Starbucked Read online

  I asked Schultz if he agreed with those — including his former right- and left-hand men, Behar and Orin Smith — who have claimed that Starbucks changed the world. “It’s a pretty arrogant thing to say, ‘We changed the world,’ ” he replied. “I don’t know if I’d say it like that. I think we have managed to, with a simple cup of coffee and a very unique experience, enhance the lives of millions of people by creating a sense of community, by bringing people together and recognizing the importance of place in people’s lives. In the last few years, I think it’s become fairly evident that we’re having this effect around the world.” This is the kind of statement that made Schultz a marketing icon; he can steer any question toward the concepts he wants to associate with the brand, turning his answer into a brief celebration of the benevolence of Starbucks. The lofty words tend to arrive in avalanches. Explaining what his company has done for the once-debased coffee bean, for example, Schultz told me, “We’ve been able to raise it to a unique level in this country in terms of its manifestations of the social experience, bringing people together, community, humanity, all of these things.”

  Mention coffee around Schultz, and the next thing you know you’re talking about the human condition. When I asked how these leaps made sense — how a latte can become a key to transcendence and how, as he often claims, a company with 125,000 employees could possibly be “passionate” — Schultz adopted a serene, sagelike grin. “It’s very easy to be passionate about something that tastes so good,” he said. “And I think the culture of the company self-selects people who are passionate, and probably people leave who do not feel it. It’s not just something that you can prescribe and hand to somebody. It’s just . . . it happens. It’s imprinted on the DNA of the company.”

  If Schultz sometimes sounds like a victim of wishful thinking, this is because he genuinely believes his company can do what most people deem impossible; and considering how far Starbucks has risen when next to no one thought it viable twenty years ago, it’s hard to blame him. This is a company that forever changed the way people consume the most popular beverage on the planet. After his near-religious experience in a Milan espresso bar, Schultz took two cheap and simple ingredients, coffee and milk, and used them to spark a national craze, develop a powerful brand, twist Wall Street around his little finger, and expand his caffeinated empire faster than any other chain in history. Why wouldn’t he think Starbucks is capable of anything? But Schultz doesn’t just believe things that seem impossible; he believes things that are impossible. In a remark about Starbucks’s ability to incorporate “romance and theater” into its design, he told me, “I think the art and mystique of Starbucks has been our ability to do that in a company that could be described as a chain. It’s not, because every store, although the same, is different.” It sounds like something a stoned college student might say — every store, although the same, is different — but to Schultz, the true believer, it makes perfect sense.

  This conviction that Starbucks can achieve the unachievable helps explain Schultz’s dismissal of any concerns about resistance to his company’s ubiquity. Once people “get underneath the hood and see the conscience of the company, the benevolence of Starbucks,” he said, they welcome it into their communities without reservation. “I think the issue of ubiquity was more of a concern people had three or four years ago than they appear to have today,” he continued, “because of the kind of company we are, the reputation we have.” Schultz might see no downside in exponential expansion, but many others view the matter differently. “It’s going to become like McDonald’s,” said Jim Romenesko, the Starbucks Gossip webmaster. “When I was a kid, going to McDonald’s was special, but then they just ran it up until it got out of control. Starbucks is just going to lose appeal as it grows. I already see it happening.” Robert Thompson, the Syracuse University pop-culture professor, pointed out that Starbucks has long thrived on its gourmet image, yet utterly pervasive companies never maintain their air of distinction. “Anyone can get Starbucks now,” he told me. “There’s no exclusivity to it anymore. They’ve moved into volume, volume, volume.” Regardless, Schultz claims his company shall overcome all doubt. He concedes that “when things get big, they don’t usually stay good,” but insists that Starbucks is different. “No company our size has ever really done this before,” he said. “We have created an anomaly in the marketplace, and in doing so, we are for the most part being given the respect that very few have garnered in the past.”

  Starbucks, Schultz believes, is an enterprise fueled by destiny — he’s been sure of this since that fateful day in Milan. In his book, Schultz compares himself to the wizard Merlin, who went through life going backward in time, forever alienated from others by his knowledge of what the future held. “Sometimes I think I know how he must have felt,” he wrote. “My vision for the future, my aspirations of what kind of company Starbucks should be, are so easily misunderstood.” In a sense, Schultz is probably right to believe in fate. If he had never voyaged out to Seattle and just continued selling house-wares, another company would have brought gourmet coffee to the masses, but surely no one could have replicated the dramatic, overwhelming success of Starbucks. So when I asked Schultz if he would have been happy if things had turned out differently — if Starbucks had only blossomed into a chain of maybe a hundred stores — he was momentarily taken aback, as if the question didn’t make sense to him. And maybe it didn’t. “I would not have been happy if I knew the opportunity was greater than one hundred stores and we stopped,” he began. “But I don’t think anyone then or now believed the runway we would have would be this great. And sitting here today, it’s going to be greater from this point on to the future than it has been in the last fifteen years. That’s going to be the stunner.”

  But what if the world is already stunned enough?

  PART TWO

  Getting Steamed

  5

  Storm Brewing

  On the afternoon of July 12, 1789, a young French journalist and rabble-rouser named Camille Desmoulins vaulted himself onto a tabletop at Paris’s Café de Foy, drew a pair of pistols from within his coat, and — losing for a moment his lifelong stammer — let out an impassioned cry: “To arms, citizens!” In eighteenth-century France, this sort of thing actually happened all the time; café patrons generally just tried to get the overexcited speaker off the furniture by telling him something like, “Hey, you start storming the Bastille and we’ll totally meet you there later.” But at that moment, with bread prices intolerably high and the monarchy utterly despised, Desmoulins’s speech drove those at the Café de Foy into a frothing rage, and the crowd charged off to pick a fight that would eventually snowball into the French Revolution.

  That this bloody national uprising began in a coffee-house is hardly a surprise. Coffee is a remarkably incendiary beverage, with a long history of sparking debate, dissent, and even outright violence; some thinkers of ages past went so far as to blame “that dark and evil bean from Africa” for the human sacrifices made by the “black-skinned savages of that continent.” Cafés have nurtured the ideological seedlings of revolutions from Europe to Russia to America, a fact that led many fearful governments to stock them with spies, if they permitted them to operate at all. Coffee-inspired unruliness so terrified the grand viziers of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, for instance, that they briefly made consumption of the brew a crime punishable by death. (Those caught drinking it received a brutal thrashing on the first offense, and on the second offense they were just sealed inside a leather bag and pitched into the Bosphorus River.) One might think that jitter-inducing caffeine, not coffee, is the real culprit behind all the friction and strife. But consider this: tea contains the very same drug, yet it has precisely the opposite reputation — that of a great pacifier, a symbol of polite society. It may seem far-fetched to think that coffee has some unique power over us, but at the same time, a cup of English Breakfast never made anyone want to fight the powers that be.

  For r
easons that may forever remain mysterious, discord sticks to coffee like a shadow, and today this turmoil has taken a new form. Ironically, the outrage that coffee-house-goers used to channel into toppling the government now has a new target: the coffee-house itself. Actually, just one coffeehouse — Starbucks. In a way, this is surprising; one of the company’s signal achievements was its ability to take the countercultural bite out of coffee-houses and transform them into beverage-dispensing day spas. But in the process, Starbucks created an entire subculture of people who abhor its way of doing business. After all, Starbucks is the first coffee-house to ever actually become one of those reviled powers that be that café patrons have always resisted. The coffee-house as a hotbed of radical ideas is largely dead, and though it trades on this romantic image, Starbucks is the one that did it in. Indeed, thinking of the coffee-house as a haven for intellectual discourse is difficult when the one in question operates thousands of clones, wants to sell you the latest Coldplay album, and serves five-dollar milkshakes for adults. It’s tough to imagine Camille Desmoulins hopping up onto a purple velour couch and hoisting a venti iced mocha for liberty.

  Chances are, he’d be hoisting a metal USA Today box through the front windows of a Starbucks instead, as a group of bandana-masked protesters did, to much fanfare, during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle. This climactic moment — images of which reached millions of Americans through television and newspapers — constituted the official beginning of a backlash against Starbucks. The company had finally reached a point where it was no longer an up-and-coming Northwest coffee company, but another massive corporation. And to those of a certain Left-leaning bent, Starbucks was more than that: it stood for everything rotten and deceitful about corporate America. On top of all of the attention, accolades, and cash the company has earned over the years, it now attracts an equal measure of controversy. Just as in the nineties, legions of customers still flaunt their green-and-white cups as status symbols; the difference is, today you’ll also find some customers ducking furtively into Starbucks stores with unmarked mugs, petrified that they might be spotted patronizing a company that many in their peer group consider downright evil.

  But wait a minute. Starbucks is supposed to be in the business of fostering social harmony — filling souls, not just bellies, and all that. Why the hand-wringing about a coffee company? Because for some people — neighborhood activists, human rights workers, and ordinary, Big Business–wary Americans among them — Starbucks touches a special nerve. Megacompanies like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart are easy targets, their transgressions so obvious that it’s pointless to debate them; anyone who walks through the golden arches knows they’re taking the express route to heart disease, yet they pack the place regardless. But in the eyes of its critics, Starbucks is a far subtler threat, its methods more insidious. For one, the company has buffed its public image to such a high sheen that unless you’ve spent time investigating its effects on the world, you would think Starbucks was a branch of the United Nations. Think about its core product: coffee seems benign, yet it’s fiercely addictive. And look at its expansion technique: the chain sneaks into the crevices of a city, swiftly and silently reaching ubiquity. Plus, to grow so fast and make so much money just seems sinister, like the company really is aiming for global domination. Little wonder, then, that Dr. Evil, the power-hungry villain in the Austin Powers movies, kept a secret lair at the top of Starbucks headquarters.

  Everyone has an opinion about Starbucks, and those whose feelings on the company range toward burning hatred have expressed their derision in a variety of creative ways — boycotts, pickets, petitions, vandalism, and more. Take Jeremy Dorosin, a California scuba instructor who felt so wronged by Starbucks’s customer service that he paid $40,000 for several large Wall Street Journal ads denouncing the company. * Or consider a few examples of the inventive sabotage techniques favored by the anticorporate wing of the Starbucks-hating crowd. In 2003, vandals jammed the locks of twenty-three Houston Starbucks stores with toothpicks and glue in the dead of night, rendering the cafés inoperable. That same year, a group of San Francisco pranksters disabled the locks at seventeen stores, then plastered up for lease signs and a faked memo on Starbucks letterhead declaring that in the interest of good taste, “This location will cease operations as of today.” (“We hope that you will continue to visit us here until that time,” the letter added cheekily.) In 1999, hoodlums in Portland, Maine, shattered one store’s windows on four consecutive weekends. “Customers say it’s been really incon-ve-nient,” late-night host Conan O’Brien remarked about the incident, “because, several times now, they’ve had to use the Starbucks across the street.”

  The list goes on and on: a sit-in in Madison, Wisconsin; spray-painted “corporate whore” screeds in Chicago; a string of aggressive urination incidents at a store in Durango, Colorado; ball bearings fired through the windows of three San Diego stores. Starbucks has become such a perennial target that on particularly volatile occasions, police protect it in advance. When New York City hosted the Republican National Convention in the summer of 2004, for example, several Starbucks stores stayed open behind walls of riot cops, and the company instructed its employees not to wear their uniforms in public for fear of drawing hostility. For some, protesting Starbucks is a knee-jerk reaction. After a Seattle police officer shot and killed a black man who was trying to flee a traffic stop in his car in 2001, the Reverend Robert Jeffrey of New Hope Baptist Church had an odd response: he called for a boycott of Starbucks. Obviously, the company had nothing to do with the incident, but Jeffrey had picked up on a neat trick — if you want attention for your cause, protest Starbucks and you’ll get it. *

  So what, precisely, has Starbucks done to incur this ill will? The lineup of charges against the company is quite diverse, but they fall into five main categories. According to its critics, Starbucks is

  • Killing the character of neighborhoods and employing predatory tactics to take out locally owned coffee-houses.

  • Causing the suffering of millions of Third World coffee farmers by paying unfair prices for beans.

  • Peddling a product that is harmful to our health (and to our delicate palates).

  • Exploiting its employees and crushing their attempts to unionize.

  • Homogenizing the planet and destroying cultural diversity by saturating the world with its stores.

  There are plenty more where those came from — like the accusations that Starbucks secretly pushes a liberal agenda, and even that it once attempted to exploit emotions about 9/11 to sell more of its Tazo Citrus drinks — but those are the most significant of the lot. These five allegations trace the effect a corporation has on every part of the world it touches: local neighborhoods, suppliers, customers, employees, and the very fabric of world culture itself. Figuring out the truth behind the charges levied against Starbucks, then, should give us a picture of what its influence on the world really is. And that is the objective of the second half of this book: to investigate the ethical debates about the company’s interactions with different segments of society — from coffee growers to mom-and-pop coffee-house owners — and to discover the hidden ways that Starbucks affects our lives.

  When I spoke with Howard Schultz, he insisted that the allegations against his company were “all noise,” just the bitter grumblings of those who reflexively hate any business where you can’t buy things made from hemp. Yet if this were no more than “noise,” Starbucks wouldn’t have to pay upwards of $500,000 a year to provide Schultz with bodyguards and personal security services. (In 2003 alone, the company shelled out $677,334 to protect him.) Nevertheless, Schultz has consistently expressed bewilderment at the suggestion that there are people who don’t adore Starbucks unconditionally; in response, he simply reiterates his belief in the company’s essential magnanimity. “You have to have the courage to believe in the purpose of the company,” he told me, wringing the maximum meaning out of the noble nouns. “And the courage we have i
s that we recognize that our success is going to create people that are going to misunderstand us or target us for something. Over time, we’re going to have detractors because we’ve gotten big and successful.”

  Of course, this is at least partially true; any company as huge and lucrative as Starbucks will inevitably draw critics. But Schultz also believes his company has become a magnet for controversy because it’s so benevolent — in other words, because protesters know Starbucks is a progressive company and therefore assume it will be inclined to heed their criticism. (Ronnie Cummins, the head of the Organic Consumers Association, has basically granted Schultz this point. Cummins has organized several protests of the company over its use of milk containing bovine growth hormone, and he acknowledges that his group only picks on Starbucks because a conglomerate like Kraft would never pay it a moment’s attention.) Schultz also likes to point out that Starbucks gets an unfair share of anticorporate agitation because of its high visibility. “Starbucks is both this ubiquitous brand and a place where you can go and break a window,” he told Business Week in 2002. “You can’t break a can of Coke.” But this is only the logical result of a strategy Schultz himself emphatically embraced: if your stores are con-ve-nient to visit for a Frappuccino, they’re also con-ve-nient to vandalize. Ultimately, Starbucks brought this controversy on itself with its rapid expansion and its constant self-promotion. “For a big corporation, they’re phenomenal and progressive in many ways,” explained Kevin Knox, the former Starbucks roaster. “But they promote themselves as being even better than they actually are. So they open themselves up to be analyzed according to the highest standards.”