June 15, 2006 Issue

My deadline for this column is every other Monday morning at 9 a.m. I awoke this morning at 4:30 a.m. in an apartment in Birmingham, Ala. with two thoughts: One, I had nothing in mind for this piece and two: whatever I came up with would have to be sent to Leah Stratmann, our editor, via laptop, via a Starbucks across the street.

WiFi is a wonderful thing and if I understood how it works I guess I could write about it. However, I still don’t understand televisions, radios, satellites, fax machines, cell phones, regular phones, microwaves, or computers. I’m not going to even try to figure out WiFi.

I do know that Starbucks has WiFi. They may have invented it for all I know. A generation of Americans are growing up thinking Starbucks invented coffee; and in a sense, they did.

Corporate restaurants are on my list of things that make our culture less interesting. They have contributed to the bland homogenization of our people as much as any aspect of modern life except for television and print media.

But Starbucks is different. Howard Schultz and his minions have branded a product that is, in and of itself, an economic force. Like cotton, corn, wheat, orange juice and pork bellies; coffee is a traded commodity. Starbucks is changing the way the world views that particular commodity.

My father was a coffee drinker. He always drank his black. The thought of him ordering a grande hazelnut cappuccino with frothed soymilk is laughable. Of course he probably never ordered a pomegranate margarita either.

Starbucks has somehow made it possible for grown men to order ridiculous sounding, expensive concoctions like a green chai frappacino without looking over their shoulder to see if someone views this as less than manly behavior.

I can’t vouch for Starbucks food offerings except to assume they are mass-produced in some huge factory. I’m sure the biscotti is okay. But Starbucks isn’t about food and it isn’t just about coffee. It is about marketing style, hip-ness, and profit. Huge profit. In many communities it is also a place where the young professionals go trying to hook-up and to work away from offices for a bit of a different perspective.

Who would have guessed that a coffee shop would become an arbiter of fashion and culture? More than any other multi-unit food service operation, Starbucks is dictating the way we view ourselves. Out of the mainstream CDs, and indie movie DVDs that Starbucks has a hand in producing, we are all becoming an increasing part of the Starbucks mix. With thousands of locations across the world, a coffee shop has become a driving force in the music and film industries and a daily part of millions of lives.

One of the services Starbucks provides that is almost as wonderful as WiFi is the sale of The New York Times. In some locales Starbucks is the only place that venerable newspaper is available for purchase.

I prefer to spend my money with independent operators wherever I am. I try to shop at local retail stores and restaurants. I stay away from huge multi-national corporate operations whenever possible. But when it comes to coffee, and everything that now goes with it, Starbucks is making it increasingly difficult to do that. It just isn’t possible for Joe’s coffee shop to compete in a market that not only expects to be able to connect to the internet without any plugs or wires, but to also create a cup of coffee that is more than a cup of coffee. A Starbucks coffee makes a statement. That statement may be this: “I’ve got more money than sense or taste, but dig me, I’m here, laptop under one arm, newspaper under the other and I’m somebody to be reckoned with.”

Starbucks is not just changing the way we drink coffee, it is changing the way we think. They have
created a whole new class of people and made quite a few star bucks in the process.

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