I just sat down in this cozy little independent coffee shop in my current city of residence (San Francisco) to write a little bit about Starbucks…and maybe a little about local versus corporate economies as well. I’ve actually been meaning to turn my attention to these guys for a while, ever since I noticed their new “fair trade” iconography gracing the bus stops of my fair city some months ago. You may have seen this, it’s large-scale representations of a very organic, very hand-knit looking light brown sack, which is, of course, how all fair trade coffee gets transported to our caffeine-starved shores. Tongue out of cheek, though, seriously, I like the campaign and the way Starbucks seems to be constantly evolving their brand.
Then, I ask myself, how can this be? I mean I’m sitting here in an independently owned coffee shop to do my writing. Why? Well, yeah, I care about supporting my local economy, blah blah blah. But, if I’m being honest, it’s the vibe. Classic German prog-rock band Neu! is pulsing from strategically spaced speakers. The place is bathed in natural light. I’m sitting at a scarred square wooden table. Wireless is free and there are plenty of electrical outlets so I can keep my laptop charged. And the coffee’s decent, too. If I went to do this writing and Net surfing in any Starbucks, it would be a) not free b) noisy c) filled with only mild, corporately approved music d) hopelessly over-lit and e) suffused with that strange nowhere/everywhere antiseptic feeling that every chain seems to embody in spades.
Nevertheless, if I’m looking to grab the best tasting soy latte I can get, I’ll definitely be stepping into a Starbucks and snagging one of those ubiquitous cup-and-sleeves that poke from every celebrity’s hand in the pages of Us magazine (talk about the best product placement ever). Starbucks is a great grab-and-go, but I never have the desire to stick around (though, in my neighborhood, many folks do).
So, this discrepancy or contradiction or nuance or whatever you want to call it, hit me a little harder when I came across a recent article from the Guardian UK, by University of Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal. In it, she frames a critique of Starbucks latest recession-influenced strategy:
Starbucks’ new stealth strategy sees it “rebranding”, or de-branding, stores to give them different names and more local “community personality”. A victim of its own success—161 branches within a five-mile radius in Central London and the famous promise to open a new one every fortnight— Starbucks has been hit by the recession and, in different ways, both by the turn to less expensive caffeine hits and a reawakening of interest in local economies. Even before the downturn, its legendary CEO, Howard Schultz, fretted about what he called the ‘watering down of the Starbucks experience’ and the loss of ‘the soul of the past’ in ‘the warm feeling of the neighborhood store’.
Now, I just noticed this occurrence while cycling around town. A coffee shop that looks home grown, but is really a Starbucks. I actually find the move kind of heartening. I lived in Seattle’s coffee shop mecca neighborhood, Capitol Hill, during the early 1990s (before Starbucks was anything more than a local brand) and remember the diversity of the city’s coffee culture. Every café had its own vibe, including Starbucks. I can’t even name the amount of excellent bands I discovered, just by hanging out in different shops and drinking in their stereo systems. In one sense, this new “local flavor” move by Starbucks doesn’t just reflect their market research savvy about the public’s growing interest in local economies OR the company’s need to reduce costs (by forgoing those incurred from creating signage and stores that fit the corporately approved design schematics).
I believe it’s also a reflection of where our consumer culture is heading. Slow down and think about it for a second. The hallmark of everything that’s going on with social media – Twitter, blogs, online reviews, real-time feedback and, overall, increasing independence of thought among customers – speaks to a growing inability of large companies to exert control over their brands. And where branding became the business religion of the 1990s, now in the late 2000s the command-and-control enforcement of a company’s brand identity is becoming both a liability and an impossibility. In one sense, I see Starbucks as recognizing this environment and bravely letting go. Maybe next time I stop in for a grab-and-go latte, I’ll stick around, maybe even chat with staff that have not been hounded into being scary cheery Disneyesque baristas.
Professor Gopal, I suspect, doesn’t see it the same way. Here, she wonders:
The transformation of the quirky, the unique and the countercultural into mainstream commodity culture is not new, and Starbucks is hardly alone in enacting this relentless corporate logic… What can be done, and is it an issue? If every human desire, including a commitment to the distinctively local can be repackaged with such global panache, perhaps this is further evidence of the futility of resisting the gigantic enclosure that is corporate globalisation.
I don’t see the same futility. For one, I think it’s important to remember that most folks ARE mainstream. Whatever at any given time is quirky and countercultural is usually enjoyed solely by the quirky and the countercultural, always a minority of folks in any country. Not every business can make their cake off this audience alone. Mass appeal does count for something. Two, blunting the impact of corporate globalization may not necessarily be the binary action/reaction suggested by Gopal’s use of the word “resisting” above. What if blunting globalization’s negative impact is a matter of propagating an unruly coexistence, not unlike how Michael Pollan envisions our future food system as being one in which local organic farms enjoy an increasing share of the food market with large-scale agribusiness?
What I mean is, the public is not always as brainwashed as intellectuals may think. In a Web 2.0 world in which regular, mainstream consumers exhibit an astounding amount of agency, local businesses have enormous opportunities to tap into that agency by reaching out to customers and each other (through online social media, the formation of cooperatives, partnerships, collective promotions and homemade branding efforts). This means that local businesses can engage an audience and protect their business interests not simply because a mass of customers become inspired to RESIST corporate businesses (which involves straight-up repudiation and is very difficult), but because they’ve been inspired to JOIN great local businesses. In an environment with this kind of potential, Starbucks may simply become one successful business among many viable and frequented options for today’s caffeine seekers.