by Taylor Clark
The stakes are high for Starbucks in the caffeine debate. Several former and current Starbucks executives told me that they could imagine only one thing that might bring Starbucks down: conclusive scientific evidence that caffeine is unhealthy. If that contingency were to arrive, the company would bear a heavy burden; thanks to Starbucks, we’re taking in more caffeine than ever. “What’s a small coffee now?” asked Roland Griffiths, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has conducted many studies on caffeine. “A few years ago, a cup of coffee was five ounces, but the ‘small’ at Starbucks is twelve ounces. It’s more than doubled.” As we’ve seen, Starbucks also serves the most potent brew in the coffee-house world, which, on a strong day, packs nearly as much caffeine in a single grande cup as three maximum-strength NoDoz caplets. And since the company brought coffee back into vogue, we’ve become surrounded with caffeinated “energy drinks” like Red Bull, caffeinated breath mints, caffeinated vodka . . . the list goes on.
All of which leads to the inevitable question: Is caffeine bad for us? And what does the stuff do to our bodies, anyway?
To Drink or Not to Drink?
When we humans ingest moderate amounts of caffeine, a series of pleasant sensations runs through us like an electric current. We feel invigorated, buzz with industry, the mortal coil suddenly crackling with newfound energy. The mind races. The heart thumps faster. There’s a very good reason why caffeine makes us feel so keyed up: we’ve just swallowed poison, and our bodies are reacting accordingly.
Specifically, caffeine is bug poison — a natural insecticide that developed in plants as a means of short-circuiting the nervous systems of any crawlers who might hazard a munch. Its scrambling effect on bug brains is truly impressive. In one study, conducted by NASA, researchers dosed common house spiders with several different psychoactive drugs — Benzedrine (a variant of amphetamine), chloral hydrate (a sedative and hypnotic), marijuana, and caffeine — to see what kind of effect each would have on their webs. The tweaked, sedated, and stoned spiders spun decent-looking facsimiles of the standard web, with the necessary hubs and concentric circles. The caffeinated spiders, on the other hand, wove the arachnid equivalent of gibberish, a fractured and haphazard mess.
Since we are neither insect nor arachnid, the drug affects us far differently, but it still takes quick and decisive command of our bodily functions. Within thirty to forty-five minutes of your first sip of coffee, caffeine molecules reach their peak concentration in the body, permeating all barriers. It slips into saliva, spinal fluid, breast milk, and even sperm, which wiggle and swim more energetically when under the influence.
The source of caffeine’s power within our bodies is its resemblance to adenosine, a neurotransmitter that regulates sleep. Adenosine works in the nervous system the same way a radiator works in a car: its purpose is to keep the brain from overheating. Each time a neuron fires, adenosine is produced as a by-product, and the more it fires, the more adenosine accumulates. Over time, the adenosine finds its way to receptor sites, which then tell the brain that it’s time to shut down — that is, we grow tired and fall asleep. After enough time has passed, the receptor sites reabsorb the adenosine and we wake up refreshed, ready for another day of intense neural action.
Caffeine works by disrupting this process. To the brain, caffeine and adenosine look identical, which means the caffeine molecules start snapping into the adenosine receptor sites right and left — only the fit isn’t exact, so the caffeine blocks adenosine from getting in, but it doesn’t order the brain to shut down. As Stephen Braun explains in his useful book, Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, the effect is “like putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals”; our neurons begin firing more rapidly because they have no way of slowing down. (Blocked receptor sites on the colon and kidneys also account for the laxative and diuretic properties of coffee; those organs, too, get going with enthusiasm.) The body responds to the foreign menace by sending squadrons of liver enzymes to dismantle the caffeine molecules, and after six or so hours things return to normal.
But although caffeine is technically a toxin, that doesn’t necessarily mean it does us any harm. Despite the extreme scrutiny scientists have placed on the drug, no serious health charges have ever been proved. If anything, the studies have given coffee drinking a better reputation. Regular coffee consumption appears to offer significant protection against Parkinson’s disease, liver disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers — enough benefits to offset risks like a mild rise in blood pressure. * Taken in moderation — say, three or fewer cups of coffee a day — caffeine generally enriches our lives without serious consequence. It gives us the miraculous ability to become alert on command, improves mental quickness, enhances athletic performance, and even improves the drinker’s mood. Caffeine is so good at boosting one’s attitude, in fact, that researchers have discovered that a strong dose of the stuff does as much to bring up a person’s spirits as cocaine or amphetamines.
Which brings us around to another problem: caffeine is uncommonly addictive. Coffee neophytes can develop physical dependence on the drug in as few as three days, and once they do, they need a daily dose of it just to get their brains functioning normally. And if anything gets in the way of that fix, caffeine withdrawal symptoms will begin appearing within twelve to twenty-four hours of the addict’s last cup, meaning that many of us are already suffering its initial effects when we wake up each morning. Headaches are just the beginning; other symptoms of withdrawal include depression, fatigue, lethargy, irritability, and even vomiting. Should you be crazy enough to quit entirely, it takes about a week of abstention for the body to return to normal.
The situation sounds far worse than it really is. Caffeine may be fiercely addictive, but it’s no drug of abuse; nobody has ever held up a liquor store to get cash for a hit of cappuccino. You don’t need to drink more coffee over time to get the same buzz, and overuse is highly unpleasant, as anyone who has had the jitters from one espresso too many will confirm. Actually, overdosing on caffeine through coffee drinking is all but physically impossible, though Gus Comstock made an inspiring attempt to do so. And what’s more, the addiction probably does more good than harm: caffeine may be the only psychoactive drug on the planet that routinely saves lives, by making the highways safer from drowsy drivers. “With coffee, it’s more a habit than an addiction,” said Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor who studies our relationships with the things we eat and drink. “Addiction is a dirty word in this culture, and I don’t like using it. Technically, it’s addictive, but it’s really quite benign. Something so innocuous isn’t that bad to be addicted to.”
This verdict on caffeine bodes well for Starbucks, but it’s not a green light to indulge freely in the chain’s concoctions. Black coffee on its own is virtually free of calories, but the milk-and-syrup drinks and megamuffins Starbucks serves can pack a staggering number of them. When the Center for Science in the Public Interest learned that a venti Strawberries and Crème Frappuccino with whipped cream contained an astonishing 770 calories, the organization branded the drink “food porn” and described it as “the nutritional equivalent of a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pepperoni Pizza that you sip through a straw.” New Zealand’s Consumer magazine also found that a Starbucks venti White Hot Chocolate with whipped cream had more calories and fat than a Big Mac and a medium Coke combined. (And let’s not even go into “breve” espresso drinks, which are made with half-and-half instead of milk.)
The solution here is simple: stick with classics like French press coffee, espresso, and cappuccinos — the drinks in which the complexity and refinement of coffee shines through untainted. As Dr. Illy might ask, would you want to conceal a gorgeous woman under a full-length trench coat?
When I was speaking with Illy in his Trieste office, trying to keep up with the cavalcade of charts and equations, he interrupted the barrage for a moment and took out a small black device
from his desk. It was a handheld image viewer, containing hundreds of digital photographs of coffee under powerful magnification. With the manner of a museum curator, he showed me pictures of golden crema foam that looked like the paintings of Gustav Klimt; video of tiny oil particles in espresso dancing in unison; images of pale blue caffeine crystals arrayed in constellations of long, slender needles. “Very beautiful, no?” he asked.
And it was.
8
Green-Apron Army
Let us now take a moment to reflect on the plight of the Starbucks barista, that patient indulger of obsessive-compulsive customer requests, that tireless dispenser of forced smiles, that hapless victim of a never-ending parade of indignities. Any brave soul who dons the green apron must endure annoyances that would crush the rest of us — or at least send us into a cup-throwing, syrup-spraying rage. Consider just a few of the job’s daily ordeals:
• Dealing with precaffeinated morning customers, who often communicate solely through grunts and scowls.
• Deciphering novella-length orders, like a “decaf single grande extra vanilla two-percent extra caramel 185-degree with whipped cream caramel macchiato.” *
• Watching customers reach into the tip jar to help themselves to change when their tab comes to $4.07.
• Needing to conduct business transactions with people as they loudly discuss their sex lives via cell phone.
• Wearing company-issue buttons with slogans like, “I only say yes!”
• Having to figure out how to make a “three-quarter shot” of espresso or “chewy” foam.
• Staring all day at ads that declare, “My drink is like a mental back rub.”
I could go on, pointing out the customers who pay their bills in nickels or the constant aural assault of Starbucks’s easy-listening XM Satellite Radio station, but the point is obvious enough already: working at Starbucks is a constant struggle with the forces of exasperation. And sometimes exasperation wins out. Push a barista beyond his breaking point, and you’ll end up receiving the universal punishment — he’ll secretly give you decaf.
For Starbucks wage earners, the torment doesn’t always end in the stores; company baristas must also take part in bone-chilling extracurricular events. In one such case, first revealed by the Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger, Starbucks subjected an auditorium full of employees to a truly cruel and unusual display. The occasion was a 2005 awards ceremony for licensed store employees (the ones who work in airport and bookstore outlets), and baristas on the scene reported that the event was plodding along as expected until the emcee announced an unanticipated arrival — “Jefferson Starbucks!” Suddenly, a band of costumed middle managers burst onto the stage. Clad in brightly colored wigs, fishnet shirts, and leather pants, with giant prop instruments in their hands and a huge record hanging behind them, the troupe looked — in one informant’s words — “like a living cake decoration.” As the crowd recoiled in collective horror, the supergroup launched into a tune that has often been described as “the worst song of all time”: the 1985 Jefferson Starship hit “We Built This City.” But this wasn’t the usual version of the song; their lip-synched adaptation included lyrical gems like, “Knee-deep in the mocha / Making coffee right / So many partners / Workin’ late at night.” Another verse bears reprinting in its entirety:
Someone’s always working / DM’s and inside sales
We care, and service levels / Are driving better sales!
We just want to build here / IMDS, does it pass?
We call on development / To complete the task!
Which culminated, naturally, with the soaring refrain, “We built this Starbucks on heart and soul!” The band members were so taken with their composition that they presented each attendee with a CD, which explains how the recording made its way onto the Internet, where it will remain for all eternity as a memento mori — a grim reminder of the hazards of working for Starbucks.
Over the years, two things have kept the baristas’ spirits afloat through tribulations like these. First, there was the devotion that Howard Schultz inspired in rank-and-file Starbucks employees, making them feel as though each latte they sold represented a step toward global unity. But second, on a more material level, Starbucks has long offered one of the nation’s most progressive benefits plans for retail workers. Every employee who puts in at least twenty hours a week receives access to stock options and a low-cost health-care plan (which covers dental, vision, and even hypnotherapy), plus auxiliary perks like tuition reimbursement and paid adoption fees. The company has maintained this benefits cornucopia despite astronomical increases in the cost of health care, which has led to a peculiar result: according to company spokespeople, Starbucks now pays more each year to insure its employees (over $200 million) than it pays for its raw coffee beans. This benevolence wins the company no end of praise in the business press — Starbucks is a mainstay on Fortune’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list — and it helps make employees want to stick around as well. The average quick-serve eatery’s annual employee turnover rate is 200 percent, yet Starbucks sees only 80 percent of its baristas leave the company each year.
Starbucks has enjoyed an employee-friendly public image for decades, but that image is now beginning to lose some of its luster. Every day, the company adds three hundred new hires to its workforce of more than 125,000, and every day, the grumblings about the indignities of modern Starbucks baristadom grow louder. Of course, baristas don’t just object to the petty annoyances and the eighties cover songs. According to dissatisfied employees, the company’s hourly workers must deal with wildly inconsistent hours, low wages, chronic understaffing, and glaring workplace health hazards. The job, they say, is becoming more routinized and strictly controlled over time, making them feel like dispensable cogs in an enormous corporate machine. Many baristas are furious about these trends — no one more so than Daniel Gross, a law student at Fordham University who fancies himself the leader of the employee resistance. Since the day he was hired at Starbucks, Gross has eagerly played the role of rabble-rouser, seeking to either change the chain’s policies toward wage earners or shatter its compassionate public appearance. “Starbucks, more than any other company, has successfully deceived people into believing that it’s a good place to work,” he told me. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.”
To say that Gross is a radical would be selling him short. For the past four years, he has been pressing his colleagues to join up with the Industrial Workers of the World (aka the Wobblies), a storied labor union whose ideas are so far Left that they sometimes break through into an entirely new dimension of political extremism. When Gross was explaining to me his belief that every worker deserves a chance to join a union, for instance, he added “except cops and prison guards,” as if it were something about which all reasonable people agree. Why not cops and prison guards? “Because those folks have chosen to betray their class interests,” he said. “The security apparatus in this country is aligned with the bosses. Whenever you see capital in distress, they’re quick to intervene.” Ah, yes. An articulate and surprisingly good-natured twenty-seven-year-old, Gross nevertheless has a rabid temperament when it comes to Starbucks. One press release for his nascent IWW Starbucks Workers Union claimed that “Starbucks, with its poverty wages and rampant repetitive-stress dangers, resembles a sweatshop more than it does a decent place to work.” Since no barista has ever been locked into a Starbucks and forced to work a sixteen-hour shift without breaks, bathrooms, or food, the comparison may not quite fit.
But despite the penchant for distasteful exaggeration (or maybe because of it), Gross and his prounion colleagues have made the grievances of the Starbucks hourly workforce into a hot issue, generating scores of news stories and sparking endless debate on Internet forums. In their baristas’ rights campaign, the radical Starbucks Workers Union has managed to gain the support of an unlikely ally: the National Labor Relations Board. Gross alleges that Starbucks has conducted a “viciou
s antiunion campaign” — threatening IWW supporters and attempting to bribe workers on the fence — and indeed, the NLRB has backed up some of his assertions. In March 2006, the company settled an NLRB claim that it had violated labor law by illegally obstructing the union — a major defeat, even though Starbucks admitted no fault in the agreement. And the worker grievances keep stacking up; the company recently paid $18 million to settle a California lawsuit filed by more than a thousand current and former store managers, who claimed that it illegally withheld overtime pay. (Similar suits are pending in other states.) The acrimony between the company and some of its employees has grown so thick that Starbucks recently suffered its first strike, in New Zealand, when over two hundred disgruntled workers from nine stores flooded onto Auckland’s streets to voice their complaints.
This furor over the rights of Starbucks baristas raises a thorny issue: in a job for which almost everyone is overqualified, what can one fairly expect from an employer? After all, just as Gross and his growing band of comrades are making their union push, their jobs are becoming less and less skilled. Where the wearers of the green apron once manipulated the espresso machine with hard-won expertise, their job is now restricted to smiling, handling money, and pressing buttons on the new superautomatics. A labor union might not even make sense in a workplace where 80 percent of the workers (many of whom don’t take the job that seriously) leave every year. So what does it mean to be a Starbucks barista today? Are they craftsmen or cogs? And how generous should we expect the company to be with them?
A Barista Is Born
Six hundred years ago, the birthplace of coffee — what is now Ethiopia — lay under the rule of a tribal kingdom known as Kefa. According to legend, Kefa society had a caste called the Tofaco, who were charged with a unique duty: brewing the king’s coffee. This makes the Tofaco history’s first baristas. (One likes to imagine them wearing polo shirts and khakis, asking their warlord if he’d like an almond biscotti with his beverage.) Long after the Kefa kingdom faded away, the idea of coffee preparation as a lifelong vocation rose again in Italy — which was somewhat necessary, since mid-twentieth-century espresso machines were about as complicated to operate as the space shuttle. The finicky, tuxedo-clad barista (Italian for “bartender”) introduced humanity to coffee as a work of art, worthy of decades of devotion. Even today, the average age of a barista in Italy is thirty-eight, a far cry from the stereotypical college-age espresso jockey at Starbucks.