Starbucked

Just ran across a review of a book called Starbucked, which describes the mechanisms of Starbucks’ unlikely success. There’s a lot of focus-grouping involved in creating the Starbucks “experience”, apparently, and it grows out of a culture of new-age cookie-cutterism and aggressive homogeneity-breeding. This has the reviewer feeling a bit dyspeptic:

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.

Well, yes. I can see all that, I suppose, but it’s kind of a narrow view of things. Granted, I’m not exactly an impartial witness here — it’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m writing this from my second Starbucks of the day — but it seems to me that, while there’s certainly something to be said for quirkiness and individuality in your haunts, it’s also important to have a place that’s comfortable, staid, and familiar enough to serve as a launching pad for your own brand of quirkiness. That’s something Jeff Vandermeer told us, once: find stability and routine in your life, and you’ll have a platform steady enough to release the unfettered chaos you need to make art. ¹

So I don’t really care that everything from the color of the walls around me to the music playing above me is carefully tuned to offend as few people as possible, and replicated more or less verbatim in thousands of other Starbucks, all over the world. Ubiquity and conformity aren’t necessarily bad things. Starbucks works.