A Magical Journey Through the World of Starbucks Coffee You Wont Believe What Happens Next

An ethnological and psychoanalytical experiment in spending two months at various Starbucks Coffee spots around Europe, trying to understand their symbolic meaning in our culture today.

GET ORGANIZED is sprayed in rugged black letters over the brick facade of the 19th century Gothic-style building right across the street of the Starbucks Coffeehouse I’m about to enter. An appeal to the activists of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement who for months have been gathering here. A call for action I take personally as it awakens memories of scribbled words pinned on my refrigerator door for many years: “Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”[1] Is that so? Am I getting organized? Occupying Starbucks? At least I plan to spend an exorbitant time within their culture in order to better understand how it transformed into the cultural icon it become today.

Opening the door, crossing a threshold, separating from outside reality, entering into a space of constructed unknown, but judging by its atmosphere, well-known territory: the world of Starbucks. I am greeted by a soundscape of drifting jazz-tunes and distant female voices from a long forgotten past whispering words of love. Beans being ground, mobile conversations started, orders taken, milk heather martinheateding. In front of me, behind Lisa, the barista, stands proud and silent a siren. Encircled by green, seductively staring at me, you, us, waiting in line to order, her hair seems to wave in the wind. What wind? I’m already off guard, disorganized, loosing myself in daydreams, fantasies and sensory experiences. What were my objectives again? A slide of my forefinger touching the screen of my iPhone opens my field notes and I’m reminded again of the questions I have set out to explore.

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“What makes Starbucks the cultural icon is has become today? What is its myth and unique culture, what are its rituals?” Embarking on an ethnological exploration into one of the temples of 21st century globalized consumer society raises the need to first clear out another fundamental question in anthropology and in its subfield, ethnology. “Who is the other?” I realize that I speak this out loud as the woman in front of me slowly turns her head around giving me a disturbed smile I don’t know how to meet. Who am I studying? Who is being studied? Am I being studied? There are reasons to be paranoid. This field of study, the world of Starbucks, is an entirely constructed space experience and space. As consumers of Starbucks we are the ones getting studied., I and you and I are playing the roles of “the other” in a staged Starbucks experience most of us are unconscious of how it’s “scripted”.

Everything around me: letting my gaze dreamily sweep over the room – the big art canvas portraying a single oak in an African landscape and the words ‘hope’, ‘live your dreams’ and ‘Justice' carved in as with a pencil – the old 19th century coffee grinders put up on a oak shelf for display – the large framed high contrast black and white photos of coffee farmers smiling ( authentically) – the old sacks of coffee beans – the book shelves with old nautical atlases and novels – the automatic greeting from Lisa who waits for my order – the groove of the beat that smoothly blends into the next: it’s all an expensive fantasy, a constructed daydream and a script for the imagination constructedfashioned to serve the Starbucks mythology. A corporate myth that has become “ritualized” into an experience, built on in-depth consumer studies of us as “the other”. What can I do but observe the observed as I am being observed? How to hold this paradox?

To “get organized” might not be the best strategy after all within this constructed field of ethnological study? At least if we want to come out of this experience with insights that reaches beyond the “knowledge horizon” and what is already known by Starbucks own consumer research department. French anthropologist Marc Augé writes in his book “The War of Dreams” that the new techniques of communication and image-making render the relation to the other more and more abstract, “We become accustomed to seeing everything but there is some doubt whether we are still looking.” [2] To transcend the paradox and find answers to the questions of research I chose a strategy that is anything but organized, but rather pathological, that of the “doppelgänger” and multiple personality. Not to nourish what might already seem to be the undertaking of a psychotic researcher, but to make sure I keep one foot – one perspective – one camera – one ‘I’, outside the theatrical stage I am about to enter. An eye that critically monitors the one that observes us, a macro-lens of rationality setting our these experiences within the broader context of history and power relations and history. A complementary super-ego characterized by a “directed-thinking” that we I name Max. A personality supporting the other half of the split duo, the participant observer, Jakob, embodying the Starbucks experience guided by his fantasy-thinking. [3] Dear reader, please join us on thisa derive[4] into dreamland!

Starbucks — Story

“What’s your name?” “Jakob, ” I answer, and before I realize I have given away something precious and before I get to ask her “What for?” my name is already written in black letters on a white Starbucks take-away cup, handed over to the barista, and as my Visa card smoothly slides into the machine and the transaction is processed, I understand I have just given away a part of me, a piece of identity and experienced some sort of micro-initiation. Separation – initiation – renewal, a rite-of-passage, into what? into the Starbucks culture. I start to sweat, feel anxious, look nervously round, everyone is smiling, staring into space or screens; somewhere someone seems to call my name.

Once upon a time in America there was a self-made man named Howard Schultz working as general manager for an ordinary Swedish kitchen and house-ware company outside New York. Interested in why a certain company on the American west coast named “Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spices” bought so many plastic drip filters he decided to pay them a visit. In Seattle he was greeted by the founders; an, enthusiastic threesome of relaxed west-coast academics turned coffee beans lovers and entrepreneurs, Mr Schultz fell in love with the company and later wrote in his memoirs: “I couldn’t stop thinking about Starbucks… like a jazz tune you can´t get out of your head.”[5]

A few years after this initial meeting Schultz, by this time already head of marketing at Starbucks went on another trip but this time to another far away land, Europe, where he once again was shot by the arrows of Amore. He was in Italy for a housewaress show but instead fell in love with the Italian coffee culture, the legacy of the European coffee house tradition with its romance and flair ; he perceived it as “great theatre”. On the way back to America he had a vision, and a dream to transform Starbucks from a few stores for premium coffee beans, tea and spices into a new type of coffee house inheriting the cultural tradition of coffee he had experienced. “We would take something old and tired and common – coffee – and weave a sense of romance and community around it. We would rediscover the mystique and charm that swirled around coffee throughout the centuries.“[6] 


Howard Schultz: America's New Banality Supervillain

Tightly compressed, this is the officially approved version of the Starbucks foundation myth. It is the corporate myth that is at the heart of the Starbucks brand and that nourishes their vision of bringing great coffee to everyone, everywhere, one cup at a time, through offering a unique and differentiated Starbucks experience. Schultz later states in his autobiography: “Like Nike, Starbucks had entered a low-margin commodity business and transformed its product into a cultural symbol.”[7] But how did this cultural icon find its form? What does its immense global success have to say about our collective of today? In order to answer this we need to more carefully look at its history, we have to decode the brand – “debrand” Starbucks – to see how their founding mythology is turned into a differentiating experience; or speaking ethnologically, into a ritualized act of consumption. But before that, let’s get back inside the brand through our heroic split-off half of an ethnographer, our other ‘I’. Let us join Jakob on his ethnographic excursion into dreamland, where he is just seems to have gabout to ogetten initiated.

“Jakob, you’re Jakob, right?” I hear a voice speaking to me, a flash of a smile, a cup in my hand. Araya, the barista is already back behind the coffee machine steaming milk and shouting “Tall Frappucchino extra shot for Jennifer” as I get to ask him: “What is this thing about the name?” He looks up, smiling before he starts talking. “You know it’s about sorting out orders

Tightly compressed, this is the officially approved version of the Starbucks foundation myth. It is the corporate myth that is at the heart of the Starbucks brand and that nourishes their vision of bringing great coffee to everyone, everywhere, one cup at a time, through offering a unique and differentiated Starbucks experience. Schultz later states in his autobiography: “Like Nike, Starbucks had entered a low-margin commodity business and transformed its product into a cultural symbol.”[7] But how did this cultural icon find its form? What does its immense global success have to say about our collective of today? In order to answer this we need to more carefully look at its history, we have to decode the brand – “debrand” Starbucks – to see how their founding mythology is turned into a differentiating experience; or speaking ethnologically, into a ritualized act of consumption. But before that, let’s get back inside the brand through our heroic split-off half of an ethnographer, our other ‘I’. Let us join Jakob on his ethnographic excursion into dreamland, where he is just seems to have gabout to ogetten initiated.

“Jakob, you’re Jakob, right?” I hear a voice speaking to me, a flash of a smile, a cup in my hand. Araya, the barista is already back behind the coffee machine steaming milk and shouting “Tall Frappucchino extra shot for Jennifer” as I get to ask him: “What is this thing about the name?” He looks up, smiling before he starts talking. “You know it’s about sorting out orders

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