Jul 15, 2021
Bryant Simon’s book says Starbucks has replaced the corner bar and the stoop as an American … [+] gathering spot.
Glennis Pagano
Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) has 14,805 retail shops in the United States as of June 13, 2021 and netted $19.1 billion in revenue in 2020. Because of the pandemic, its sales dipped 27% from the previous year.
But according to Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks, written by Bryant Simon, a professor of history and director of American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Starbucks has had a dramatic effect on the American culture.
He quotes musician Alice Cooper who said that General Motors used to symbolize the U.S. “Now as Starbucks goes, so goes America,” Cooper said.
Simon said that Starbucks “pinpointed, packaged and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better.”
He is also critical of Starbucks. Despite the fact that it provides staff who works a minimum 20 hours a week health care benefits, Simon says, “It never existed for the larger good; it worked for Wall Street and shareholders.”
Its premium coffee, Simon suggests, served as an American status symbol, “like a BMW coupe or a Kate Space handbag.” Their grande lattes made its customers feel as if “they were better than others — cooler, richer and more sophisticated.”
Here’s what Bryant Simon said about Starbucks’ effect on the American culture:
You’ve documented that Starbucks has a sweeping effect on the American culture. Overall what has been the effect?
Simon: I think there are two things to keep in mind when thinking about Starbucks: its impact on society and its reflection of American society. Starbucks has put up a mirror to ourselves and seeing what we care about and desire. It has helped to transform American taste. It took an everyday commodity like coffee and upgraded it and changed it. The simplest thing is it taught us as a culture to pay more than a dollar for a cup of coffee. Secondly, it helped to transform how we navigate cities.
How so?
Simon: It gave us a place away from home to gather, work, hide out, meet people, and it helped launch other coffee shops. It really, in some way, transformed the way people used space away from home.
In the book, you cited that America used to hang out at the corner bar, the front stoop or the church, and now they gravitate to Starbucks. Why?
Simon: What happened is, Starbucks kicked off at the time that the government’s commitment to public spaces declined, such as libraries and common spaces in train stations. New York put up unsittable benches to fend off the homeless. Starbucks wants to be considered a third place, a gathering spot for friends or business meetings. First place is home; second is work. Howard Schultz had an uncanny sense of what people were missing in their lives. What makes the company so explosive is they offered a chance to get things that people were missing in their lives — like a gathering place.
But you also note while there are over 200 Starbucks shops in prosperous Manhattan, there are only a handful in the mostly working-class Bronx. Why?
Simon: What Starbucks is selling is a kind of affordable luxury and that is something that working-class and largely Black and Brown sections of the city can’t afford. Starbucks doesn’t necessarily want to attract those people. That price point is a gate keeping mechanism. It’s an economic and class question.
Starbucks premium coffee used to be a status symbol. Has it lost its cachet?
Simon: It lost its cachet as a high end spot. And in the process it made itself into a middling product and that allowed itself to expand. You can’t be a high-end product and be everywhere. And they made a decision at a certain point that they would be everywhere and sacrifice some of the cachet they had.
At the beginning under Howard Schultz’s leadership, it offered premium coffee and wouldn’t compromise. Then it started offering Frapuccino, midday drink bargains, and frequent customer discounts. What’s the problem with doing that?
Simon: It’s claiming authenticity about coffee, while it’s doing all of these moves, which are inauthentic.
You say most of its employees are joyless. Doesn’t it offer a slew of entry level jobs to many people and an ability to become managers?
Simon: They offer college courses as one option that barely pays for college. They allow their employees to buy health care benefits because we live in a country with a totally broken health care system. It’s a measure of their triumph in shaping their news.
Starbucks has opened a new Roastery in Manhattan and a Reserve. What’s their effect?
Simon: I think those places are simply show places or advertisements. And whether they make money or not, they need to be there as a symbol of Starbucks’ authenticity and knowledge of coffee.
Of late, Starbucks has moved to promoting mobile app orders and drive-thrus. What’s the effect?
Simon: It put Starbucks in a good position to respond to the pandemic. Drive-thrus speak to Starbucks’ recognizing that we’re not an upscale brand. We’re going to be people’s default cup of decent coffee.
You visited an astounding 425 Starbucks in researching your book. Overall, what’s the impact that this coffee chain has had on American culture?
Simon: Starbucks has changed what we drink and how we interact outside the home. We’ve come to expect that where we go to get a cup of coffee is place to work or meet one another. My son got a job in a small town of Hastings, Michigan, where there’s a coffee shop that likely wouldn’t be there without Starbucks.
Where do you see Starbucks going in the future?
Simon: If I were Starbucks, it’d be more of the same. I’d put a Starbucks at every rest stop on the highway, airport, and train station. It’d be the place that people recognize for a decent cup of coffee.
