Straight Outta Caramel Macchiatos

[cbertsch]

I remember reading a story describing the "first urban Starbucks" back in the late 1990s with bemusement. As far as I could tell, there were already hundreds of urban locations. But this new store was in Harlem and therefore "urban" in a different sense.

I don't think that location was a collaborative venture between Starbucks and Magic Johnson's Johnson Development Corporation, but most subsequent "urban" stores have been. And now that partnership has come to the home of N.W.A.:

Mayor Eric Perrodin said the Starbucks ``was like a stamp of approval for the city of Compton'' and is symbolic of a new and prosperous time.

Fans of the green medallion from the days of its Pacific Northwest exclusivity or even when the sole location in the San Francisco Bay Area was at 51st and Broadway -- me, that is -- may tighten their sneers -- quantity almost always goes downhill with quantity -- but I think Alexis De Tocqueville would have regarded the mayor's statement as an accurate expression of American reality, even while not so secretly lamenting the demise of specialosity.

While I realize it may be stretching truth to the point of transparency to term Starbucks a "civic organization" in the sense of Democracy in American, there is something interesting about the way in which mainstream café culture reorganizes private "public" space. All those people sitting at their Wi-Fi laptops half-working in their office away from the office or, increasingly, their only office are engaged with other citizens in a way that people who don't work in public are not.

Comments

[batdina.livejournal.com]

once upon a time I was waiting for the Elizabethan stage to open in Ashland, and I found myself in conversation with someone about Berkeley. She was saying that in the years she lived in Berkeley, (I think she got an MBA), there was, and I quote "Not a single cafe near campus where she could get her latte."

Upon further questioning (I, no doubt, probably looked at her like she was the idiot I still believe her to have been), what she really meant was that "there was no Starbucks", all other places (numbering in the dozens) being places she didn't trust to give her the latte she was desiring.

While I have been known to get myself a latte at Starbucks on occasion, I have also been known to smile with glee every time I realise that there's a Peets near campus now, but still no Starbucks on the southside.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

quantity almost always goes downhill with quantity

Come again?

Seriously, do you think the quality's gone down at all? I head for Starbucks at least twice a year, and it always seems pretty much the same; at least, the lattes are the same [it might interest you to know that Starbucks uses just about the highest milk to coffee ratio of any coffee shop, at least according to a Guardian article from this Spring].