Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks by Bryant Simon

$54.00

Hardcover

Last week, Seattle Times reporter, Melissa Allison, revealed that Starbucks was opening several remodeled, rustic looking eco-friendly stores.  But the new cafes won’t be named Starbuck and they won’t sell products with the Starbucks logo on them either.  The name of the newly named coffeehouse Allison visited was 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.  Other new cafes are planned and will also be named after the neighborhoods and areas they are located in.  The new names, Tim Pfeiffer, Starbucks’ senior vice president of global design, told Allison are meant to give the stores “a community personality.”   See Allison’s article, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009479123_starbucks16.html

So a Starbucks won’t be a Starbuck any more.  What does this tell us?  A lot, I think.
 
Brands and globalization, as many scholars and commentators have noted with alarm, have bred a homogenized and numbing landscape of sameness from Seattle to Singapore.   One well-researched study warns of the spread of “clone towns.”   (See this report, http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/12345news_clonetownbritainresults.aspx) When Jim Hyssop of Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, saw a Starbucks go in his downtown next to the McDonalds and the Pizza Hut, he predicted, “If someone blindfolded you, put you in a helicopter and set you down in a town somewhere in England, you wouldn’t be able to tell where you are anymore.”  Witnessing Starbucks’ invasion of London, an English travel writer bemoaned that the historic city “is well on the way to being transformed into Generica, a land where all the high streets look identical.  Chains, chains, chains – from pharmacies to pubs, cafes and restaurants.”  “For such a vibrant place,” he complained, “it’s disappointing to see that such a huge chunk of the population is so undiscerning.”  Perhaps he is right to blame us – consumers – for the emergence of this bleak geography of nowhere, to borrow new urbanist flag waver James Howard Kunstler’s telling phrase.  Starbucks and the other chains, at least to some extent, follow demand.  So maybe, then, we need someone to ring the alarm and save us from ourselves and our desires for sameness and predictable comfort.  But do we really want the fight against brands and Generica to be led by Starbucks or McDonalds or one of the other companies who have created the string of clone towns in the first place?

There is, however, a grassroots pushback against the brands already taking shape out there.  Some towns are trying to ban chain stores.  Even more widespread, consumers are revolting against sameness every day with their feet and their purchases.  As the branded world spreads from North America to Europe to Asia, from the suburbs to the cities, the value of the local, the natural, the small, the mom and pop has gone up.  Some consumers have grown weary of the lack of choice and gone looking, often paying a little extra, for something that is one of a kind, special, and tied to the place where they live.  In many ways, this explains the appeal of the independent coffee house.  While Starbucks has struggled in recent months, the local places, the independents, have kept up their business and done okay.

Now Starbucks wants a piece of that action.  But in order to get it, it has to shed its name.  (That alone says something about the value of the brand and the meaning of that new slogan, “It’s not just coffee, it’s Starbucks.”)  Now Starbucks will be called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.  Still a place with a local name owned by a multi-national corporation with 16,000 stores world-wide isn’t a local place, it is a sham, another attempt to consume genuine desire with carefully crafted artifice – something Starbucks does quite often.