Starbucked

by Taylor Clark

  What are we to think of this aggressive expansion of the Starbucks empire? Should we chafe at the very idea of the company selling its Americanized espresso drinks to the same gastronomically obsessed Italians who created the beverage in the first place? Indeed, many of us feel an instinctive sense of revulsion at the thought of Starbucks in a place like Paris; the fear is that the company will displace the city’s centuries-old sidewalk cafés and its leisurely croissant-and-coffee breakfasts — the very cultural traditions that make Paris charming and unique. This collective worry is at the heart of what the British sociologist Jeremy Tunstall has called the “cultural imperialism thesis,” which claims that “authentic, traditional, and local culture in many parts of the world is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products, mainly from the United States.”

  When Tunstall first wrote those words, back in 1977, cultural imperialism posed a much smaller threat to the world than it does today. Thirty years ago, Hollywood movies and products like Coke were America’s major anxiety-causing exports. But today, there are Wal-Mart stores in Argentina, McDonald’s restaurants in Pakistan, Gap outlets in Japan — all of them changing the local culture in subtle ways. Just as McDonald’s has transformed eating habits around the world by offering quick, cheap, and unhealthy meals, Starbucks tends to make permanent cultural alterations as well. “I was just in Vienna, and there were people all over carrying Starbucks cups on the street,” said Michael Coles, the Caribou Coffee CEO. “Before Starbucks arrived, people didn’t carry around food or drinks in public — it just wasn’t done. But Starbucks changed that.” If you fly all the way to, say, Malaysia, then immediately spot a Starbucks, the sight makes you grimace a bit. It’s as if you never left home at all, as if all the unique traditions of the world are slowly blending into one homogenous, Americanized monoculture — what the political scientist Benjamin Barber calls “one big New Jersey.” Surely no one wants that.

  Yet at the same time, it’s not for us to decide what other cultures can and cannot accept. International customers are saying they want Starbucks — though not always, as we’ll see — and it’s impossible to explain to a Frappuccino-craving Kuwaiti why he shouldn’t want this without sounding hopelessly meddlesome and elitist. How can something like Starbucks be okay for us but not for them? Wouldn’t we feel a bit odd if someone claimed Americans were debased as a people by the insidious spread of Hyundai cars, Nokia phones, and Sony televisions? What’s more, the coffee in many of the markets Starbucks enters is unspeakably vile. (Even in Paris: “France has some of the worst god-awful coffee anywhere,” the early Starbucks employee Dawn Pinaud, among others, opined. “They should stick to other food.”) On a certain level, denying these people better coffee just seems cruel.

  It’s a complicated question, and one that grows increasingly important as more American corporations seek profits on foreign shores: when a company refuses to place restrictions on its global growth, should we draw a line somewhere for what is morally acceptable? Certainly, concerns about cultural imperialism will never stop Starbucks from placing stores wherever there’s money to be made. At the 2006 shareholders meeting, Schultz placated one particularly rabid investor, who thought Starbucks ought to expand faster than it already is, by telling him, “There are going to be very few countries in the course of time that we are not going to be in. Be patient.” It’s safe to say that this notion provides comfort to far fewer people than Schultz thinks. Yet everyone who goes to Starbucks is implicitly sponsoring his globe-spanning vision; we cluck our tongues at a new Starbucks in Paris, yet we fund its construction with our mochas and cappuccinos.

  As a recent report from the market research firm Mintel wryly put it, Starbucks has just one “main competitor” these days: “the ire sometimes caused by its global presence, which sends some potential customers out of their way to support local shops.” But will this ire ever catch up with Starbucks?

  Resistance Is Futile

  Starbucks’s foray into global coffee domination began in the late 1990s, with its swift occupation of two of the world’s preeminent tea-drinking countries. The two cases illustrate very different sides of the debate over the company’s corporate colonialism.

  In 1996, Starbucks unveiled its first Japanese outlet, in Tokyo’s posh Ginza district, with a performance that would have made any Broadway producer proud. At an opening ceremony, Shinto priests blessed the new store and prayed for harmony between Starbucks and the forces of nature, while Schultz, Howard Behar, and other executives sipped sake and washed their hands in spring water. When Schultz and Behar saw a line of one hundred excited Japanese coffee fanatics waiting for their first taste of Starbucks, the two cried together. From that moment on, Starbucks enjoyed massive success in Japan; astoundingly, the company’s Japanese stores (of which there are now more than six hundred) became twice as profitable as its already-lucrative American stores. The lines at the cafés were endless, and thus customers greeted each new Starbucks with elation. (A bit of serendipity may have helped the company’s chances as well: according to Japanese fable, anyone who eats the flesh of a mermaid gains eternal life.) Flush with victory, Schultz told the Financial Times four years later that his company had “transformed the culture” in Japan.

  To be sure, Japanese consumers have long adored American brands, but the company’s success there was far from preordained. In fact, when Starbucks was still mulling its Japanese debut, a consulting firm advised it not to go in at all. Although the Japanese were already drinking impressive quantities of coffee by the midnineties — both from the cramped kissaten shops that had long dotted the urban landscape and from the pervasive canned-coffee vending machines — the consultants believed Starbucks would clash with social norms. The chain’s no-smoking rule would alienate young people, they thought, and the etiquette-obsessed Japanese would never be seen drinking coffee in public. Despite this, Starbucks made just a few slight changes to its formula, like concocting a green tea Frappuccino and offering smaller drinks and pastries to conform with Japanese preferences. Then it began the deluge of stores. And here’s the crucial part: the Japanese bent to accommodate Starbucks, not the other way around. The company still opens more than one hundred stores a year there.

  Yet if the Japanese welcomed Starbucks with enthusiasm, the British greeted it with something like paranoid shock. In the spring of 1998, over sixty Starbucks stores appeared in the United Kingdom at once, essentially without warning. This was the company’s idea of “breaking through the noise”: it acquired a sixty-five-store chain called Seattle Coffee Company and immediately converted its locations into Starbucks stores. In a way, the takeover was fitting. SCC was founded in 1995 by Scott and Ally Svenson, an expatriate Seattleite couple who had first opened a café mostly to relieve their longing for the espresso concoctions of their hometown. “You wouldn’t believe all of the things you had to go through to get any kind of decent coffee in London,” Scott Svenson told me. * “At the time, about ninety-six percent of all coffee consumed in the UK was instant coffee. It was so bad that my wife actually called Howard Behar and said, ‘We live here, the coffee is terrible, and you should do something about it.’ He said, ‘Listen, we get calls like this all the time. We’ll get there eventually.’ ” But the Svensons couldn’t wait any longer; they soon started their own coffee bar, intending to run it as a hobby. Sales rocketed upward, however, and the Svensons kept expanding their business until Starbucks realized it had to buy them out or risk losing the British market.

  The sudden appearance of these sixty-five Starbucks stores alarmed many Brits, and the sentiment only intensified as the company inundated the country with outlets. London — which, as of 1998, had no coffee culture to speak of — zipped past the two-hundred-Starbucks mark in just seven years, and it now has more stores than New York City. This invasion didn’t do wonders for the company’s public relations or for sales. Between 1998 and 2002, Starbucks lost £50
million (about $90 million) in the UK, because of a mixture of consumer resistance and naïveté about the London real estate market. “I don’t want to give too many of my own impressions on Starbucks’s public image in the UK, because I’ve obviously got some conflicts,” said Scott Svenson, who briefly took an executive position with Starbucks after the sale. “They probably rushed too quickly in establishing a presence. They weren’t localized enough. When you grow like that, I think you lose . . .” — he hesitated — “things.”

  Edward Bramah epitomizes the typical old-fashioned Londoner who has become angry over the decline of these “things” in his city. A tall, bushy-eyebrowed veteran of the tea and coffee industries, Bramah is the founder, head tour guide, author-in-residence, receptionist, and occasional disgruntled barista at the Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee, in south London. He’s also a bit of an eccentric. When I first walked into the museum and said hello, he shot me a cockeyed smile and, with the kind of mischievous glint in his eye that one sees in small children wandering into traffic, asked me, “Are you happy?” I gave an uncomfortable chuckle and asked why I should be happy. “Because everyone should be happy,” he said. And then he turned around and walked off — something he would go on to do a dozen more times over the course of our conversation.

  But behavioral quirks aside, Bramah is a passionate authority on the traditional coffee-drinking methods of antiquity. “Coffee is a superb drink,” he told me. “I cannot begin to tell you how one can wax lyrical about the delectable delights of delicious coffee.” His ramshackle museum bursts with caffeinated arcana: Portuguese gas-heated brass urns, hydrostatic percolators, bulbous glass vacuum pots, silver-plated Victorian-era siphoning systems, egg-shaped reversible drip pots, brewing contraptions designed to look like locomotives. There was even a small diorama that depicted Gabriel de Clieu watering his prized coffee plant aboard Le Dromedaire. When Bramah’s eye falls on his exhibits of early espresso machines, though, his demeanor sours. “The coffee served in these new cafés isn’t coffee,” he spat. “All that bloody milk. These people know damn well they’re selling milk.” For Bramah, the recent influx of espresso bars in his country represents a perversion of the civilized tea- and coffee-drinking rituals of the past — a point he underscored by pulling me a foul shot of espresso and prodding me to admit that, yes, it tasted terrible. “I’m going to cut this espresso machine off as soon as I can,” he said, sneering in its direction. “It really just produces something that needs milk and sugar.”

  Of course, Bramah may just be resistant to change — there’s a fine line between preserving cultural traditions and clinging to a romanticized past. But he has good reason to worry that espresso will overrun the customs of old. Despite its early image as ruthless corporate conquistador, Starbucks has sparked a massive shift in British tastes. Over the last five years, UK tea sales have plunged while coffee sales have soared, which has brought about a stunning result: Britons now spend more on coffee each year (£738 million) than they spend on tea (£623 million). Particularly in London, coffee-house saturation has reached epidemic levels; one can’t walk ten blocks on a commercial street without passing two or three Starbucks stores, plus a handful of its main competitors, Caffè Nero, Costa Coffee, and Coffee Republic. The tea industry has attempted to regain lost ground with espresso machine– esque contraptions like Lipton’s “T-Bird,” but to little effect. With the help of a major charm campaign — and more than five hundred UK stores — Starbucks is overcoming local resistance and establishing a firm grip on the wallets of Britain’s proliferating coffee drinkers.

  The moral of these two stories is this: in Japan and Great Britain, the initial receptions were different, but the ultimate result was the same. Starbucks typically comes in, ignoring any local outcry, and people eventually disregard their reservations and start patronizing the chain. Sometimes the company fundamentally alters its operations for a new market — as it did in Saudi Arabia, where all stores are segregated into “men-only” and “family” sections, each with their own sales counters, in accordance with the country’s rigid separation of the sexes in public. (After a warning from the Saudi religious police, the Muttawa, Starbucks also removed the scandalous siren from its logo and replaced her with a simple crown; the Muttawa later had a change of heart, and the company reinstated the original logo.) But mostly, the changes are minor, like offering more savory foods in Asian markets, or croissants — if you could call them that without defaming the entire world of pastries — in France.

  The company can get away with this for a reason that might upset opponents of globalization: international customers crave the full American Starbucks treatment, caramel syrup and all. “The local consumer in all these countries wants the authentic Starbucks Experience,” Schultz told me. “They don’t want it watered down for Mexico or watered down for China. They want Starbucks.” Plus, international customers often take a liking to Starbucks for the very same reasons Americans did. In Mexico City, Starbucks stores attract the young, the beautiful, and the affluent. Consumers in Jakarta proclaim their pride in being able to drink the same cup of coffee as the country’s wealthiest people, even though a Frappuccino costs more there than the average Indonesian factory worker earns in a day. Kuwaitis like the dating scene, especially since the sexes almost never get to intermingle in public otherwise. The only major difference is that 85 percent of international customers stay and drink their cappuccinos and espressos inside the store, while the majority of Americans rush out with their to-go orders.

  “It’s incredible,” said Pinaud. “The coffee concept works anywhere.” It has even taken off in war-torn Afghanistan, where a knock-off “Starbucks” in Kandahar is a community hub and a financial success, selling five hundred cups of coffee a day. “You have no idea how happy I feel here,” Saifullah Habibi, one of the café’s regulars, told the BBC. “By late evening, I find myself dreading the moment it will close for the night.” And fittingly, there’s another faux Starbucks in the northeast of that country — at the U.S. Air Force Base in Bagram, where a California National Guardsman set one up inside a metal shipping container to help boost troop morale. After all, it’s tough to find a good latte in the high desert of Afghanistan.

  Forbidden Desire

  For five hundred years, Beijing’s Forbidden City served as the political and cultural heart of imperial China. The 9,999-room palace is so vital to the country’s sense of identity that an illustration of its main entrance — called Tiananmen, or “Gate of Heavenly Peace” — still adorns the official seal of the People’s Republic of China. Constructed in the early fifteenth century, the walled and fortified complex housed emperors from China’s final two dynasties, the Ming and Qing, up until the collapse of imperial power in 1912. Now, almost a century later, it became the home of a different empire.

  In the autumn of 2000, Starbucks planted a tiny, six-seat store on the grounds of the Forbidden City, in the corner of a gold-roofed building known as Jiuqinfang — ironically, “place of many sleepers.” Neither Starbucks nor the palace’s administrators expected what followed: a torrential outpouring of indignation. “Not the Forbidden City!” blared the China Consumer Journal, which went on to proclaim, “This is no different from slapping China’s 1.2 billion people and 5,000-year traditional culture in the face.” In one Internet poll, 70 percent of respondents claimed they opposed the new coffee-house that had slipped into their country’s cultural hub. (Not everyone was displeased, however. “We like them here,” a neighboring shop-keep-er told the Washington Post. “It means more foreigners come. And foreigners have lots of money.”) Local outcry had already doomed a KFC in the vicinity and a McDonald’s in nearby Tiananmen Square, so the store’s future looked grim. Palace officials, rushing to stem the public relations nightmare, ordered the company to take down two signs and stated that the only appropriate course of action would be to kick the Starbucks out of the Forbidden City.

  Oddly enough, the country where Starbucks has endured some of
its worst criticism as an insensitive cultural imperialist is now the company’s primary target for growth. Though the rapidly industrializing nation is still predominantly poor, China’s middle class and upper class number some 250 million people; Schultz believes they need lattes, even if the country has no native coffee tradition and barely uses milk at all. Starbucks hopes to ensnare China’s “little emperors” — the millions who were raised as only children because of the country’s one-child policy and are thus used to being spoiled. These young people are far more sympathetic with American-style individuality than their parents, and the company expects this will lead them to embrace its customizable drinks. So far, this theory has proved correct: bourgeois Chinese consumers have welcomed Starbucks, flaunting their branded white cups in the same conspicuous manner as their counterparts the world over. Imitators have sprouted up as well, such as USABucks and Shanghai Xingbake (xing meaning “star,” and bake being as phonetically close to “bucks” as one can get in Mandarin). * Starbucks now operates 250 Chinese outlets, and Schultz claims the country will one day be second only to the United States in number of stores.

  Schultz’s strategy for minimizing future surges of anti-Starbucks sentiment is quite straightforward: he wants Chinese people to think of Starbucks as a Chinese company. “For us to succeed in China, we have to be Chinese, not American,” he said. “We’re in a very fortunate position. Unlike almost any Western retailer I can think of, we’ve established something that by and large no longer has attachment to something Western or American. It is as relevant in all of these countries as it is in the U.S. And we’re not wrapping ourselves in the American flag.” To achieve this goal of blending in to new cultures, Starbucks uses some of the same tactics it employs in American neighborhoods, like donating to a local charity. “We tailored our entry into China to mirror the benevolence of the company in the U.S.,” Schultz told me. “Before we made a dollar of profit there, we established a five-million-dollar education fund for young girls in rural China who would never have access to an education. And we didn’t do that to create a marketing event or a press release.”