Starbucked
Page 31
Page 259.
Oliver Burkeman, “Howard’s Way,” Guardian, October 20, 2000.
Page 260.
Mark D. Fefer, “Flappuccino: Arabs Boycott Starbucks,” Seattle Weekly, June 26, 2002.
Daniel Gross’s Slate piece, “Don’t Buy American,” can be found at http://www.slate.com/id/2112272/.
Page 261.
For a good look at the future of Starbucks, see Barbara Kiviat, “The Big Gulp at Starbucks,” Time, December 10, 2006; Elizabeth M. Gillespie, “Customers in Driver’s Seat at Starbucks,” Associated Press, December 24, 2005; and Steven Gray, “Fill ’er Up — With Latte,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2006.
Page 263.
Scott Pelley, “Howard Schultz: The Star of Starbucks,” 60 Minutes, CBS, April 23, 2006.
Page 264.
Gillespie, “Customers in Driver’s Seat at Starbucks.”
Page 265.
“Starbucks Wars,” Consumer Reports, March 2007.
The full Schultz memo is at http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2007/ 02/starbucks_chair_2.html.
Epilogue: The Last Drop
Page 270.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Penguin, 1992).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Taylor Clark grew up in Ashland, Oregon, and attended Dartmouth College. After college, he began working for the Portland, Oregon, alt-weekly Willamette Week as a freelancer and then a news staff writer. Clark lives in Portland and his tastes in coffee run toward a good Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. This is his first book.
* Although a Canadian man did once sue Starbucks after a faulty toilet seat smashed his penis against the bowl (don’t ask — it’s complicated), which, according to the Toronto Star, left his genitals “bruised, crushed, and rendered ineffective.”
*Actually, it was probably because the state-owned East India Company held a monopoly on tea, which gave the Crown a financial incentive to quash coffee consumption. But humor me.
*Heckler later came up with the names for Cinnabon, the software company Visio, and Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia.
†Twenty-five years later, Howard Schultz would make the puzzling claim that Starbuck was the Pequod’s “coffee-loving first mate,” though Herman Melville never mentions Starbuck’s views on coffee drinking.
*Seriously — caffeine is incredibly toxic to them.
*For those keeping score at home, this means that Peet’s is actually Starbucks, and Starbucks — which started out as an imitation of Peet’s — is really Il Giornale.
*For the record, this order translates to a decaf coffee to go, with one shot of decaf espresso and one shot of regular espresso added in.
†I should point out, however, that the American city with the most coffee-houses per capita today isn’t Seattle — it’s Anchorage, Alaska.
*Adding to the injury, Schultz has lately taken credit for the third-place concept himself, telling CNBC’s American Made program in 2006, “I coined this phrase over the last ten, fifteen years about Starbucks being this third place between home and work.”
*Although it did take some things off. According to a 1989 Seattle Weekly story, the company decided to jettison its selection of spices after a couple of unfortunate felines overdosed on Starbucks-bought catnip and spasmed out of lofty windows.
*A quick explanatory note: There’s actually a decent reason why the names of Starbucks’s three basic sizes all connote the same idea of bigness. Originally, Il Giornale offered three cup options — the eight-ounce “short,” the twelve-ounce “tall,” and the sixteen-ounce “grande.” In this context, “tall” actually makes sense. But when Starbucks added the “venti” cup to cater to America’s super-sizing tendency, “short” got bumped from the menu. The “short” cup is still available at Starbucks stores, as a sort of in-crowd secret.
*I made that one up. My favorite actual Starbucks quasi-poem comes from a napkin, with three phrases of what appears to be a failed haiku surrounding a stylized leaf: “I will embrace it / Roasting / Bring me a perfect warm.”
*Although a former fast-food executive once proposed offering a thirty-two-ounce size. After vicious debate, wiser heads prevailed, prohibiting this monstrosity from seeing daylight. Starbucks introduced the twenty-ounce “venti” instead.
*The company didn’t retire the “Grow, Roast, Brew, Aroma” designs until 2005, when it began building new stores with three new templates: “Classico,” a woody, European look; “di Moda,” a slick, angular, more cosmopolitan design; and “Origins,” a cheerfully colored template that is supposed to look like a Middle Eastern marketplace.
*How this didn’t fail every time is a total mystery.
*You may have also noticed by now that former Starbucks executives seem compelled by some invisible force to write books about their deeds at the company. In addition to the already-published tomes by Schultz, Rubinfeld, Scott Bedbury, and John Moore — a former marketing department employee we’ll encounter later — books are forthcoming from Harry Roberts and from the team of Jerome Conlon and Wright Massey.
*In a related story, legend has it that McDonald’s agents — always targeting the kids — used to measure the length of the milk aisle in local markets to gauge the number of children in the area.
*This, incidentally, is a major reason why Starbucks doesn’t franchise: Schultz always intended to blanket cities with outlets, but franchisees would surely protest every time the company wanted to jam in another store and endanger the franchisee’s sales.
*To clarify: in this chapter, “the competition” and related phrases refer to other coffee chains. Independently owned coffee-houses are a different matter, which we’ll discuss in chapter 5.
*We’ll delve into Starbucks’s campaigns abroad, as well as the cultural imperialism debate, in chapter 9.
*A quick side note: A Texas man who calls himself “Winter” actually has made a full-time pursuit out of visiting and cataloging every Starbucks store on the planet. He’s made it to about sixty-five hundred locations so far.
*To be fair, Dorosin’s anger was slightly out of proportion with Starbucks’s transgression against him: selling him two defective $300 espresso machines, then refusing to replace them with $2,400 models. When the company offered a compromise, Dorosin upped the ante, demanding Starbucks apologize for mistreating him by sponsoring a multimillion-dollar center for runaway kids.
*Jeffrey tried to justify the boycott by claiming that all of corporate America deserves blame for keeping black people down, but he also admitted that protesting Starbucks was a far more effective publicity grabber than the usual candlelight vigils and rallies.
*Current Starbucks CEO Jim Donald actually boasted of having done this in a 2005 issue of Fortune magazine: “We just had a four-day leadership conference. The theme was human connection. We didn’t once talk about sales and profits. We talked about how we continue to grow and how we connect.”
*What’s more, these two places — Mocha and Java — were significant coffee sources for so long that their names became synonymous with the drink. (Centuries later, Howard Schultz would give the former word its current meaning by naming his new hot cocoa and espresso concoction a “mocha.”)
*And here, I hasten to note that there is considerable debate about how much of the following took place only in de Clieu’s imagination — but at the very least, the guy had impressive dramatic flair.
*The American per capita average is ten pounds, based on the three billion pounds the United States imports each year, according to the ICO — but that figure includes those who don’t drink coffee as well.
*Some might ask a slightly different question: if coffee is so cheap, why is a latte still four dollars? We’ll get to that in a few pages.
*Okay, maybe in the piñata industry.
*Some farmers have criticized this program, pointing out that it costs them much more than an extra $0.10 per pound to do all of the things Starbucks is asking for.
*Actually, I gu
ess that part hasn’t changed much.
*Which is puzzling, since a different Dunkin’ Donuts–backed survey found that habitual coffee drinkers had sex more often than those who abstained — from coffee, that is.
*Calm down — it doesn’t.
*For the purposes of this discussion, I’m assuming that the atrocity known as decaf isn’t an option. Perhaps as proof that divine providence agrees with this assessment, a 2005 National Institutes of Health study found that decaf coffee — but not regular coffee — causes an upsurge in drinkers’ levels of harmful LDL cholesterol.
*By the way, this revelation should finally disprove the common misconception that espresso drinks are more powerful than plain drip brew; even a double shot has less caffeine than a twelve-ounce coffee.
*Word to the wise, though: pregnant women should cut back because babies don’t develop the enzymes to properly break down caffeine until well after birth. Caffeine also intensifies symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. And it doesn’t help you sober up.
*According to a barista who posted on the Starbucks Gossip Web site’s message board, a Seattle-area woman orders this exact drink every day at the height of the morning rush.
*A note about sources in this chapter: Starbucks doesn’t allow its baristas to speak with members of the press, but former employees were happy to speak about their experiences there.
†Although Schultz’s critics point out that this generous health plan is only feasible because Starbucks’s workers are predominantly young and healthy. It also helps the bottom line: Schultz himself admits that offering full benefits to lure a barista into sticking around costs only half as much as training a new hire.
*Though it would be almost impossible to prove that Starbucks systematically cuts workers’ hours to keep them from qualifying for health coverage, this is a pervasive complaint from employees.
*For years, Schultz has had an ideal location picked out for his first Italian store — which he refuses to reveal — but he has yet to announce anything concrete about his company’s entrance into the country.
*A demonstration of Svenson’s point: for a time, members of an outfit calling itself the “Coffee Police” would show up at British cafés in full police dress and reprimand the owners for their awful coffee.
*Other international Starbucks doppelgängers include Starlight Coffee in Santiago, Chile; Starblack in Ho Chi Minh City; Star Café in Prague; and Starbutts, a gentlemen’s bar in Seoul.