Starbucked Read online

  Even Schultz found himself lost in the chaos on occasion. He still approved every decision personally and monitored each store’s sales daily — calling the managers to praise or berate them accordingly — but no one could keep track of the pandemonium at headquarters. Recalled Roberts, “Howard would come up and ask me very quietly, ‘Who are all of these people? What do they do on this floor?’ I’d say, ‘Why are you asking me? I have no idea.’ ” Stores were opening so quickly that Schultz and Roberts would sketch out designs for them on napkins and scraps of paper and hand them off to McCurdy’s department. This was the kind of chaos Schultz craved, the kind that came from popularity. And it was only the beginning.

  Going Hollywood

  For all of the company’s heady growth under Schultz — it octupled in size in just three years — Starbucks was still confined to the Pacific Northwest and Chicago at the dawn of 1991. Schultz intended to establish a strong foothold in every city Starbucks entered before moving on; competitors like Gloria Jean’s Coffee Bean had expanded far too hastily and left themselves dangling just above the abyss of insolvency. With Starbucks dominating its main markets, Schultz next took aim at Los Angeles, a proposition that seemed even more foolish than going into Chicago. Sweltering, smog-choked days didn’t quite make a person crave hot coffee, the thinking went. But the common wisdom underestimated one thing: the trend sensitivity of Angelenos. Seattle may have birthed the espresso revolution, but Hollywood got it ready for its close-up.

  Unlike in Chicago, the company’s success in Los Angeles was never in doubt. Just before Starbucks opened its first store there, in Santa Monica, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed its coffee the best in America. The result was a torrent of humanity at California’s earliest Starbucks. “When we opened that store in Santa Monica, it just blew up” said Behar. “We absolutely could not handle the volume. The tile on the floor right in front of the counter wore out completely within a few months. That’s when I knew we had a tiger by the tail — or it had us.” Starbucks kept rolling out cafés, yet the demand kept rising. “Every store we opened in L.A. was a million-dollar store within the first year — Boom! Boom! Boom!” Pinaud recalled. L.A.’s sudden infatuation with Starbucks shocked everyone. Seattle, Lattetown USA itself, had taken years to develop a similar fervor.

  But Seattle didn’t have movie stars, who apparently require greater quantities of coffee than the little people in order to survive. Celebrities had long delighted in expensive beans (recall Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, in chapter 1), but they had yet to discover well-prepared, stylishly presented espresso, which, being Italian, was naturally a far more glamorous product. Complicated espresso drinks took off so quickly among the Hollywood elite that Steve Martin was already making fun of them within the year in his movie L.A. Story. In a joke that ranks as one of the first mainstream media acknowledgments of the coffee trend, Martin’s character asks a waiter at the café L’Idiot for a “half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon,” which, aside from being impossible, hardly even seems a fussy order today.

  As Hollywood soon discovered, designer coffee was a product born for the diva treatment. There are only so many ways to order, say, a steak, but at Starbucks, you have literally fifty-five thousand drink combinations to choose from, thus ensuring that you can express your individuality through an order so convoluted it can’t be finished in one breath. Technically, a “venti wet cappuccino extra hot” and a “tall double 190-degree no foam latte” are more or less the same drink, but that wasn’t the point. At Starbucks, being finicky was celebrated; this was a place that actually glorified and indulged our neurotic tendencies. Hence, Hollywood — a town with finickiness to spare — helped launch the vogue for coffee fussiness. The trend continues unabated today. For instance, take Joel Madden, the prolifically tattooed lead singer of the punk-pop band Good Charlotte and a man who insists on beverage perfection. “Joel gets a soy nonfat sugar-free vanilla latte,” his assistant told Teen People. “If I send someone else to get it, they’ll come back with not enough Splenda or something. You might as well not even hand him that.”

  Even today, years after the company lost its patina of exclusive cool, celebrities are still inseparable from their Starbucks cups. A glance through any gossip magazine yields at least a few photos of stars wearing their public camouflage gear — sunglasses — and holding the familiar white cup with the green logo. Britney Spears and Madonna seem to have Starbucks cups surgically attached to their hands, and the actors Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner were photographed with the cups so often in 2005 that the New York Daily News claimed the couple had signed a “seven-figure” contract with Starbucks to be seen holding the product. (Both parties denied this.) A few Web sites even track stars’ coffee preferences, which often reflect on their personalities: Katie Holmes takes a half-caf grande soy latte; Elijah Wood favors a quad espresso over ice; and Hulk Hogan likes the venti caramel Frappuccino.

  The upshot of this celebrity enthusiasm was millions of dollars in free advertising each year for Starbucks, and the company never hesitated to cash in. By the end of 1991, Schultz had cranked his enterprise up above 115 stores, and the espresso craze was just beginning to crack into the mainstream consciousness. To most, it appeared to be no more than a fad nearing the end of its fifteen minutes of fame. In a sense, espresso could have been like juice bars, just another concept that spawned cultlike zeal and grandiose plans before petering out.

  But people don’t get addicted to juice. Those who were paying closer attention noticed a few telling clues that the coffee-house wasn’t a fad at all; it was an emerging American institution. Starbucks opened as many stores as it possibly could, yet almost none of them failed. Its customers didn’t just pop in when they felt like it — they needed their fix every day, sometimes multiple times. As Schultz showed in Vancouver, he could even put two stores across the street from one another and keep both full of customers. And it’s not like coffee was a faddish product, since most of America drank it habitually. Maybe this idea had longevity.

  When Starbucks went public on June 26, 1992, many thought it was a cute gesture from a niche company. Three months later, after its stock price on the Nasdaq index doubled to thirty-three dollars, they stopped laughing and started buying. The evening before the IPO, Schultz gathered Olsen, Behar, and several others in his office, which overlooked the roasting plant. Schultz recorded a congratulatory announcement that each employee would receive the next morning, then grinned from his chair for a moment before telling his colleagues, “Get ready for the ride of your life, because the lid is about to come off this thing.”

  The great mermaid had arrived.

  Whither Starbucks?

  America has been cruel to its food fads in recent years. Things always get off to a torrid start, with the nation pledging its undying love to the hot young victual — be it Krispy Kreme Doughnuts or frozen yogurt, wraps or low-carb bread. But the affair generally ends in tears, as the coldhearted Lothario abruptly dumps the new foodstuff and returns to the old standbys, like an errant husband back to his meatloaf-baking wife.

  Why should gourmet coffee have been any different? After all, the craze had many of the hallmarks of the soon-to-be-dumped fad: it was fashionable, grew suspiciously popular with astounding speed, and no one really needed the product. Sure, people needed coffee (or caffeine, at least) to survive the day, but not necessarily four-dollar pitchers of hot milk and espresso. Coffee-houses did provide something that frozen yogurt shops couldn’t, however — a solution to a glaring problem in American society. Just as McDonald’s filled a need for quick, cheap sustenance in a busy postwar culture obsessed with driving and convenience, the coffee-house gave a harried and disjointed nation a place to hang out and recharge. This, every bit as much as the addictive and alluring main product, was what made Starbucks into a new cultural institution: we went there because we had nowhere else to go.

  Let’s take a closer look at the America of the 1990s. First, we notice th
at it’s a richer and more productive nation than ever before. With the seventy-five million baby boomers in their peak earning years, incomes were soaring. Between 1980 and 1999, average income in constant 1999 dollars shot from $15,744 to $21,239, according to U.S. government statistics, a 35 percent increase in just two decades. And just as earnings were rising, discount superstores like Wal-Mart and Target were driving down the cost of living. So began the age of disposable income, when millions of Americans accustomed to penny-pinching could suddenly afford to participate in a new consumer universe of unnecessary crap.

  Everyone should have been thrilled, right? Actually, no. Sociology researchers were finding that increases in wealth didn’t add to the average person’s level of happiness at all; instead, Americans were reporting ever-higher levels of stress. This was not entirely unexpected. In 1970, the Swedish economist Staffan Linder predicted that mounting levels of affluence would only increase social pressures to succeed, leading to what he called a “harried leisure class”; paradoxically, labor-saving innovations would make us work more, not less. Work became a national fetish, and America started doing more of it than any other country on earth. On average, we now work 160 hours per year more than we did thirty-five years ago. Consequently, we also get less sleep — 20 percent less per night than Americans of a century before.

  We sought refuge from stress in opulent trinkets, spending our surplus cash on what some began calling “affordable luxuries.” Ads encouraged us to “indulge” in self-pampering products like chocolates and lotions as a balm for daily anxieties. In the book Trading Up: The New American Luxury, authors Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske claim that the top benefit consumers look for in a product today is emotional satisfaction — they want to be coddled, to feel their all-consuming work has yielded something meaningful. Many of the people Silverstein and Fiske spoke to said that owning expensive, indulgent products made them feel more accomplished and satisfied with their lives. Thus, a new industry of luxury products aimed at the middle class arose, and no item was too basic for the treatment — in fact, the more basic, the better. A twenty-three-dollar bottle of liquid hand soap at Bath and Body Works, anyone? Maybe an eleven-dollar head of organic arugula at Whole Foods?

  Or how about a dolled-up cup of coffee for $4.25 at Starbucks? Now we can fully understand the appeal of designer coffee as a product for the nineties and beyond: for frazzled, affluent worker bees looking to feel spoiled and get a kick of energy, nothing could beat a warm, custom-made espresso drink. Indeed, the advent of a constantly exhausted, hyperprosperous society in search of emotional soothing almost makes the rise of specialty coffee seem preordained. People had long felt sentimental bonds with the drink. “Keep in mind that coffee is a very personal thing,” said Dave Olsen, Starbucks’s longtime coffee expert. “It can be stimulating and soothing, often at the same time. It can be private and social. It has all of these opposites contained within it.” Schultz seized on the emotional pull of his product quite early, relentlessly bringing up the “romance of coffee” in interviews. “There are very few things you start your day with, and brushing your teeth just isn’t very romantic,” he told Brandweek in 1999. “There is something romantic and comforting about coffee. . . . It is something you hold and you hold it every day.”

  Gourmet coffee was an ideal product for the time, but the pull of the coffee-house as a place went deeper still. On top of the country’s sense of nervous exhaustion and its need for emotional fulfillment, we also suffered from a long-standing social malady: an increasing feeling of disconnection from our fellow citizens. As the Harvard political science professor Robert Putnam outlines in his book Bowling Alone, civic engagement has been on the wane for decades in America. Putnam blames technology for this. Instead of participating in community activities, he says, people were staying home and staring at the television — and with the personal computer becoming an office necessity, many had to spend their working hours staring at a glowing screen as well. These technologies certainly thwarted a lot of daily socializing, but so did our housing choices. If you lived in the mushrooming suburbs, where neighbors seldom met and the idea of walking somewhere was laughable, your sense of belonging to a community was doubly foiled.

  And even if we did want to make an effort, where could we have gone? In many cities, the only businesses that could legitimately claim to be community gathering places were bars, most of which were smoky, sleazy, and too loud for conversation. Plus, only goods that enhance productivity could curry favor under the new social regime; alcohol and tobacco were increasingly being seen as health-wrecking evils. “Smoking is now considered a worse sin than at least five of the ten commandments,” the New York Times columnist David Brooks explains in his book Bobos in Paradise. “Coffee becomes the beverage of the age because it stimulates mental acuity, while booze is out of favor because it dulls the judgment.”

  The coffee-house offered an antidote to these social deficiencies: a place to just hang out. As a comfortable and safe community nexus, free of drunks and secondhand smoke, the café eased the problem of disconnection while offering an item that people could come in for every day; it became America’s version of the British pub. Of course, there was no pressure to actually be social (as the Austrian writer Alfred Polgar once quipped, the coffee-house is “a place for people who want to be alone, but need company for it”), yet it was the feeling of unwinding among other humans that counted. Where else but a coffee-house could you pay a couple dollars for a drink, then fritter away four hours splayed across a couch, reading a book? And how many other businesses would let lonesome telecommuters, whose ranks qua-dru-pled in the nineties, use them as makeshift offices? Jim Romenesko, the webmaster of a prominent media industry news blog (as well as a lesser known one called Starbucks Gossip), works in four or five different Chicago-area Starbucks stores each day. “I can sit at a Starbucks for five hours with one coffee and no one gives me subtle hints to leave,” he said. “No one hassles me.” As something of a connoisseur of the Starbucks environment, Romenesko also knows how much some regulars rely on Starbucks for a sense of social connection. “I think there are some customers who think that these baristas are their real friends,” he said.

  The perfect catchphrase for the coffee-house’s vital social function happened to be languishing in disuse, just waiting for someone to seize on it. When Harry Roberts found himself struggling to put the communal appeal of Starbucks into words, he shared his trouble with his wife, who soon stumbled across the solution in a bookstore: an out-of-print book called The Great Good Place, by a sociology professor named Ray Oldenburg. In his book, Oldenburg describes America’s need for the neutral, safe, public gathering spots that had gradually disappeared; he calls this nexus the “third place,” with home and work being places one and two. His words were eerily prescient — he even pointed out that third places generally revolve around beverages, like with tea-houses and pubs. As Schultz might have said, the synergy was too good to be true. The company now had its philanthropic rallying cry: it wasn’t a coffee company, but a third place bringing people together through the social glue of coffee. And who could disagree?

  Well, Ray Oldenburg, for one. Now retired, Oldenburg is grateful for the renewed attention that Starbucks brought to his third-place idea, but he remains displeased that the company co-opted his concept. “It was a little tacky of them not to consult me,” he told me. * Oldenburg’s idea of a third place was actually of a calmer, mom-and-pop establishment without Starbucks’s high volume and fast turnover. He appreciates the headway against the civically disengaged suburbs, however. When I asked him what inspired the third-place idea, he replied, “Oh hell, I bought a house in a subdivision. That’s what did it. Jesus! Nobody knows each other! I mean, it’s like forming community is against the law in the suburbs.” Still, when Oldenburg got a call recently from an advertising firm representing Starbucks and the caller asked if he would be willing to endorse the company, he declined.

  But despite
Oldenburg’s disapproval, Starbucks soon spread the third place across America, and neither the company nor the country would be the same again. As Howard Behar put it, “When it became the third place, the dynamics changed completely.”

  Breve New World

  Coffee-houses hit the mainstream so hard in the mid-1990s, one might have thought the nation was just emerging from a prolonged national shortage of overstuffed chairs and giant muffins. Designer coffee became more than just a chic thing to drink; with the third-place idea as its lodestar, Starbucks was making coffee into a way of life.

  As with most things trendy, the first people to base their lives around coffee-houses were hip young urbanites. Here was a place with awesome potential for romance, an ideal environment in which to absentmindedly flaunt your battered copy of Ulysses while showing off your taste in the finer things. And if your sophisticated ways successfully lured in an attractive stranger, a coffee-house made the perfect setting for a first date; it involved less pressure and expense than the standard dinner and a movie, and if things went poorly, you didn’t have to wait for the check before hitting the emergency eject switch. Coffee-house cool also got a boost from another cultural phenomenon back in Seattle: the city’s grunge music scene. The members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden never went so far as to wreck an espresso machine onstage with their guitars, but the relationship between grunge and coffee-houses featured prominently in the 1992 proto–Generation × film Singles, wherein the hipster Seattleite characters split time between grunge concerts, romantic meltdowns, and witty repartee at coffee shops.