Everything but the Coffee by Bryant Simon Read Free Book Online

Starbucks didn’t work as well as it once did on these fronts. It wasn’t a deal even for somewhat free-spending self-gifters. That’s because it had lost its cachet and because it didn’t seem so luxurious or like such a treat anymore. It couldn’t make people feel as good as it once did—even in a venti-sized cup.

CHAPTER V
    Hear Music for Everyday Explorers
    In 2006,
New York Times
columnist and linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg published a book called
Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show
. Nunberg’s long list captured the attention of NPR media reporter Brooke Gladstone. “Hmm,” she thought, “this sounds like a profile” of her listeners. She set out to see if, in fact, it did fit. Using internal documents, she discovered that while NPR listeners refrained from body piercing, they did like movies and sushi. They were 173 percent more likely than other Americans to buy a Volvo and 310 times more likely to read the Sunday
Times
. They liked
West Wing
, not
Fear Factor
, and yes, she determined, they really did go to Starbucks.
    Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. In many ways, NPR and Starbucks sell similar products. Both package themselves as authentic: real news, real coffee. NPR, it likes to remind its listeners, doesn’t run crass commercials; and Starbucks, it likes to tell its customers, doesn’t rely on Budweiser-type advertisements. NPR reporters and anchors speak in muted voices that match the earth-tone shades of the walls and chairs at Starbucks stores. But both sell, actually, what Gladstone calleda desire to “understand how the world works.” 1 Indicating once again the expanded meanings of buying, they offered their customers an easy way to absorb and project a sense of learning and discovery. Both were kind of like
National Geographic
without the text. Beyond the hourly updates and drip coffee, the NPR and Starbucks experiences turn on the easy acquisition of adventure and knowledge. Both promise to take customers to new and different places, and the customers in turn get to use the knowledge they gain from these adventures as a kind of currency— as yet another way to make distinctions and show that they are, in the words of a Starbucks marketing representative, “everyday explorers.” 2
    The best thing about these explorations, though, is that the adventurers don’t have to travel by themselves. NPR and Starbucks organize the tours for them. Everyday explorers don’t have to spend hours online researching flights or looking for clean hotels or encountering any of the unpredictability or griminess that comes from seeking out something truly new and foreign. Yet they can still get regular doses of discovery through their purchases.
    “I want to come in and be surprised,” Hazel Delgado, a thirty-three-year-old regular at a San Bernardino, California, Starbucks said about her favorite coffeehouse. 3 Customers will pay for discovery—with pledge drive calls and return visits for high-priced coffee—because the idea and feeling of discovery has value. Listening to a radio report from Myanmar or drinking a cup of coffee made from Sumatra beans can be like traveling to a far-off land. Both Starbucks and NPR make this kind of “virtual touring” accessible and easy while still slightly foreign and exotic. Among creative class types, travel or discovery translates into cultural capital. Knowing something or going away can earn you the respect, admiration, and the dinner party envy of friends and associates. The farther you go, at least in higher education and higher earning circles, the more capital you get. Think about the esteem and admiration someone earns at a get-together in a New York City loft apartment for venturing to Laos or Chile. You get points, too, for discovering a newBurmese or Brazilian restaurant. Sensing