Piquantly contrarian essay on Starbucks' real genius: its appeal to the unreconstructed American consumer.

coffee, consumerism, food and drink, starbucks

Andy:

For Schultz, this mainstream customer base was both a boon and a curse. In Pour Your Heart Into It, his 1997 account of Starbucks’ rise to global behemoth, he reveals a preoccupation with authenticity that echoed Kurt Cobain’s. In 1989, he initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers—it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”

Eventually, Schultz relented. And really, what greater punk-rock middle finger is there to purist prescriptions about what constitutes a true coffee drink than a blended ice beverage flavored with Pumpkin Spice powder? . . .

In reality, the chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.

Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.

Community (and, interestingly, awareness of quality) can and do conspire to redeem some of the most failed cultural offerings. Good movies are just good, but bad ones can be instructive.

failure, movies, redemption

Nate:

Duerfahrd recently brought his 29 students to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago for a special screening of the 2003 film “The Room,” widely reviled as the “Citizen Kane” of bad cinema.

“Everyone was talking during the movie and throwing things at it and chanting things at it and responding to it,” Duerfahrd said. “It was a beautiful event.”

Tommy Wiseau, director of the now cult-classic movie, was even on hand.

“The students all wanted to meet the man to blame for the movie,” Duerfahrd said. “It was more like a pilgrimage. Twenty-nine students wouldn’t have gone to see Spielberg or a successful director. They wanted to see Wiseau, this guy who made this horrible film.”

And that’s the heart of the professor’s respect for rotten movie making. It’s easy for us to watch and be entertained by a high-quality film. It’s a passive experience. Deriving enjoyment from a bad movie takes work, imagination and creativity – all the skills the bad movie’s creators failed to utilize.

...

“Most of the things that go on in our own life look like they’re out of a bad movie,” Duerfahrd said. “Forgotten lines, dropped engagement rings, poor acting. That’s what makes the bad movies so much like the life we lead.”

I'm not sure this a helpful model for charity per se, but it does feel a bit like a prophetic act. I wonder if our dollar-distributor would have fared much better near the same spot 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. An economist would likely note that what our prophet found out was that most people priced the amount of effort and risk involved in figuring out what was really going on, making a promise to a stranger, and then either carrying it out or reneging on it, at something more than a buck.

art, cultural worlds, economics, money, prophesy

Nate:

About the same time that Ibnale was handing out umbrellas, Brett Lockspeiser took $100 worth of dollar bills to the 16th Street Mission BART Station and held up a sign.

“I will give you $1 for you to give to someone else,” the sign said. Throughout the evening rush, Lockspeiser stood in the station, trying to give away dollar bills.

“Everyone though I was trying to scam them,” he said. “They wanted to know what I was up to. I told them they just had to promise to give the $1 to someone else.”

After three hours, Lockspeiser had managed to give away only $52. One passer-by did not take the $1 but, suspecting that Lockspeiser was down and out, handed him a pair of socks.

It's hard not to view the coverage of Saturday's devastating earthquake in Chile as a parallel study in aftermaths with Haiti's January quake. I've only had two or three news cycles to observe, but already the the media obsession with looting (is it happening? is it not happening?) seems apparent. The article I read in this morning's paper even left the impression that President Michelle Bachelet's request for outside aid had to do with the looters rather than the massive, widespread destruction. So I was astonished and heartened by the anecdote below, which captures a bit of culture-making in crisis, as the powerful and the powerless come to conflict and, amazingly given the way these things sometimes turn out, negotiate a more helpful solution.

community, earthquakes, government, horizons of the possible, improvisation, property

Nate:

The police fired water cannons and tear gas to disperse hundreds of people who forced their way into shuttered shops in the southern city of Concepción, which was devastated. But law enforcement authorities, heeding the cries of residents that they lacked food and water, eventually settled on a system that allowed staples to be taken but not televisions and other electronic goods.