Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture

I am not sure what led me to pick up Starbucked, but I am glad that I did. I’ve certainly had my fair share of frappuccinos over the years, but I am hardly a Starbucks loyalist. As far as coffee chains go, I actually really prefer Caribou Coffee, which, thanks to this book, I now know is owned by an Islamic group that requires them to follow portions of Shari’ah Law. I had no idea…

But, back to Starbucks:

Clark starts out by discussing the draw of Starbucks. I hadn’t considered it before, but this section spurred a lot of thought in my mind and amongst me and my friends. Starbucks is marketed as a way to indulge yourself and it is an inexpensive way to have something that seems luxurious. For only a few dollars, you can feel like show more you are pampering yourself. The marketing is brilliant, and the demand for their product is seemingly endless.

Clark also discusses the placement of Starbucks stores. Years ago, Starbucks executives realized that they could put in a store directly across the street from another store, and it would draw an almost completely different crowd. The Starbucks real estate team is top-notch, and they evaluate not just neighborhood education levels, number of children, and where traffic flows, but also the number of times a person visits a shopping center (dry cleaners and video stores are great neighbors for Starbucks, because you have to go back a second time to drop off or pick up items) or even the number of oil stains in a parking lot. Starbucks is perfectly happy to offer large sums of money to landlords in order to oust competitive coffee stores. They will even leave a retail space empty, just to keep it from being occupied by a competitor.

On the other hand, Starbucks has created an industry where one didn’t exist before, and this has greatly benefited local coffee shops. Even though Caribou, the next biggest competitor to Starbucks, has only about 1/4 the number of stores, smaller coffee shops have a very good success rate. The success is far better than that of independently owned restaurants. Also, independent shops tend to do very well when they are located near a Starbucks. It seems that people get hooked on Starbucks drinks (which are mostly milk — they contain just a few cents worth of coffee) and then they venture out and try local places.

This book is filled with these kind of dichotomies. Clark discusses the start of Starbucks (did you know that one of the founders of Starbucks bought Peet’s coffee, which was their initial inspiration, and sold Starbucks?), the coffee bean industry, the fair-trade debate, the way that Starbucks treats its employees, the way that Starbucks kills culture when it invades a new country, the fact that Starbucks basically sells milk, the fact that the espresso at Starbucks is no longer made by the baristas, but by machines, and so much more. It all goes back to what I said above… Starbucks is a big corporate monster, and yet Starbucks has helped a lot of people too. It isn’t black-and-white, and that is precisely why I liked this book. It would’ve been easy to take one side or the other (read Pour Your Heart Into It, the book written by the long-time CEO of Starbucks if you’re looking for a one-sided view.)

I don’t plan on frequenting Starbucks. I will continue to support the local coffee shops and the smaller chains, but I can appreciate the way that Starbucks has changed our world, both for good and for bad. This book was a fairly entertaining read, and I will never look at the coffee industry in the same way! show less

Not the best book of its type I've read, but worth a read if you're reasonably interested in the subject matter. I liked that the author didn't focus exclusively on Starbucks, but took some time to locate the chain in the context of other coffee company, and even the more historic roots of the beverage. There's also some nice discussion of whether coffee (well, really caffeine) itself is healthy/harmful, physiologically, psychologically, and on a more macro level, economically.

An outstanding book -- the author has caught just the right balance between Starbucks' claims to be saving humanity and the assertions of its fiercest critics. I was delighted to read such a detailed and fair account of the attempts to organize Starbucks workers into unions in the USA, Canada and New Zealand -- all of which have covered on LabourStart (http://www.labourstart.org). Mr Clark clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book and it's also extremely well-written. I went through it in one day.

Taylor Clark does an excellent job of dissecting the culture, coffee, and commercialization of Starbucks in this entertaining and informative book. Starbucked is a even handed explication of coffee culture in America and in the world. Clark's access to current and former Starbucks employees lets the reader see all sides of working at Starbucks and Starbucks' plans for expansion worldwide.

Clark's tone and voice are very enjoyable throughout --- I found myself laughing out loud several times in the course of reading. But make no mistake, this is a serious, well researched study of one of the world's most pervasive companies.

It was interesting to read this from the perspective of a person who does not live in a country where Starbucks is the predominant coffee chain. Here, people are either a huge Timmies fan, or a huge Starbucks fan, and it’s hard to find someone who enjoys the coffee from both. Me? I love Starbucks, and so this book has given me food for thought.

The book was divided into two parts – the first talking about the history of coffee and the company, and the second of the effects that Starbucks has on the world. It was interesting to read from a business and marketing perspective to see how Starbucks has become such a huge corporation.

The main ideas that the author seemed to be getting across was (a) that the quality of both the service and show more coffee at Starbucks has been on a downhill slide ever since it started as a mass-market coffee house machine, and (b) this has allowed for the opportunity for mom-and-pop coffee houses to succeed as never before. That said, however, it’s hard to tell how much the author was approaching the subject with complete objectivity – it went in spurts from feeling like the author extremely disliked the Starbucks corporation to feeling like he was telling you that although the corporation isn’t good, it isn’t as evil as people say it is.

The book talked a lot about how Starbucks has had an influence on the coffee industry in general, but it has also gone into a bit of detail as to how other coffee companies has influenced the world economy as well. This is one of the areas I am going to want to look more into at a later date, when I have the time to do some research on my own. Specifically, I want to look more into the difference between Coffea robusta and Coffea arabica – according to Clark, not only is robusta easier to cultivate, but it’s also the worse of the two tasting types of coffee. He also claims that robusta is the type that is used for instant coffee, and because the big companies buy only this for the instant coffee, before removing any of it’s natural flavour and adding all sorts of artificial flavours to actually make it taste good, it is part of the reason why coffee farmers in Brazil and other countries that harvest arabica (the tasty kind of coffee) are suffering. Again, it’s something I want to look more into. If this is the truth, then I’ll definitely start using my perculator with real coffee more and more often.

This was definitely a thought-provoking read and while it wasn’t as easy a read as other non-fiction books I’ve read recently, it was still thoroughly enjoyable. show less

This is more a book to skim through than to savor. Many interesting facts and opinions about Starbuck's, and for someone who remembers the '70s, a realization of how much time has passed and how things have changed, in the world of coffee as elsewhere.

How could you go wrong with an expose of Starbucks? Taylor Clark managed to do it. His smug, self-satisfied tone is off-putting enough, and for some reason he organized the book into two halves that sound like they were not written by the same person or part of the same book. Combine poor writing with poor editing and this is what you get.