Brewing Complacency

Posted 30 May, 2008 in Book Reviews |

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture, by Taylor Clark. Little, Brown, $29.99 cloth, 304 pp., ISBN: 978-0-316-01348-2.

On June 27, 1998, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article with the headline “New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks.” Sending up the iconic coffee company’s penchant for blitzing selected urban environments with dozens of locations, sometimes directly across the street from one another, The Onion took this idea to its reductio ad absurdum:

The new men’s-room-based Starbucks, the coffee giant’s 1,531st U.S. location, will be open to both men and women when not “in use.” In addition to offering specialty coffees from around the world, it will serve freshly baked pastries, Italian pannini sandwiches and soups, as well as the rest room’s usual selection of toilet paper and soap.

The weird thing is, this notion, while admittedly absurd, is not all that far removed from reality. In her 2000 anti-corporate polemic No Logo, Naomi Klein quotes Globe and Mail columnist John Barber, who suggests that Starbucks’s preferred method is to blanket a given urban area with outlets “like head lice through a kindergarten.”

The company’s practice, which Klein calls “clustering,” began in 1991, when the head of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, discovered that his fledgling chain’s most profitable location, situated on Robson Street in Vancouver, was so busy it was actually turning away customers daily. In an apparent act of insanity that, in retrospect, turned out to be a stroke of business genius, Schultz opened a second Starbucks fifteen yards away, across the street from the existing location. Their street addresses were 1099 Robson Street and 1100 Robson Street, respectively.

The remarkable thing about this scheme, as Taylor Clark points out in his engaging and lively investigation of the coffee chain, is that it actually worked:

Schultz expected the two stores to eat away at each other’s sales, but nothing of the sort happened. As he’d hoped, they attracted mostly different crowds; the new café lured the well-heeled business set, while the original drew a hipper, more relaxed clientele. And both groups turned up in droves. Schultz’s gamble had hit the jackpot — amazingly, his two Robson Street coffeehouses soon became the best- and second-best-performing stores in the chain.

Since the Robson Street experiment, the company has grown by leaps and bounds, to the point that it now opens an astounding 2,000 locations each year — that’s an average of six new stores per day worldwide.

This global coffeehouse hegemony is completely in line with Schultz’s vision for the company. Part of the philosophy behind clustering, as Clark attests, is the goal of making the chain unavoidable to potential customers. If you are in the corporation’s most coveted demographic — high-income, educated city-dwellers between the ages of eighteen and forty-five — you should not be able to leave your house to go to work, to run an errand, or even to take a leisurely stroll without passing at least one Starbucks. Corner lots are prized for their ability to attract customers coming from a variety of different directions, as are locations near DVD rental stores and dry cleaners, which offer customers two separate opportunities to patronize them: once when dropping off and once when picking up.

The location of each new coffeehouse is anything but accidental: it is the product of exhaustive research and real-estate knowhow, much of which goes unremarked upon by customers or commentators. Clark points out, for example, that most Starbucks locations on the way into a city’s downtown are located on the right-hand side of the street. Why? Because commuters in a rush to get to work will likely not want to expend the time or effort required to make two left-hand turns, one to get to the store, and another to get back en route to their original destination.

One of Clark’s great strengths in Starbucked is in exposing the almost fanatical level of calculation that goes into every corporate decision, from the colour of the walls to the layout of the stores to the music on the stereo, “which changed in mood throughout the day to reflect the needs of customers in each ‘day part.’” While Schultz speaks in artificially elevated, New Age language about the vaunted “Starbucks Experience” and about Starbucks as a mythical “third place,” separate from home and work, where customers can retreat to rejuvenate their spirits and to feed their souls — Schultz claims that the chain was “built on the human spirit” — the entirety of the company is the result of relentless planning and constant focus groups, the quizzing of potential customers about their “need states” and their “lifestyle segments.” The soulful experience that Starbucks patrons putatively crave is the result of a carefully micromanaged plan that systematically erases any kind of individuality or the flaws that allow for uniqueness. The “Starbucks Experience” is the apex of cookie-cutter corporate sameness.

Clark quotes from a 2002 New York Times Magazine profile of Howard Schultz in an attempt to explain how Starbucks managed to capture the imaginations of an ever-growing segment of the population: “Schultz is very good at getting what he wants by imagining what you want and then telling you that.” And not just telling you what you want, but selling it to you. First, he convinced us that we needed overpriced lattes — essentially coffee and milk, which sell for more than $4.00 at most stores — then he convinced us that we need CDs and home espresso machines and breakfast sandwiches — a new addition to the Starbucks roster, essentially a glorified Egg McMuffin — and so on. The management gurus at corporate headquarters even try to anticipate what the hot fashion colours will be next year, so that they can craft matching beverages in those colours.

All of this adds up to what can only be conceived of as a masterstroke of brainwashing on the part of cynical marketers and corporate shills who have been drinking too much of their own Kool Aid — sorry: their own Frappaccinos. Not that they really had to do too much to win over a style and celebrity-obsessed culture. It helps that they have a highly addictive product to push. But as soon as the ubiquitous white-and-green paper cup became a kind of ad-hoc status symbol — as soon as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and Ben Affleck began to be photographed in public clutching the cups in their storied mitts — Schultz’s work was essentially done for him.

There is something ironic about a society that supposedly prizes authenticity and individuality buying in so readily to what is a patently ersatz experience: unlike the Italian specialty coffees that serve as their inspiration, Starbucks’s concoctions are produced by an automated process that removes any kind of artistry from their creation; all the barista has to do to pull an espresso or a cappuccino is to press the correct button on the espresso machine. (Clark slyly refers to this as the “bionic” Starbucks.) What Starbucks actually provides is not sustenance for the soul, but a carefully mediated, calculated, and replicated experience that is closer to the fast food template of McDonald’s than to the individualistic and highly idiosyncratic cafés of Paris or Milan. Schultz’s peculiar genius, as Clark shows, is in convincing us that we are being sold sophistication, when in reality we are simply drones in a giant corporate machine that grows ever more entrenched, at the rate of six stores per day.

4 comments to “Brewing Complacency”

Starbucks calculating how best to lift your wallet | John Baker's Blog, June 19th, 2008 at 4:02 am:

• […] a review of Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture, by Taylor Clark, Stephen W. Beattie notes that “part of the philosophy behind clustering (having more than one store in the same […]

Bruce Humbert, June 21st, 2008 at 2:50 pm:

• I am not sure what the gripe is - your’s or Clarks - Starbuck’s has worked hard to give it’s customers what they want - they did not trick them - brainwash them - fool them in any way that I can see. What the heck is wrong with asking consumers what they want and then giving it to them…

  They would not suggest that they are for everyone - and there is a rather thriving alternative coffee shop business growing among local cafes and shops that position themselves as the anti-starbucks - for folks like you and Mr. Clark…

joe, June 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 am:

• One reason few people mention that some people visit starbucks is that they have better staff than most independent coffee shops.

  There are less tip whores at starbucks than at independent coffee shops. You pour a cup of coffee or tea into a cup and take my money and I should tip you for you 15-30 seconds of labour? And if you don’t tip you often get the crappy attitude.

  Also there are less employees with rude, surly, passive aggressive “I hate my job and the customers, but i’m too afraid to get a better one” attitude, at starbucks than at many independent shops.

Starbucked — Glass Maze, June 22nd, 2008 at 9:22 am:

• […] ran across a review of a book called Starbucked, which describes the mechanisms of Starbucks’ unlikely success. […]

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