confessions of a starbuckener

[rezendi]

Starbucken¹ Internationale

	America	Canada	UK	France
Ubiquity	You remember that Simpsons episode where they go into a mall and every store is a Starbucks?	Omnipresent in Toronto (often directly next to or across from a Second Cup), rare elsewhere.	Everywhere in Central London, probably more common than even in Manhattan. Uncommon elsewhere.	One near metro Odéon, another opening up soon in Les Halles
Coffee sizes	Tall, grande, venti. No small.	Small - but you have to ask for it, it's not on the menu board - tall, grande, venti	Tall, grande, venti. No small.	Petit, moyen, grande. Venti exists, but you have to ask for it.
Coffee-of-the-day variations	None.	Dark Roast or Mild?	Normal or Fair Trade?	None. (and it's coffee "de la semaine", ie of the week, not of the day.)
Food	Pastries.	Pastries.	Pastries, sandwiches, salads, paninis they grill for you.	Pastries, sandwiches, salads.
Wi-Fi	Ubiquitous and reasonably priced on a monthly basis.	No.	Sometimes, but outrageously expensive.	No.
Commercial success	Variable, but generally successful.	Doing OK, but Second Cup is putting up a ferocious fight.	Very successful, largely because the previous competition was pretty much uniformly awful.	Too soon to tell, but the one at Odéon is always thronging with people, half tourists, half French.
Approximate average US$ price of a regular filter coffee	1.55	1.10	2.75	2.75

¹"Starbucken" is the plural of "Starbucks". A "Starbuckener" is a person who frequents Starbucks. Where did I get these words? I, er, made them up.

I am a fan of Starbucks. I am proud, yes, proud to say this, I do not think I am committing a moral or cultural sin by frequenting them, and I'll take you on one at a time or all in a group if I hafta!

Seriously, I don't understand the intense vitriol that Starbucks inspires in so many people. They serve somewhat overpriced coffee in pleasant surroundings. This is the work of the devil? Heck, even Oxfam is a fan, as cited here. I suppose it's not Starbucks itself but what it represents - the homogenization of the planet, the Evil Multinational Corporations that are Destroying The Earth, the Yuppie Scum who drink their coffee - which is so hated. And coffee being the second most internationally traded commodity in the world (after oil), coffee shops are a natural target for antiglobalisers. All the same, honestly, I just don't get it. But this leads inevitably into my pro-Third-World-sweatshop rant, and, well, we probably don't have time for that in this episode of The World According To rezendi.

I guess there's also the "destroys local coffee shops" argument. Except, first of all you all saw that South Park episode right?, and second of all, they don't. They just destroy the bad ones that people don't like. That's how competitive trade works. Good coffee shops survive, thrive, and innovate. It's capitalism in action at its finest.


Now reading: Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which is a fantasy novella wrapped inside a tale of doomed Depression-era love wrapped inside in a twentieth-century family saga told by a dying old woman. ("Oh," I can hear you all sniffing, "one of those".) Stunningly great, so far. Atwood is almost too good for her own good - her similes are amazing, but there are so many of them that if the rest of her writing was any less taut it would start to feel cluttered. It's interesting to compare and contrast with Richler, whose writing is livelier and more personal but doesn't have the same distant, devastating power. He's red wine; she's single-malt Scotch.


Still not sure if I'm going to go to India, but I think the visa problem is solved; I should be able to get a same-day visa from the consulate in Toronto, when back there early October. And for less than half the price it would cost in Paris. Why are things almost always much cheaper in Canada compared to the other First World places I go? I'm not complaining, I'm just economically bewildered.

20,000 words into my new book, I have decided it has gone horribly wrong almost from the start. At least I now think I know what I want to do with it. But in future I really gotta try to work more efficiently.

Comments

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

Starbucken? ... Starbuccaneers!

I don't like their coffee, nor their hot chocolate. When one of my regular hangouts was a Starbucks it was a constant challenge finding the obligatory thing to order as the price of admission. I was sometimes driven to buying bottled water when I couldn't bear the thought of another one of their cookies (not that the cookies are bad, but night after night after night they lose their appeal...).

Some of the ones in Toronto were comfy enough to be a coffee shop hangout type of place. I haven't been into too many Vancouver ones, but when I have they seem to give a more hurried vibe, people who are stopping for a drink as a pause in a busy day. Not conducive to being a place to go and hang out on a regular basis.

Are there franchised Starbucken? At least some are not franchises: I raised this question with a barista* and she revealed the surprising (to me) fact that their store was not a franchise. It wasn't clear if she implied that there are no Starbucks franchises or if there were a mixture of franchise and corporate-owned stores. Anyhow, I guess that can vary country by country too. This was in Canada.

Any info on the source of the name? There's a character Starbuck in Moby Dick.

*I original thought "barista" was a pretentious invention of Starbucks, but Italian sources confirm that in Italian it is what a coffee maker is called. Of course, gratuitously using Italian can be pretentious** but in this case there's no good English equivalent. "Coffee girl" doesn't work for a guy. "Latte hotte" (with "hotte" rhyming with "latte") would work but it's too long and drawn out and insufficiently snappy for routine use. And the "certified coffee agent" of Second Cup sounds bizarre, like they go on cloak-and-daggers James Bond-style escapades involving coffee intrigue. "Cappucinista", maybe?

**cf. everywhere on College St. in Toronto. Sure it's Little Italy. But those uber-trendy little beautiful-people-go-there-to-be-seen-by-other-beautiful-people places (with no chairs, because people can't see you if you're sitting down) aren't doing it because they're authentic Italian, they're doing it because they're authentic pretentious...

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

Starbacchanalia!

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Clearly, Starbacchanalia are the secret, after-hours sex-drugs-and-coffee orgies held in select suburban Starbucks branches at 3AM. Only the most devout Starbuckeners (the Starbuckenoscenti?)are invited.

Or maybe they're part of Phase Two (http://students.washington.edu/greenbam/humor/starbucks.html).

[zipties-revenge.livejournal.com]

i'm friends with pretty much everyone who works in coffeehouses in [this small town of my summer residence]. i also make the coffee drinks.

i think that "coffee snobs" works pretty well to describe us. the only problem with it is that it's a little overgeneral. but i suppose that we just call snotty customers "bastards" instead.