Bryant Simon, author of Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, is a history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and has spent years researching the coffee chain and drinking coffee at Starbucks. His book focuses on just how carefully Starbucks manages its image and in-store environment.

Anyone laboring under the delusion that Starbucks exists to feed the hungry and solve the world’s problems will learn from Simon’s book that Starbucks is just a company, out to make as much money as it can by providing customers with what they want. That might seem obvious enough — companies don’t usually seek to lose money. But a main purpose of Simon’s book is to debunk the notion that Starbucks exists to serve the public good. I’m not sure who has this notion, but Simon demonstrates that Starbucks is promoting it.

Part of what Starbucks is selling is its environment and ethical image. Simon argues that customers like Starbucks because they like what it stands for and that it has convinced them that buying its products helps to make them good people. Most people I know who love Starbucks keep going back for the caffeine and the sugar, but since I gave up caffeine a few months ago and haven’t spent years researching Starbucks, I’ll grant that Simon knows more about it than I do. The status-seeking that he sees as a core reason people go to Starbucks might be an unconscious motive for some or many customers, just as people want certain labels on their shirts or cars or sneakers. His sociological/psychological approach is fine as far as it goes, but we can say the same for a number of products, which he acknowledges.   

It’s fair to say that Simon and I don’t share political views. It seems that his book is intended for readers who hold his academic left-leaning perspective and assumptions. At least, he doesn’t do much to convince the skeptical reader that society would be better off with the more robust public/government asserting itself that he prefers and that would, in his view, make Starbucks and its image-crafting less necessary. That seems to be a given for him. Though his perspective obviously permeates the entire book — he’s not a big fan of privatization — he is usually careful not to make pronouncements that readers might strongly object to. When he offers a critique, there is often some on-the-other-handing. Simon does show how Starbucks has created a public image that is not consistent with reality, but he doesn’t insist that people who spend their money there are all mindless drones who’ve been tricked by advertising.

To some readers, it might seem at times that Simon is trying to have it both ways or at least trying too hard to not drift from his academic impartiality and to present, if not a balanced view of Starbucks, at least an objective one. Or it might seem that he is attempting to forestall criticism by avoiding making a statement that is too likely to inflame opposition or that is over the top. Sometimes it seems that he is just being reasonable; other times some might think he is passive-aggressive, making an argument without making it. As the book goes on, the balance shifts. The on-the-other-handing dies down. The book never turns into a screed, but what begins as a history and sociological explanation for Starbucks’ success does start to feel like more of a condemnation.

When discussing the music that Starbucks plays in its stores, Simon does a good job, as he does throughout, of explaining the company’s reasoning and procedures for faking its authenticity and managing the perception people have of Starbucks. That is really the strength of the book. When Simon strays from it and comments on politics and the market, he seems prone to ideological pronouncements that are at the least debatable and in one case might be better left unsaid. In the book’s worst passage, in seeking to show the dangers of a ubiquitous retail chain influencing musical tastes and choosing which CDs to sell in its stores, Simon writes:

Like [Walmart], [music critic Mark Kemp] felt like the coffee shop from Seattle used its might to dictate taste and morality [...] In a blistering New Republic piece, [David Hadju] likened Starbucks to the Soviet Union and its soundscape of state-dictated music. Both of these assessments are too harsh. Starbucks isn’t quite Stalin or Big Brother bent on mind control. The end result might not, however, be all that different. Like Kremlin censors, Starbucks regulated choice — not to retain state power but to bolster corporate profits, although the distinction between the role of government and the role of brands gets fuzzier all the time. Starbucks wanted to move drinks and sweets, and to do that in the postneed economic order, it had to manufacture images and feelings — in this case of discovery and exploration — to drive coffee and music sales. In the process, it narrowed the sounds available. But it did this while actually increasing the number of CDs for sale at the stores, making it hard (again reminiscent in some ways of the control of language under the Kremlin) to tell what was actually happening to our choices. Perhaps that’s how censorship operates in our civically challenged world dominated by consumption and the increased consolidation of corporate media power. It looks like we have more choices when we really have fewer.

The author of this excerpt is terribly confused if he thinks that people today have fewer musical choices than they once had. They might have fewer musical choices at Starbucks, but the “increased consolidation of corporate media power” doesn’t seem to be helping record companies or keeping millions of people from discovering music — tens of thousands of songs — from all over the place on the Internet. Usually the concern we hear is the opposite — that there is no longer a central cultural resource, that the gatekeepers (editors, reviewers) don’t have the power they once did, that there are too many alternatives and people don’t know what to choose and we no longer have a shared national culture.

Note that Simon first says that Kemp and Hadju comparing Starbucks to the Soviet Union is too harsh before he goes on to compare Starbucks to the Kremlin. Note also the use of “perhaps,” to make a claim about censorship in our “civically challenged world” while not asserting it too strongly. As for the comparison itself, we shouldn’t have to explain to a history professor the important differences between government censorship as seen in the Soviet Union and the head of music at Starbucks choosing to not play a song by Bruce Springsteen that references anal sex. 

Fortunately for Everything but the Coffee, the book does not contain many excesses this blatant. Certainly the book is informed by its author’s political perspective, but when Bryant Simon focuses on the history, statements, and practices of Starbucks, the reader learns about how the company operates, even if this reader didn’t learn much about America.

 

Here is my FTC-inspired disclaimer notifying you that this book was provided to me free of charge, as review copies usually are.

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