BookOpinion

Ready for consumption like a mocha frappuccino, “Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture” by Taylor Clark hit bookstores this past week. BookOpinion has compiled reviews from several media outlets.

Clark, a Portland-based journalist, has felt this topic brewing (last pun from us, we promise) since the Starbucks chain opened three branches in his small Oregon hometown. Hundreds of interviews and countless hours later, “Starbucked” was crafted into a “witty and often biting book,” according to the New York Post.

Publishers Weekly summarizes the book: “His coverage begins with a Seattle trio who set out to emulate the high-quality coffee of the California-based Peet’s chain, before Howard Schultz took over the company and laid plans for its massive expansion. While Clark grudgingly admires Starbucks’ ability to repackage coffee as beverage entertainment for a hyperprosperous society in search of emotional soothing, there’s a lot he doesn’t like about the company. He’s convinced that Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity by ruthlessly outmaneuvering local competition on a global scale, and dubs the baristas’ work as a textbook McJob. Even the quality of the coffee, he says, has gone downhill.”

The San Francisco Chronicle gave the book a good review, “Entertaining, illuminating and reflective are not qualities usually associated with corporate histories. But Taylor Clark, former Willamette Week alt-weekly journalist, Dartmouth College graduate and Portland resident, has written a story about one business that’s all of these… Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture‘ is the eminently readable result. Clark explains that his purpose in writing the book was ‘to tell the story of how a major corporation, peddling a simple, age-old commodity, influences the daily life and culture of the world.’”

The New York Post digs into the topic further:

October 28, 2007 — In 2004, residents in Portland, Oregon, tried to firebomb a new Starbucks store that had opened in the face of intense community opposition. The Molotov cocktail bounced off the reinforced glass, burning harmlessly. Starbucks, a corporation with a worldwide reach of 13,000 stores from Seattle to Paris, Beijing to Saudi Arabia (where there are separate seats for men and women), has long fortified itself against local enemies. Despite the disgruntled neighbors in Portland, the new Starbucks stayed open.

Starting in 1971 as a storefront selling fresh-roasted gourmet coffee beans to coffee fanatics in Seattle, Starbucks has evolved into a ubiquitous player in the American cultural landscape, making us into caffeine addicts and connoisseurs of expensive coffee. In “Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture,“ journalist Taylor Clark has written a rollicking account of the social phenomenon, which has become our national meeting place, filling the void left by the churches and marketplaces of the past…

…Clark has many funny asides. Using Internet map searches, he found that the farthest place from a Starbucks in America is the hamlet of Saco, Montana, which is almost 200 miles away from any of the pervasive green coffee shops. The derogatory nickname of “Charbucks” comes from the burned nature of the beans of the Starbucks dark roast. Clark briefly muses over the possibility that burned beans may encourage people to buy expensive milk-based drinks like venti lattes.

The Starbucks’ juggernaut continues unabated worldwide, with the company opening as many as six stores a day and serving 40 million customers. Starbucks penetrated the horrified British, French and Japanese markets and made new coffee drinkers in droves. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks is reaching its saturation point. The coffee giant’s prestige is evaporating. “Starbucks is just going to lose appeal as it grows,” pop-culture analyst Robert Thompson told Clark. “Anyone can get Starbucks now. There’s no exclusivity anymore. They’ve moved into volume, volume, volume.”

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The Wall Street Journal writes about how the book delves into the success of Starbucks:

A major part of the Starbucks story has to do with real estate, since the company obviously favors a kind of neighborhood saturation. “Through a combination of cunning store-placement strategy and ruthlessness with competitors,” Mr. Clark writes, “the company attempted to make it so customers couldn’t help but go to Starbucks.” One Starbucks real-estate dealmaker, who was turned down for an attractive commercial space, discovered that the refusing landlord was a doctor. She made an appointment to see him, pretending to be a patient, and repeated her pitch at his office. He caved in, and Starbucks got the space. As for what space is best, Starbucks prefers to be near dry cleaners and video stores, because they require two visits — for dropping off and picking up.

The company has been no less relentless about its image. The high prices signal not just quality but luxury, and the specialized vocabulary (”venti,” “doppio” and the like) elevates a mundane form of consumption into the realm of cosmopolitan taste. In the same vein, Mr. Schultz strives to make each Starbucks a “third place” between work and home. “We’re not in the coffee business serving people,” he likes to say, “we’re in the people business serving coffee.”
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