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elfsSomeone wrote, "I am a bad woman, because I am happy with my local Starbucks."
No, you're not. You're making the best of a lousy situation.
It became a lousy situation because you, and everyone like you, who lives in that neighborhood, each and individually, made a self-interested short-view decision about what you wanted, and Starbucks met that need well enough.
Starbucks is a corporation, a soulless, sociopathic entity in a struggle with other soulless, sociopathic entities for control of a niche within an ecology we call "the marketplace." It is made up of human beings, but no more cares about them than we do about the bacteria and mites that colonize and even maintain our bodies. Their marketplace ecology is made up of human beings, but human beings notoriously make short-term decisions that in the long run can ruin an ecology-- the classical example being the denuding of Easter Island-- and publicly traded corporations are pressured to make decisions about their short-term stock price over long-term viability that lead to "self"-interested decision making that can trash their own ecology just as much.
A Starbucks cafe' is a box owned by one of these corporations, and stocked with the tools of a uniform experience. That experience looks and smells like a law library, and when it's not sounding like a distant but automated railyard it's filled with music chosen by an algorithm and approved by a committee, the bulk of which is packaged as "edgy" or "innovative" but is generally inoffensive, nondisruptive, and occasionally ethnic enough to re-assure the listener that he doesn't just listen to white people singing to other white people.
You make the best of that situation as you can. The people in that box are still people, and they're people from your neighborhood. Their struggle is to find and maintain a personal, local identity within that uniformity, and to somehow maintain the neighborhood. The owner of that Starbucks struggles to maintain her neighborhood even as franchise and distribution costs mean that local dollars flow to stockholders rather than neighborhood grocers.
I'm not ragging on Starbucks particularly here. The same thing is true of McDonald's, or the Olive Garden, or Home Depot. I'm particularly sensitive to restaurants and cafes because eating is one of those super-intimate things human beings do with their bodies, often in public, that I really dislike seeing distorted into a uniform experience by the leveraging opportunities of an economy of scale.
But we've reached the point where even our vocabulary has become distorted by our market experience. We talk about solutions as "stakeholders" and "stockholders," we have a single notion about money and currency that's not a fiat of God or nature but a convenience of government. Corporations evolve strategies to take advantage of our narrowed worldview and the innate, natural, short-term thinking of the human brain, not out of any conspiracy but because that's the natural evolution of a successful corporation.
Sure, lots of people like their local Starbucks. There are two Starbucks within walking distance of my home. But nowadays I have no alternative without getting into my car: Starbucks successfully drove the local roaster out of business last year. Their location was poor compared to the one Starbucks could afford, they were two blocks further away from the concentration of the local population, and they tried to compete with the chains by imitating the chain's flavor rather than having any distinctiveness of their own.
If I want expensive coffee, Starbucks is where I go, too. But I can't help but wonder if a local cafe', with good coffee, where the place smells like a roaster, where each barista gets to set the music, and where the owner got to choose his own wallpaper, wouldn't be a more local, more intimate, more neighborly experience.
No, you're not. You're making the best of a lousy situation.
It became a lousy situation because you, and everyone like you, who lives in that neighborhood, each and individually, made a self-interested short-view decision about what you wanted, and Starbucks met that need well enough.
Starbucks is a corporation, a soulless, sociopathic entity in a struggle with other soulless, sociopathic entities for control of a niche within an ecology we call "the marketplace." It is made up of human beings, but no more cares about them than we do about the bacteria and mites that colonize and even maintain our bodies. Their marketplace ecology is made up of human beings, but human beings notoriously make short-term decisions that in the long run can ruin an ecology-- the classical example being the denuding of Easter Island-- and publicly traded corporations are pressured to make decisions about their short-term stock price over long-term viability that lead to "self"-interested decision making that can trash their own ecology just as much.
A Starbucks cafe' is a box owned by one of these corporations, and stocked with the tools of a uniform experience. That experience looks and smells like a law library, and when it's not sounding like a distant but automated railyard it's filled with music chosen by an algorithm and approved by a committee, the bulk of which is packaged as "edgy" or "innovative" but is generally inoffensive, nondisruptive, and occasionally ethnic enough to re-assure the listener that he doesn't just listen to white people singing to other white people.
You make the best of that situation as you can. The people in that box are still people, and they're people from your neighborhood. Their struggle is to find and maintain a personal, local identity within that uniformity, and to somehow maintain the neighborhood. The owner of that Starbucks struggles to maintain her neighborhood even as franchise and distribution costs mean that local dollars flow to stockholders rather than neighborhood grocers.
I'm not ragging on Starbucks particularly here. The same thing is true of McDonald's, or the Olive Garden, or Home Depot. I'm particularly sensitive to restaurants and cafes because eating is one of those super-intimate things human beings do with their bodies, often in public, that I really dislike seeing distorted into a uniform experience by the leveraging opportunities of an economy of scale.
But we've reached the point where even our vocabulary has become distorted by our market experience. We talk about solutions as "stakeholders" and "stockholders," we have a single notion about money and currency that's not a fiat of God or nature but a convenience of government. Corporations evolve strategies to take advantage of our narrowed worldview and the innate, natural, short-term thinking of the human brain, not out of any conspiracy but because that's the natural evolution of a successful corporation.
Sure, lots of people like their local Starbucks. There are two Starbucks within walking distance of my home. But nowadays I have no alternative without getting into my car: Starbucks successfully drove the local roaster out of business last year. Their location was poor compared to the one Starbucks could afford, they were two blocks further away from the concentration of the local population, and they tried to compete with the chains by imitating the chain's flavor rather than having any distinctiveness of their own.
If I want expensive coffee, Starbucks is where I go, too. But I can't help but wonder if a local cafe', with good coffee, where the place smells like a roaster, where each barista gets to set the music, and where the owner got to choose his own wallpaper, wouldn't be a more local, more intimate, more neighborly experience.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-06 10:20 pm (UTC)I suppose that for me the defining moment was the realisation that I could make a cup of damn fine coffee (or tea, of course) for thirty cents, tops, in my own kitchen, and have my friends and neighbours over for coffee. At the time for where I was then living, coffee-out was either the predicatble whitebread experience of Starbucks (they having already suppressed all of their competition) or dreadful watery **and** burnt coffee from the diner up the road by the subway station. That was it, zero choice.
Marketing may sway consumers, but common sense **still** persuades citizens.
Would rather be a citizen than a consumer, any day.