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BY JOSH COHEN

In print | Published November 2, 2006

Imagine a world where you didn’t have to search for anything at all. Where you had all you ever thought you needed at your fingertips, around the corner, in the lobby, the bookstore or right across the street. In such a world, all that is demanded of you in return is that, for all this instant stuff, you stick to your daily, ritualized track, like those plastic horses you make run with water guns in carnival games. You’d be going in a circle, maybe, but if they fed and entertained you along the way, would you know it?

It’s almost embarrassing to criticize Starbucks, because to heap scorn on the omnipotent and omniscient entity, to burn flags and cry Freedom, becomes, in certain instances, as much a cliché routine in all-out domination as conformity itself.

Even worse than being ineffectual, perhaps, are the spurned and spiteful glares you get from the quieter, cooperative citizens, like you’ve betrayed them. They’re the ones sipping their lattes — made special, half-skim, half-whole, a drop of sugar-free Hazelnut syrup, for them — as if it were their daily supplement, and lounging in their plush green couches — waiting for them every morning, as if this were home — with laptops in laps, yawning and drinking coffee.

Starbucks announced several weeks ago that it is expanding. Not just to those other countries in South America or Africa, or to buried yuppie-less Midwestern cities, but within its already-controlled territory, too. In New York City, the side-by-side Starbucks are contemptible to the self-conscious Manhattanite, but a city staple nonetheless. Last week, in the press conference announcing its newest plan, one vice president explained: “Going to the other side of the street can be a barrier.”

On average, six new black, green and glass stores appear on someone’s corner every day, and yet as company Chairman Howard Shulz put it, “This is still the opening act for Starbucks.” In the business world, the company’s incredible propagation is something of an enigma, only to be admired from afar as it subverts conventional notions of business and consumer culture. “It’s highly unusual,” said one equity analyst. “At some stage there [are] limits to their expansion, but to date we really haven’t seen any signs that they are near that point.” It’s unclear whether this is promising or ominous.

Starbucks sells relief from the human condition, and not just with its unnecessary convenience compared to your work or home or to its other slightly further branch. It tells you, too, what music to listen to and what books to read. With a piece of suspiciously excited and circular logic, the keyboardist Herbie Hancock, whose recent album, “Possibilities,” was an instant hit due to its Starbucks sales, explained: “Going to Starbucks, you feel kind of hip. I feel kind of hip when I go to Starbucks; that’s how I know!”

It seems wrong, almost, to point to the eager delusion implied in that quote, kind of like it does condemning certain Americans for voting Bush. To imagine Starbucks normalizing people’s lives in and out of their homes, so that everyone’s listening to Herbie Hancock’s elevator jazz, is unnerving — mostly because you have to empathize a little with the power of Adam Smith’s unseen hand winding so many people up from behind.

Starbucks, which started with those tacky holiday mixes next to the mints, now has even greater cultural ambition: in an executive’s words, to help you “discover new things.” Thus it sells “Greatest Hits” compilations featuring a young Bette Midler or a grinning Ray Charles, books by Mitch Albom or coffee from Rwanda, but it also recommends movies like “Akeelah and the Bee,” about a young black girl who triumphs at a spelling bee. According to one of Starbucks’ marketers, the movie expresses the sort of values the company wants to provide its supporters.

“Starbucks,” she said, “is all about community and inspiration, and everything in that movie seemed aligned with that — it has that human connection. It doesn’t have to be a family film, but it does have to be socially relevant.”

The phenomenon that feeds Starbucks is not so different from the phenomenon that feeds “socially relevant” movements like the corporate RED campaign, which promises that, if you buy this iPod or that pair of jeans, Apple or the Gap will donate a small but important share of its profit to The Global Fund to fight AIDS or malaria.

On the surface, there is nothing but good intentions in the RED campaign, just like, through its see-through windows, the notion of an all-accessible, super-stocked coffee shop looks awfully and instantly satisfying, too. But these Bono-backed initiatives have existed for decades now and been proved to make little to no dent at all. They are, instead, about the privileged consumer, maybe signing up for the new RED Amex in their Starbucks, not the caricatured African featured in the advertisements. The model Gisele, echoing Starbucks’ own feel-good brand of individualism, put it best in a RED interview: “We can all start shopping more, and feel good about it. No more guilt!”

Guilty for my own armchair scorn, I decided over fall break to take my laptop and go and work in the Starbucks near my house. When I got there, I looked around, but no one looked at me. There was absolutely nowhere to sit. Several comfy-looking chairs were occupied merely by someone’s coat or bag, but when I approached, I received barely an acknowledgment of my standing there. Soon I decided I didn’t want to write a paper nestled between three middle-aged hipsters anyway. I tried the other Starbucks down the block, but it too was filled to the brim. It all looked like the moment of eerie bliss and busy work before a great flood.

I’m sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts now and a little girl was just tying and untying my shoelaces until her mother insisted she stop. Curiously, it’s what inspired me to write this column. You have to wonder if maybe Starbucks isn’t precisely as pernicious as it seems, not just for its consumers but for everything it causes them to ignore, when Dunkin’ Donuts becomes a haven for free thought.

Josh is a sophomore. You can reach him at jcohen2@swarthmore.edu.

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