by Taylor Clark
As coffee fever spread around the globe in the 1990s, so too did the notion that those who prepared the beverage were culinary artistes, capable of summoning drinkable masterpieces with the pull of a lever. In the twenty-first century, however, it’s not enough to be just an artist. One must be a mogul, an in-your-face personality, preferably with a reality TV show and a line of branded kitchen products at Target. And actually, the world’s first superstar barista may not be too far off. Thanks to the recent invention of barista competitions — flashy yet grueling exhibitions of coffee-making skill — barista celebrities do exist. They even have groupies.
The stars of the barista cosmos emerge at the World Barista Championship, an annual event that draws entrants from countries as far-flung as Estonia, Puerto Rico, and Lebanon. In fact, when I attended the 2005 contest, which was held in a spacious wing of Seattle’s old public library building, the Lebanese supporters were some of the wildest, most snappily dressed people there; they all wore matching gray shirts and striped pants, with a black lebanon embroidered down the leg. This was only the beginning of the competition’s surprises. Before I arrived, I expected to walk in and find a few scattered baristas quietly fixing drinks in front of a tiny crowd of socially maladjusted coffee lovers. Instead, I entered a tempest of five hundred flag-waving, cheering barista fanatics, their attention riveted on the coffee theatrics taking place at one of the three gleaming, tanning bed–sized espresso machines. Close-ups of the action played on two huge screens. An announcer offered play-by-play. Whenever a barista poured something into a cup, and especially if he did anything involving a martini shaker, the audience burst into cheers. Picture a cooking show, mix in a dash of American Idol, then warp the result into a parallel dimension where crowds roar their approval every time someone steams milk, and you’ve got a barista competition.
The contest works as follows. Within a fifteen-minute time limit, each competitor must prepare three drinks for a panel of sensory judges: an espresso, a cappuccino, and a “signature beverage,” which is a high-concept concoction of the barista’s own invention. The Danish contender, for instance, served a drink called ESB (for “Enhanced Sensory Balance”), which he made by combining lavender syrup, sugar drops, and green Madagascar pepper, melting the mixture into a gel with a blowtorch before the judges’ eyes, then adding the result to a shot of espresso. Another signature beverage included egg whites, New Zealand honey, mandarin rind, cream, and ground cinnamon, all blended with espresso and served on a platter of dry ice. While the four sensory judges score the barista’s offerings for taste and presentation, two technical judges hover around the periphery, making sure the contender’s every movement is just right: the barista must position her elbow at a ninety-degree angle when tamping the grounds; she must exhibit proper “milk-frothing technique”; and so forth. The judges also give marks based on the competitor’s remarks during the proceedings and, strangely enough, her cleanup skills after it’s all over.
To qualify for the WBC, each entrant must first win their home nation’s barista championship, which makes the competition a sort of coffee Olympiad. Instead of a gold medal, the world’s top barista receives a golden portafilter — not to mention instant D-list celebrity status. The 2003 champion, Paul Bassett, got his own line of milk and a television series in his home country of Australia; other winners have had their faces emblazoned on syrup bottles. Consequently, many barista competitors have developed a serious swagger. Sammy Piccolo, the perennial Canadian champ, likes to dazzle audiences by competing in latte art exhibitions blindfolded, creating perfect rosettas and hearts in the foam without spilling a drop. The 2004 World Barista Champion, Norway’s Tim Wendelboe, carries around a custom-made, James Bond–style suitcase with slots inside for pitchers, shot glasses, filters, and every other tool he might need. “A barista wielding a tamper or whisking a clean paintbrush across the grinder burrs could be, I thought, just as sexy as a secret agent deftly slipping a roll of microfilm into a hidden compartment,” he explained in Barista magazine.
But the raw sex appeal of the star coffee-fixers notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine a less entertaining spectator sport than a barista competition. Fundamentally, you’re viewing the very same motions (grinding, tamping, steaming) you watch with disinterest any time you visit a café — except these baristas offer high-concept commentary about how their signature beverage represents “a volcano erupting under a glacier.” (And since all but a handful of the competitors speak English as a second language, the malapropisms can pile up; the Japanese entrant mentioned using “whole milk of the sweetness,” as well as the “everlasting gentleness of cappuccino.”) The audience has no way to tell who is brewing masterfully and who is failing miserably. A shot of espresso could taste like rat poison, and unless one of the judges were to keel over, the crowd wouldn’t know.
So when the time finally arrived to crown this year’s World Barista Champion, each of the six finalists seemed to have an equal chance of strutting home with the golden portafilter; their presentations were nearly identical, and no one had accidentally set a judge on fire. But barista dominance belonged, as usual, to the Scandinavians. (Out of the seven years the WBC has been held, Danes have won four times and Norwegians twice.) To raucous cheers, the announcer named the blowtorch-wielding Dane, Troels Poulsen, the 2005 champion. (The American contender, Phuong Tran, of Ridgefield, Washington, placed seventh in the first round, with her signature drink “Crimson Sage,” barely missing the six-person final.) As the second-place Japanese competitor bowed frantically in all directions, Poulsen — who resembled a nerdier, bearded Heath Ledger — swigged champagne from the bottle and blinked at the flurry of flash-popping cameras that suddenly engulfed him. Fans wanted autographs. Networks wanted interviews. A coffee star was born.
Notably absent from this spectacle unfolding on its own home turf was Starbucks, the company that could stock a small city with all of the baristas on its payroll. But the chain would be about as welcome at the WBC as a grease-smeared fry cook would be in the kitchen of a three-star French chef. To those who seek caffeinated glory, Starbucks represents an opposing, even hostile force. Whereas the barista competitors carry on the tradition of individuals transforming coffee beans into liquid art, Starbucks outfits its workers in identical attire, trains them to follow the same script with customers, and places them in front of automatic machines that produce a standardized product. Expert baristas dread the idea of being a mere “person behind the counter” — a drone carrying out orders — which makes Starbucks the enemy. “Most professional baristas say they wouldn’t be caught dead in a Starbucks,” said Tran, the U.S. champ. “But I’m not that much of a snob.” There are even stories of professional baristas who have lost their heads in a corporate coffee-house and insisted on getting behind the counter to give the staff a free lesson in espresso preparation.
In truth, today’s Starbucks employees can’t fairly be called “baristas” anymore; they’re more like customer service representatives. In keeping with the company’s image as equal parts coffee vendor and group therapy center, new hires learn about things like maintaining self-esteem and listening to others in their training; the concentration is on providing what Starbucks calls its “Legendary Service,” not on coffee. And when it comes to individuality, the chain would rather its employees refrain from expressing it. Starbucks’s Partner Guide focuses almost exclusively on telling workers what they can’t do. Take the company’s dress code. Employees cannot wear nail polish, use “unnatural” hair dyes, or have any visible tattoos. Earrings must be small, and they are limited to two per ear. No other piercings are allowed. A clean apron is required at all times, and if the employee damages it, he must pay the company $4.45. Pins, buttons, and other personality-expressing accoutrements are prohibited. But on the other hand, bolo ties are okay.
At times, Starbucks seems to go out of its way to remind employees of how little freedom they have in their jobs. “Absolutely no horse-play is allowed,” c
hides the Partner Guide. One employee newsletter bears the ominous name “The Siren’s Eye” — as if to warn workers that they’re being watched. Starbucks also advises its employees that it can search their belongings at any time, without prior notice and even without them present. You are dispensable, the guide appears to be saying. Just smile, take money, and push the right buttons. Indeed, as one 2002 incident proved, becoming a Starbucks barista doesn’t take much expertise. Just after five a.m. on the morning of April 30, two robbers entered a Starbucks in the town of Monroe, Washington, and held up three employees at gunpoint, demanding the money in the store’s safe. After the workers turned it over, the pair pronounced the amount unsatisfactory and quickly devised a plan to raise more cash: they would lock the front doors, confine two employees in a back room, and don the green aprons themselves. For the next half hour, the criminals served coffee through the drive-up window, taking money and making change, before finally fleeing the scene. None of the customers noticed anything was amiss.
Things Get Wobbly
Within the climate-controlled confines of Starbucks Center, a fleet of white-collar workers upholds the same brand of gung-ho zeal that marked the company’s early days. It’s not all high fives and group hugs, of course; the place does have its unique nuisances. For one, widespread access to free espresso can be dangerous. “You’re never more than twenty feet away from an espresso machine, and everyone knows how to work ’em,” Jerome Conlon, the former “Big Dig” researcher, said. “People were doing like five or six shots a day. And when you’re overcaffeinated, your ability to deal with stress plummets. It was like working in a soap opera.” With Starbucks headquarters being the marketing-obsessed entity that it is, the halls echo with business jargon — so much so that the longtime marketing employee John Moore recalls secretly playing games of “Starbucks Marketing Meeting Bingo” with colleagues to ease the suffering. As with any Bingo contest, players marked off squares on cards as their contents were called out, but in this incarnation the cues were phrases like “think outside the box,” “dimensionalize,” “synergy,” and the puzzling “Apollo will solve for that.” Moore even claims a player once scored a blackout.
But Starbucks has largely succeeded at preserving its evangelical enthusiasm, primarily because of the motivational prowess of Howard Schultz. Employees revere him; he has a talent for making people feel that their work has meaning, that working for Starbucks is less a job than a calling from above. As Moore told me, “I really lived and truly breathed the brand. I wanted people to experience it. I thought we were changing the world.” Schultz likes to talk about “leading from the heart,” and his unscripted, unabashedly sentimental communication style has inspired devotion in thousands of employees, from ground-floor baristas up to the executive enclave. “I would go out on these road shows with Howard to roll out new initiatives, and it was like he was a rock star with these Starbucks people,” said Paul Davis, the former president of Starbucks North America. “There were people who had read his book and almost memorized it. They could quote it chapter and verse.” Most every new hire catches the pro-Starbucks fever — at least for a while — after going through the chain’s training regimen. “You were brainwashed,” one longtime barista said. “I know people who are still brainwashed. It’s like those Grand Poobah meetings, except instead of elk horns, we had green aprons.” *
When we spoke, Schultz told me his foremost priority today is maintaining the trust of his 125,000 “partners,” and there’s really no reason to doubt his sincerity in this. No one would have faulted Starbucks if it hadn’t offered its part-time workers health insurance and stock options, yet it did as a matter of principle. † Schultz has always taken his employees’ welfare seriously. In the early nineties, for example, he found out that Jim Kerrigan, a Chicago store manager and Starbucks veteran from the Il Giornale days, had contracted AIDS; his health was degenerating so rapidly that he couldn’t work any longer. Schultz was disconsolate at the news. “At the time, there was no system at Starbucks for handling something like this,” recalled Dawn Pinaud, the early Starbucks employee. “He didn’t have to do it, but Howard turned human resources upside down and got everything taken care of for him.” Kerrigan died within a year, but Starbucks paid all of his medical costs — a policy it continues today for any terminally ill employee.
After another tragic incident, Schultz reaffirmed the message that he would never keep a haughty managerial distance from his workforce. As three employees were closing a Washington, DC, store one evening in July 1997, a young man named Carl Cooper walked in, took out a handgun, and demanded the keys to the safe, which held more than $10,000 in cash. When the store manager refused to hand them over and attempted to run, Cooper opened fire, killing all three employees and hiding their bodies in a backroom before fleeing empty-handed. Another employee found them the next morning. Schultz was on vacation when the shootings occurred, but once he learned what had happened, he immediately chartered a jet and flew to Washington to be with the victims’ families. He later announced that all future profits from the store would go to a nonprofit dedicated to preventing violence.
Given the lengths to which he has gone to show that he cares for his employees’ well-being, Schultz seems to view the notion of labor unions existing within Starbucks as a personal insult, as though union advocates are saying he is an oppressive force that must be battled. Schultz makes no secret of his belief that benevolent management can render organized labor obsolete; it takes care of workers’ needs, he says, without any us-versus-the-corporation acrimony. Several passages in his book reflect this idea. When Schultz bought Starbucks in 1987, two unions represented employees in the stores and in the roasting plant; in his eyes, this constituted proof that they didn’t trust management. Schultz pledged to change that and to make the union appear unnecessary in the process. “I was convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen to their concerns,” he wrote. “If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.” As Schultz tells it, his display of compassion so impressed employees that they voted, unbidden, to kick both unions out of the company.
So when Daniel Gross started stoking the unionization debate anew at Starbucks No. 7356, in midtown Manhattan, Schultz immediately voiced his displeasure — to the entire company. In May 2004, Gross shocked Starbucks’s executives by announcing that he had enlisted the support of more than half of the workers at his store and was formally requesting a vote on joining the IWW’s new Retail Workers Union. Days later, Schultz recorded a voicemail message that went out to all company employees, in which he called the union developments “very disappointing and disturbing” and encouraged workers to share any complaints about their jobs with management. This announcement violated no labor laws, but as Gross portrays things, it was the beginning of a “relentless” and “vicious” antiunion campaign.
It’s hardly surprising that Gross would paint the situation in such an angry red hue; he freely admits that he took a job at Starbucks to both pay the rent and stir up a brawl. A number of “bad jobs,” notably a stint as a bookseller at Borders, had soured Gross on corporate America. “After that, I just started to realize I needed to search for a solution for the exploitative practices of multinational corporations,” he said. His idea of a “solution” — joining up with the Wobblies — was an unusual one, considering that the IWW had all but disappeared from existence. Founded by a group of anarchists and socialists, the IWW gained prominence in the early 1900s, but its extreme goals always held it back. Then, as now, the Wobblies sought to overthrow the employing class, do away with the wage system, and abolish capitalism itself, which made it a frightening entity to bosses and ordinary citizens alike in its brief heyday.
Despite the IWW’s ragtag radicalism, Gross attracted interest from his Starbucks colleagues because of their frustration over a number of widespread grievances. They have three main complaints. “First of all, there’s the poverty wage,”
Gross told me. “Starbucks workers make six, seven, or eight dollars an hour. That’s far from being enough to live on. The second part is the lack of guaranteed hours. Chairman Schultz degraded the hours of everyone outside of management, so not a single one of us has any guaranteed hours — we’re all part-time. One week, I can get thirty-two hours of work, and the next week it might be twelve. It’s incredibly difficult to budget for necessities if you have no idea how much money is coming in.” Then there’s the worker safety issue. Gross claims routine understaffing at Starbucks stores makes the baristas work at breakneck speed, leading to repetitive strain and carpal tunnel syndrome. “This is not a quaint European coffee shop or a nice mom and pop,” he said. “This is a McDonald’s-like entity that generates lines out the door every day. You have to work consistently at a very high rate, which takes its toll. You’ll be working at the bar, and the manager will come up behind you and say, ‘Speed of service! Go quicker! Nonnegotiable!’ over and over.” To those who try to counter these charges by mentioning the company’s generous benefits, Gross points out that employees must put in an average of twenty hours a week over six months to qualify, and that many baristas say their hours mysteriously disappear at the end of this cycle, leaving them just short. *