Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture
This is not about coffee. Nor is it about its tastes, its modern gourmet guise or its effects on us. It is about big business, and how one came to dominate high streets throughout the world, driven by the design and determination of one man. It is about how one man can take a product which is undergoing a race for the bottom and with the right marketing turn it into the planet’s largest franchise. If you’re looking for a gap in the market to fill with your next business idea, this book is for you.
Starbucks’ ubiquity in The States is not something I was really cogniscent of before I read this. While they are market leaders in the UK, Costa Coffee are not far behind - with Caffe Nero not far behind them. Yet in the great US of A, if you added-up the number of coffee shop branches owned by all the other chains, they do not come to more than half of Starbucks’ outlets. This book was an education for me in the current state of play on the other side of the pond – it really is a different world over there. McDonalds bears the brunt of our anti-capitalist and anti-American protestation in this country, with an interlude several years ago of anti-anti-competitive practices which Starbucks were involved in passing once we realised how much we appreciated a convenient latte on our way to work (that excludes most of the chavs and reflective-jacket clad workers).
The story of Starbucks presented here is quite an interesting one, which in this book is given just enough room to breathe among the business stats and talking heads from those involved. The now famous (in business circles at least) Howard Shultz was a travelling salesman who noticed an upturn in espresso machine sales and so latched onto this trend, doing some research along the way over in Italy, where they actually know how to make strong coffee well, and opened up his first coffee chain Il Giornale. As you may have gathered from the fact that you’ve never heard of it, this failed to have the desired effect. His role in the growth of an existing coffee house named Starbucks (named after a character in Moby Dick) began soon after with a fair share of false starts. This was then followed by the kind of growth plan which would make Hitler’s annexing of the Rhineland look like a family day-out to Margate.
He comes across as an ambitious, slick and probably quite unpleasant man. While his shareholders love him – no surprises there then, “Go Starbucks – whoo yeah!” - he appears to achieve this by pumping out the kind of fanciful rhetoric that would not go down so well over this side of the Atlantic. As the author points out, Schultz’s retrospective description of the first time he tried a Starbucks coffee – ‘wowing him, causing him to convulse, his head tipping back in involuntary shock and awe etc’- just smacks of high-fiving corporate American nonsense. But he is clearly not in love with Starbucks or coffee so much as he is with the heady aroma of freshly-ground success. He is a businessman who seems unlikely to me to break the first rule of marketing; to never fall in love with your brand as it will blind your judgement.
The Americanly named author Taylor Clark strikes a readable tone of objective cynicism. He gets as far an conducting an interview with the great man - which neither party seem that impressed with. The most fascinating part for me was about the state of the coffee market in the USA before Starbucks hit their stride. It was so terrible, that it makes their success seem almost inevitable. For me, it made sense of all those movie references to pots of diesel-like black, treacly coffee in truck-stops and offices. The bottomless coffee pot offered by so many US establishments since the consumer boom of the 50s is incidentally one of the suggested causes of the plummeting of coffee quality, and it’s not hard to see why.
Fascinating marketing, but then when post-rationalised, almost all successfully marketed companies look like they had a genius at the helm. Clearly fallable, Howard Schultz has created a world-wide monster which, after reading this, I cannot help respect – in the same way I respect someone like King Midas. It is interesting to read from a UK perspective as it highlights some clear differences; that while the US market was enduring some awful, instant, steamed, dyed, flavour-injected, freeze-dried, robusta-filled blends, we really weren’t doing that badly. McDonalds brought us the hamburger in the 70’s, which was never that widespread before. But being closer to Europe than our colonial cousins, we had access to decent coffee if we so desired, though mostly after dinner of course.
So a story of the modern giant with some good interviews, and well-researched to boot. But if you want to know your Mocha from your Java, Arabica from Robusta and how the Croissant made it to France (trust me, that one’s interesting), then I recommend you read The Devil’s Cup. It is a travelogue history book by a young American writer who ventures around Europe, the Middle East and Africa in search of the bown bean’s origin. He entertains various theories about its link to civil unrest and which countries have done better in through the ages as a result of their tipples; the ones drinking tea, coffee or cheap ale for breakfast (place your bets now.!).
There is a section in Starbucked which gives you a potted history of coffee, with both authors pretty-much agreeing – at least on the most popular myths and explanations - but to really broaden out the picture on where coffee sits in western society, this second (though much older book) makes for excellent reading. The fact that the ballot box, the notice board and Lloyds shipping insurance were all born in London coffee houses was enough to get my attention alone, but there is much more where that came from. It not only expands upon some important points, it does so with personal interest and a little adventure tossed in. Our author finds himself on a boat full of refugees entering Yemen in a less that legal fashion at one point. When he encounters border police who arrest and interview him, he is very happy about it on the grounds that he will at least have a comfy bed. Has he never seen an Amnesty International advert? This volume was in all fairness written before 9/11 when I think the US traveller could enjoy more of a feeling of international protection.
This history of coffee is woven with his travelogue-style exploits which you would expect of a writer trying to make his book more interesting. And he succeeds in this, but only to an extent. There is no romantic involvement, no real aim to journey (other than to write the book itself) and no real opinions given on anything. As a fact-based venture, it is interesting and quite fun, but Around Ireland with a Fridge, it is not.
Right, I’m popping out for a fredo-fresca triple-shot cinnamon-whip no-foam venti latte with a hazlenut twist. Except that I’m not really. Because I’m British and it’s a Sunday, I’m going to dig the cafetiere out of the cupboard to enjoy with the Sunday papers.