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Starbucks is not meant to replicate ‘good ole day’ experience

Posted on Nov 23, 2009 in Features

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Well, they’re at it again.

Those kooks who get paid to watch the global corporate culture are all up in the news cycle once more, trying to convince us that we need to get back to the “good ole days.”

Remember the good ole days? Of course we, those “darned kids” with the “hip-hop music” and “telephones,” don’t, nor do we care. Heck, we’re too busy with our “e-mail” and “fancy typewriters” to even read a newspaper.

Apparently in these good ole days, folks strolled into their local coffee shops and actually talked to one another, rather than just grabbing their morning joe or double tall soy caramel lattes, before jetting off to work.

At least this is how Bryant Simon remembers it. Simon is a professor of history at Temple University, and my recipient of the Misguided Scholar Award for 2009.

He’s been popping up on the public radio circuit lately, shopping around his new book, “Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks.”

In his book, he claims the mega-corporation has failed to replicate the coffee shops of these fabled good ole days, which prided themselves on developing a community and fostering discussion and debate within the community.
“Literally people would sit on benches…you didn’t get your own private table,” Simon said recently on NPR’s “Here and Now.” “People were encouraged to talk.”

I bet Bryant was one of those kids who had to walk 10 miles in the snow to get to school every day and got a cardboard box to play in for Christmas.

Why are we still in the business of nagging corporations who meet our needs? It seems that once your multinational business is up and running, there’s always some doctor or documentary film crew waiting to expose your flaws.
Now I don’t want to give all corporations a pass. Some of them deserve to be exposed — like the ones who rent out sweatshop labor for four cents an hour or ax dolphins if they get in the way of canning tuna. But this guy is jumping on Starbucks for giving people their own tables to sit at.

Simon believes Starbucks has ruined the community atmosphere of the old school coffee house, and if it were his shop, he would probably get rid of the plush couches and chairs that he says tend to limit interaction.

He would also probably ditch the to-go cups, so people would have to stay in the coffee shop until they finished their coffee, and the “conversation killing Wi-Fi,” because “talk and ideas are crucial to the making of a community.”

In sum, Bryant Simon’s coffee shop would consist of one big table covered in newspapers to “provoke” discussion.
More like force it.

It seems to me like any place with a ground to walk on could meet Bryant Simon’s qualifications for a coffee shop. Has Starbucks really forgotten what the coffee shop of the good ole days was like? It seems to me like it hasn’t, and, if anything, it has improved it.

How crazy is it to suggest that people actually have the choice of hanging around in a store or leaving it, sitting in their own private spaces or talking to people?

If Simon and all the other nostalgic folks who refuse to think Starbucks is just there to give people quick service would rather have an environment from the good ole days, with benches rather than tables; simple, cheap coffee rather than fancy, complicated caramel macchiatos; and stimulated political conversation rather than silence, then they should probably hightail it to the nearest bus station. They’ve got java machines there you can put a quarter in and a couple of permanent bench dwellers who would love to talk to you about the government.

Email: diner822@yahoo.com

 




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