing the local over the brand, the farmers market over the supermarket, the Main Street strip over the mall. Same with coffee. While Starbucks closed down outlets in 2008, citing the New Recession as the cause, independent coffeehouses, The Seattle Times noted, brought in new customers and they didn't cut prices. Over the last few years, in fact, the number of independent coffeehouses in the US has jumped past the number of chain store outlets, and now represents 54% of the higher-end coffee market. How can we explain these consumer choices and the growth of these smaller business sectors? Consumers, just like the towns they live in, are starting to think that going to the branded store - to Starbucks or Cosi or Chipotle - costs too much. It makes them look too ordinary and too much like everyone else. This is what those not Starbucks Starbucks stores tacitly acknowledge. By hiding their logos, they speak to the growing appeal of the locally owned small businesses. (Remember the stealth Starbucks stores are individually designed and named after the streets they are on - the places themselves.) Apparently the experiment isn't working. A former Starbucks insider told me that 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea - the first of the new not Starbucks stores (its website, by the way, is called http://www.streetlevelcoffee.com) - is doing only a third of the business of the regular green-logoed Starbucks store that used be at that site. Perhaps consumers really do want something more than branded artifice; they want something genuinely local. The revolt against sameness may actually be real, too real for a fake Starbucks. And certainly this growing rejection of brands presents an opportunity for small business owners to create something authentically local for their customers. Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:17:25 GMT Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:17:25 GMT http://www.EverythingButTheCoffee.net Over the last few months, the New York Times has been running a series of articles on the New Hard Times. Many of these pieces investigate the costs of the currents economic crisis - costs in terms of homes lost, savings drained, and relationships strained. A smart and perceptive recent article in USA TODAY, "How Joblessness Hurts Us," by Thomas H. Sander and Robert Putnam points to another set of costs of the New Hard Times - costs in terms of community connections and increased isolation.   "Misery," Sander and Putnam write, "it turns out, doesn't love company. Distressing new research shows that unemployment fosters social isolation not just for the unemployed but also for their still-employed neighbors. Moreover, the negative consequences last much longer than the unemployment itself. Policymakers have focused on short-term help for the jobless, but they must address these longer-term community effects, too." This was true during the last Great Depression of the 1930s.   Researches back then discovered that people without jobs socialized less, attended fewer PTA meetings, and stopped going to church pot-lucks. The same drop in these kinds of daily activities that fostered community life seem to taking place now. The growing ranks of the unemployed tend to stay at home, avoid volunteering, and eschew social activities. To put it bluntly, the unemployed spend most of their increased free time alone. What's more, as Sander and Putnam argue, the loss of social connections is difficult to recover, even after the unemployed find work. Prolonged periods of joblessness translate into permanent social isolation. The answer - an aggressive job creation campaign. Not surprisingly, the comments on the USA TODAY webpage rail against this op-ed piece as predictable liberal whining, but this is not just about government spending as these critics charge, this is about the vital work of sustaining community. Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:06:11 GMT Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:06:11 GMT