Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (review)

Bryant Simon, Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Temple University, knows Starbucks. On the basis of visits to about 425 Starbucks in nine countries and in over twenty states, Simon has created a very readable and highly interesting account of Starbucks and the Starbucks phenomenon. He gathered his "data" while spending fifteen hours a week, for about nine months, in Starbucks. All told, he spent about 500 hours observing Starbucks and those who frequent its "coffee houses." Mostly he seemed to sit and watch, but he often talked with the people he met there. He read a lot about Starbucks and related phenomena and he interviewed a number of experts, including this author. He was influenced by a variety of perspectives, many of which appear in the book, but the book is not informed by any single overarching perspective.

By design the book has a casual feel and that makes it very appealing and accessible. It was written as a trade book (although, oddly, it was published by the University of California Press), or at least an academician's sense of what a trade book should look like, and it largely succeeds (at least from this academician's perspective). However, the problem with such books is that they end up not being simplified enough to succeed wildly with the general reading public or scholarly enough to please the academic community (as if it could ever be pleased). Yet, there is a place for this kind of book and we need more of them. It is accessible to most readers and there is a lot more intellectual meat to it than the usual trade book. The ideas of serious thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and Jean Baudrillard find their way, at least briefly, into the book.

Simon opens with a brief overview of the early history of Starbucks in Seattle and the role Howard Schulz played in turning it into the colossus that it is today. The book happened to have been written when Starbucks was in the doldrums, but it seems to have survived the slump (although a number of U.S. locations have been shuttered) and remains an important economic force and cultural icon. Because of my own orientation as a sociologist, and more particularly because of my interest in chains of fast food restaurants (of which Starbucks is one), I liked some chapters more than others. I thought the choice of what topics received chapter-length treatment was rather arbitrary, but that's because Simon was not operating with an overarching perspective that would have led the chapters to hang together better. I was most drawn to Chapter II on predictability (one of the dimensions of McDonaldization), Chapter III on Ray Oldenburg's idea of a "third place" that strongly influenced Schulz and Starbucks, and Chapter VII on globalization. I was less enamored of the chapters on "self-gifting and retail therapy" (Chapter IV) and Chapter V on the music at Starbucks. Self-gifting is too psychological for my tastes. I thought there were many more important topics that could have been dealt with than Starbucks' music which, in any case, seems to play much less of a role in the chain than it once did. I certainly understood the importance of including a chapter on ecology (VI), but it was to me a distraction from the main themes in my three favorite chapters and in the book as a whole. The personal comments in the Afterword and the Note on Research were useful and informative.

The lack of a logical and coherent set of chapters is further complicated by the fact that Simon changed his mind about Starbucks a number of different times. He admits in the Afterword that he had "lots of moments" of being "wrong" about Starbucks over the years that he researched and wrote the book (242). From my point of view, admittedly that of a social theorist, Simon's dramatic swings stem from a bottom...