by Taylor Clark
In 1996, a familiar controversy arrived: Starbucks announced plans to put a store in the heart of downtown Ashland, a quaint area that aspired, however pathetically, to radiate a Victorian England vibe. The whole community appeared to oppose the new store. Locals led protests. Students at the high school handed out “Friends don’t let friends go to Starbucks” bumper stickers. Didn’t we have enough coffee-houses already, they asked, what with Evo’s, the Rogue Valley Roasting Company, the Beanery, the Key of C, and so on? These were excellent hangouts — places where we would all get together, indulge in a stimulant we could buy legally, and impress each other with our knowledge of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. (Their existence and nomenclature were basically the extent of our teenage expertise, however.) My girlfriend at the time, whose pronouncements I heeded with great zeal, swore she would never set foot in the new Starbucks.
Yet a few months after the store opened, she and I were meeting there for coffee all the time. (Need I mention that it was her decision?) This was the magic of Starbucks at work. The formula Schultz and company established back in Seattle turned the locals from hostile Starbucks bashers to furtive users to full-blown addicts in what seemed like a matter of months. Everyone, even those who held out, had to admit that the company knew what it was doing. When we went back to a coffee-house like the Beanery, we’d suddenly find ourselves asking, “Was this place always so tacky, or did they cover it in linoleum and add fluorescent lights since the last time we were here?”
Today, there are three Starbucks in Ashland, a town of twenty thousand people. One of them is in a building that once housed Leo’s Campus Drive-In, a burger joint I used to frequent as a kid — it had both the best fries in town and an awesome poster showing a fleet of Ferraris parked near an ocean cliff. The new Starbucks has no awesome Ferrari posters. After I graduated from college, I waited tables for a summer at a tourist restaurant downtown to save money. Something that happened at that restaurant quite often used to set my teeth on edge: tourists would ask me if there was a Starbucks nearby. Not a coffee-house, of which Ashland had plenty, but a Starbucks. If I recommended a locally owned café, their hesitation was palpable. “But that place is strange and alien,” their demeanor said. “I’d rather stick with the familiar.” The reluctance to veer from routine was only natural, but weren’t they here to do things they couldn’t do at home? As I watched them walk off toward the Starbucks, it always struck me that they were missing out on something, and that the chain, by inundating the nation with stores, was partially responsible for making their lives that much blander.
This is where my uneasiness with Starbucks began. By the time I saw the town’s third outlet on a visit home years later, my apprehension was firm. I mean, there weren’t three of anything in Ashland — not even two of anything. Uniqueness was supposed to be the community’s strong suit, yet here were three troublingly identical corporate coffee-houses. For a while, I had to wonder if I was just uncomfortable with change in my hometown, if I somewhat irrationally wanted everything to stay just as it was when I was seventeen. What, exactly, are those stores hurting? It’s tough to put a finger on it. Many Ashlanders obviously want them, or they wouldn’t flock there in such numbers. And the Starbucks stores haven’t put any mom-and-pop coffee-houses out of business; amazingly, the local cafés are all still there, almost scientifically preserved. So what’s the harm in having a few indistinguishable Starbucks stores? The chain’s viral growth couldn’t possibly be a sign of the “end of the universe,” as the comic Lewis Black says, only half jokingly. It’s just a coffee company, right?
But still, the unease about these three stores lingered, and I could never quite express why until I came across a passage by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques, a memoir of his fieldwork in South America, Lévi-Strauss reflects on the differences between societies that have industrialized and those that have retained their old traditions. Specifically, he’s interested in rum; puzzlingly, the more modern and efficient a culture is, Lévi-Strauss says, the worse its rum tastes. When the liquor comes from factories packed with gleaming, uniform steel tanks, the result is undrinkable, yet rum stored in “ancient vats thickly encrusted with waste matter” comes out “mellow and scented” — much better, despite its “archaic method of production.” In this comparison, Lévi-Strauss sees what he calls the “paradox of civilization”: “Its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it.” That is to say, the things we like about society are most often the things that modernization eliminates; despite their virtues, efficiency and standardization have produced a worse-tasting rum. Taking this a step further, Lévi-Strauss concludes that since the prevailing trend of today’s civilizations is toward streamlined corporations and homogeneity, then “Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savor.” By embracing modernity and sameness at the expense of cultural integrity, we strip the richness and zest from our own lives.
Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity every time it builds a new café, and I can’t help but feel troubled by this. For me, Ashland’s three Starbucks stores — so plainly reminiscent of their thirteen thousand clones around the world — take something irreplaceable away from the character of the community. Fundamentally, the town’s distinctive culture is all it has; this is equally true of well-loved neighborhoods from Seattle to London to Beijing. The company, by its very nature, endangers cultural uniqueness, and this is why I am not a Starbucks customer.
But if I’m stuck at an airport, well . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In a sense, this book is the product of a dumb joke. One autumn evening a few years back, as I was sitting with friends outside a neighborhood café in Northwest Portland, our conversation turned to the incredible profusion of coffee-houses in that area of the city; just from where we sat, a Tully’s and — of course — a Starbucks were visible on the same tree-lined block. From out of nowhere, I found myself wondering out loud how far one could possibly get from the nearest Starbucks store while still staying within the city limits. I pledged to find the answer. My friends, showing naive but touching faith in my sanity, thought I was kidding and laughed accordingly.
When I suggested to my editor at Willamette Week — the alt-weekly paper where I was a staff writer — that this investigation could yield an entertaining news story, he laughed too. Then he changed the subject. But I was persistent (by which I mean “extraordinarily annoying”), and soon I was conducting highly scientific research into Starbucks’s local saturation. My tools were pushpins and a large city map; I used the pins to indicate on the map where there were Starbucks stores and then found the spot in the city that looked farthest away from one. To my surprise, the resulting article failed to electrify Portland as much as I’d hoped. But, undaunted, I later prevailed on my editors to let me write a cover story examining whether Starbucks was as awful as its detractors claimed. (My entreaties got a boost from the fact that someone had just tried to set a new local Starbucks on fire; see page 148.) For whatever reason, I kept thinking there was something inherently interesting and culturally relevant about the whole coffee phenomenon and the ubiquitous, consumer-friendly business megahit at its center. The feature I wrote attracted enough interest — both in Portland and elsewhere — that I decided to try to expand the story into the book you now hold in your hands. (Or maybe it’s in your lap; I don’t know how you prefer to read.)
This endeavor would have gone down in flames more or less immediately without the help of a number of incredible people — first and foremost my literary agent, Melissa Flashman, who patiently walked me through the whole bookmaking process and who is, as far as I’m concerned, a living saint. I feel preposterously lucky to have ended up with an agent as spectacular as Mel.
My editor, Liz Nagle, was hugely helpful and a fantastic champion of this book, for which I’ll always be grateful. Whenever I would call in some state of anguish or panic, Liz’s advice w
as invaluable. Also at Little, Brown, I’d like to thank Geoff Shandler, Marie Salter, Jason Bartholomew, and Heather Fain.
A number of friends commented on early drafts of the book and offered very useful counsel, without which I may have quite literally gone crazy. Thank you to Wilson Vediner, Zach Dundas, Nigel Jaquiss, Carissa Wode-house, Francesca Monga, and Anne Adams.
In no particular order, I also want to thank Sarah and Jonny Betts, for putting me up ever so kindly in London; Alex Morris; Mark Zusman; John Schrag; Gary Mailman; Michael Rubenstein; Michael Pilon, for the map work; Julie Beals; Chris Lydgate; Rewrite; Ashley Shelby, for planting the book proposal seed in my mind; Elsbeth Allanketner, for a lot of free coffee; Jenny Lee; Janette Fletcher; Christy Salcido at Starbucks; In These Times, the magazine wherein I first encountered the word Starbucked; Don Schoenholt, Jake Batsell, Dawn Pinaud, and Harry Roberts, who were especially helpful in my reporting; and the barista staffs at Crema, Fresh Pot, Stumptown, Blend, and Sound Grounds — the great Portland coffee-houses where much of the writing of this book was done.
Finally, my most heartfelt appreciation goes out to my mom, my dad, Gina, Lauren, and Laurel — the most loving and supportive family a guy could ever hope to have.
NOTES
In addition to my firsthand reporting and the interviews I conducted with more than a hundred sources, this book is the product of countless hours of research into the work of other writers. I would love to be able to list my source for every fact in this book, but space constraints prevent this. Hence, I’ve confined these notes to resources I found particularly helpful, leaned on particularly hard, or quoted from directly. In the text, I’ve done my best to cite sources for as many important facts and statistics as I could without disrupting the story. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from my interviews with the speaker.
"Note: page numbers refer to the print edition."
Introduction: The Experiment
Page 4.
My account of the Robson Street story comes primarily from my interviews with the sources involved, but also Brad Stone, “Grande Plans,” Newsweek, December 27, 2004; and Ian Edwards, “Marketing in Vancouver: Starbucks the Star of the Coffee Craze,” Strategy, May 15, 1995.
Page 6.
The Lewis Black quotation is from his book Nothing’s Sacred (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2005).
Page 7.
Two useful sources for my discussion of caffeine seeping into bodies of water were Tom Mashberg, “Starbucks for Starfish: Harbor Waters Yield Caffeine,” Boston Herald, May 30, 1998; and Chris Bowman, “Medicines, Chemicals Taint Water: Contaminants Pass Through Sewage Plants,” Sacramento Bee, March 28, 2000.
Page 8.
Ashley Fantz, “Church’s Coffee Campaign Is Stirring Up New Interest,” Miami Herald, April 17, 2006.
Page 9.
The Orin Smith quotation is from Cora Daniels, “Mr. Coffee: The Man Behind the $4.75 Frappuccino Makes the 500,” Fortune, April 14, 2003.
Most of the general specialty coffee-house statistics I’ve used in this book come from three institutional sources: the Specialty Coffee Association of America (http://www.scaa.org), the International Coffee Organization (www.ico.org), and the international market research firm Mintel (www.mintel.com).
Page 10.
The Laurier and Philo report can be found at http://web.ges.gla.ac.uk/~elaurier/cafesite/index1.html.
Page 12, footnote.
Karen Palmer and Peter Edwards, “Man Who Had Penis Pinched ‘Embarrassed,’ ” Toronto Star, December 1, 1999.
PART ONE: THE RISE OF THE MERMAID
Chapter 1: Life Before Lattes
Page 17.
For the story of Samuel Cate Prescott, I relied primarily on two sources: Larry Owens, “Engineering the Perfect Cup of Coffee,” Technology and Culture, October 2004; and Maurice Holland, “A $30,000 Cup of Coffee,” in Industrial Explorers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928).
Page 20.
I drew the John Adams quotation from Antony Wild, Coffee: A Dark History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). The Daniel Webster quotation is in Minna Morse and Regis Lefebure, “Across the Country, It’s All Happening at the Coffee-house,” Smithsonian, September 1996. And the Abigail Adams quotation comes from William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (New York: The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935).
Page 21.
The information for my whirlwind tour of coffee history comes from the dozens of useful books that have been published on the topic, among them: Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Ukers, All About Coffee; Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug (New York: Routledge, 2002); Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses (New York: Walker & Co., 2005); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Roger Schmidt, “Caffeine and the Coming of the Enlightenment,” Raritan, Summer 2003; and Wild, Coffee: A Dark History.
Page 22.
The Muhammad quotation comes from Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.
Page 25.
The beer soup recipe is from Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise.
I drew the Frederick the Great quotation from Ukers, All About Coffee.
Page 26.
I got the Balzac quotation, which originally appeared in his 1839 “Treatise on Modern Stimulants,” from Weinberg and Bealer, The World of Caffeine.
Page 30.
The Consumers’ Research Bulletin quotation can be found in Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.
Page 32.
On the beginnings of specialty coffee and Starbucks, see Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hyperion, 1997); and Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds.
Page 39.
The Gordon Bowker quotation originally appeared in Terry McDermott, “Cash Crop,” Seattle Times, November 28, 1993.
Page 41, second footnote.
At least one instance of Schultz claiming this occurred on the November 22, 1997, episode of CNN’s Larry King Live.
Chapter 2: A Caffeinated Craze
Page 52.
On Howard Schultz and the early days of Starbucks, see Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang, Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time (New York: Hyperion, 1997); Hugo Kugiya, “Seattle’s Coffee King,” Seattle Times, December 15, 1996; Kathryn Robinson, “Bean Town: How Starbucks Created a Coffee-Crazy Seattle — and a Horde of Competitors,” Seattle Weekly, August 2, 1989; Jennifer Reese, “The High Church of Starbucks,” Salon, November 24, 1997; Oliver Burkeman, “Howard’s Way,” Guardian, October 20, 2000; Andrew Davidson, “The Man with Grounds for Global Success,” Sunday Times (London), September 14, 2003; and “The Success of Starbucks Coffee,” Larry King Live transcript, CNN, November 22, 1997.
Page 53.
Howard Schultz: Profile, BBC Four documentary, June 8, 2002.
Page 54.
Alex Witchel, “Coffee Talk With: Howard Schultz; By Way of Canarsie, One Large Hot Cup of Business Strategy,” New York Times, December 14, 1994.
Page 58.
Nelson D. Schwartz, “Still Perking After All These Years,” Fortune, May 24, 1999.
Page 61.
Schultz’s 1986 quotation is in Rick Anderson, “Starbucks: Just Getting Started,” Seattle Weekly, April 30, 2003.
Business Unusual transcript, CNN, May 23, 1998.
Page 67.
Robinson, “Bean Town.”
Page 68.
Leah Harrison, “Starbucks’ Caffeine Rush,” Seattle Times, June 18, 1993.
Page 72.
Kathie Jenkins, “America’s Best: Brews with Attitude,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1990.
> Page 73.
Zena Burns, “Celeb Assistants Tell All,” Teen People, May 2005.
Hudson Morgan, “Any Grounds to the Ben/Jen Java Story?” New York Daily News, November 29, 2005.
Page 74.
My discussion of recent U.S. social trends and the changing American consumer owes much to Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, Trading Up: The New American Luxury (New York: Portfolio, 2003); John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); and Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe, 1999).
Page 75.
The Staffan Linder information comes from de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic.
Page 76.
Terry Lefton, “Schultz’s Caffeinated Crusade,” Brandweek, July 5, 1999.
Page 77.
My source for the oft-repeated Polgar quotation was Paul Hofmann, “Savoring the World, Cup by Cup,” New York Times, January 29, 1995.
Page 78, footnote.
Robinson, “Bean Town.”
Page 84.
Julia Sommerfeld, “Coffee Cool — The ‘Other’ Teen Drinking Scene,” Seattle Times, October 26, 2003.
Steven Gray, “More Than Caffeine: For Southern Mary-land, the First Starbucks Means Modern Suburbia,” Washington Post, March 10, 2002.
Sylvia Wieland Nogaki, “Starbucks’ New Splash,” Seattle Times, May 18, 1992.
Chapter 3: The Siren’s Song
Page 86.
The story of Hsing-Hsing the brand-loyal panda comes from Michael Kernan, “Animal Old Folks,” Smithsonian, December 1999; and James V. Grimaldi, “Ill Panda Needs Starbucks,” Seattle Times, July 22, 1999.