THE EMPIRE FILTERS BACK: CONSUMPTION, PRODUCTION, AND THE POLITICS OF STARBUCKS COFFEE, M. D Smith

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THE EMPIRE FILTERS BACK:

CONSUMPTION, PRODUCTION, AND THE
POLITICS OF STARBUCKS COFFEE
a
Michael D. Smith
a
Department of Geography 1984 West Mall, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6T 1Z2
Published online: 15 May 2013.
To cite this article: Michael D. Smith (1996) THE EMPIRE FILTERS BACK: CONSUMPTION,
PRODUCTION, AND THE POLITICS OF STARBUCKS COFFEE, Urban Geography, 17:6, 502-525, DOI:
10.2747/0272-3638.17.6.502
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THE EMPIRE FILTERS BACK: CONSUMPTION, PRODUCTION,
AND THE POLITICS OF STARBUCKS COFFEE 1
Michael D. Smith
Department of Geography
1984 West Mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6T 1Z2
Abstract: The recent emergence of a host of new cultural practices associated, at least
initially, with the gentrified landscapes of North American inner cities has coincided with
Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:10 08 May 2015
renewed interest among geographers and other social scientists, many of them influenced by
postmodern theories of signification and identity, in the modes, spaces, and politics of
contemporary consumption. These cultural studies of consumption, in turn, have been
criticized for their tendency to downplay the global forces and power relations in which such
local practices are embedded. Starbucks Coffee, the remarkably successful coffee bean and
beverage retailer, illustrates perfectly the need to reconcile these approaches. To appreciate
fully the Starbucks phenomenon requires an evaluation not only of the microgeography of
North American coffee consumption but also of the political economy of coffee production
and the persistence of colonial culture in the late 20th century.
We see ourselves as the premier purveyor of the finest coffees in the world. And,
frankly, we'd like to see a Starbucks coffee shop in every neighborhood where
people like to enjoy great coffee.
—Starbucks executive (quoted in Marketing, 1992)
And so have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-
hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders;
parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, as the three
pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, pile Cuba on
Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner
from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's
(Melville, 1964, p. 97).
INTRODUCTION
The extraordinary range of new consumption practices that have emerged in North
American cities in recent years suggests a need to rethink old categories and
concepts, as well as disciplinary boundaries. The rise, or at least the academic
discovery, of a "new middle class," whose defining feature is, perhaps, its preoccupa-
tion with a particular notion of the urban (reflected in the gentrifying landscapes of
the inner city and the aforementioned proliferation of consumer niche markets that
extol urbanity), has presented a challenge to conventional approaches to consumption
502
Urban Geography, 1996, 17, 6, pp. 502-524.
Copyright © 1996 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.
STARBUCKS COFFEE 503
and urban space within cultural geography. Arguably, however, it also imposes a duty
to resist any tendency toward mere fascinated description that, given the central
position of North American academics within this class fraction, would verge on
narcissism; instead, it is necessary to contextualize these local practices, reflective as
they are of economic as well as cultural restructuring, within a local-global political
economy whose normal functioning ensures that an immiserated, "Third World"
majority—outside, but also increasingly inside, the advanced capitalist centers—will
never share in the consumer pleasures of a "revitalized" urban North America.
CONSUMING QUESTIONS
In the conclusion to his remarkable excursus on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson

(1991, pp. 314-315) comments on the continuing relevance of the Marxist notion of
commodity fetishism, '"the effacement of the traces of production' from the object
itself," which operates at the level of the individual consumers by freeing them from
the burden of considering the conditions in which their various consumables were
produced. "Indeed," he says,
the point of having your own object world, and walls and muffled distance or
relative silence all around you is to forget about all those innumerable others for
awhile; you don't want to have to think about Third World women every time you
pull yourself up to your word processor or all the other lower class people with
their lower class lives when you decide to use or consume your other luxury
products: it would be like having voice inside your head; indeed, it "violates" the
intimate space of your privacy and your extended body {Ibid).
While allowing that consumerism is clearly too complex to be reduced to this single
principle of fetishism, he concludes that such effacement "is surely the indispensable
precondition on which all the rest can be constructed" (Ibid). Jameson is undoubtedly
right to acknowledge that the realm of consumption, like all the other spheres of
cultural activity assigned an epiphenomenal status within traditional Marxist theory,
can no longer simply be "read off as the reflex of more fundamental, economic
determinations. Yet his portrait of a realm of blissfully ignorant (if alienated)
consumption cut off from the agonies and deprivations of a rapidly degenerating
world is somewhat less persuasive (just where in this thoroughly mediatized global
culture would such a realm exist?), whereas his claim about the indispensability of the
erasure of production in the practice of consumption, during a period in the Indus-
trialized West in which the appeal of many of the most sought after commodities
lies precisely in the putative authenticity derived from their origin in Third World
production, is clearly open to question.
Jameson's comment does point, I think, to a certain tension developing within the
field of cultural analysis, however. The recent revitalization of interest in the consumer
has indeed been one of the signal achievments of so-called Cultural Studies, sparking
a host of detailed, empirical analyses of consumption as a meaningful social practice
that plays a significant role in what Appadurai calls the "global cultural economy"
of the late 20th century, particularly (but by no means exclusively) in the affluent
countries of the West (Appadurai, 1990). The analytical posture is summarized by
Stuart Hall, who says that "greater and greater numbers of people (men and
504 MICHAEL D. SMITH
women)—with however little money—play the game of using things to signify who
they are. Everybody, including people in very poor societies whom we in the West
frequently speak about as if they inhabit a world outside of culture, knows that today's
'goods' double up as social signs and produce meanings as well as energy" (Hall,
1990, p. 131).
Yet there has emerged almost simultaneously—at least from some quarters—an
increasingly skeptical reaction to the emphasis on consumption that reflects, so it
would seem, a growing unease with what is perceived as a loss or diminution of
critical, oppositional purchase. This viewpoint is captured in Sivanandan's polemical
response to Hall and others, in which he excoriates the new politics of consumption for
its limitations both at home ("Who are these people who, in our own societies—'with
however little money—play the game of using things to signify who they are' unless it
is those who use cardboard boxes under Waterloo Bridge to signify that they are the
homeless") and abroad ("The Third World is no longer out there as an object of
struggle; it is here, in the minds of people, as an anodyne to consumption, in the
personal politics of the subject—an object of Western humanism, the occasion for
individual aid, a site for pop culture and pop politics") (Sivanandan, 1990, pp. 47-48).
His comments represent perhaps the most pointed statement of concerns expressed in
other, more nuanced critiques of the consumption literature, which suggest that it
emphasizes the local, the symbolic, and the fashionable at the expense of more global,
material, and, indeed, political factors.
I want to open up a somewhat different perspective on this debate by examining a
specific instance of consumption and its associated practices, spatialities, discourses,
and politics: the "bean and beverage" retail and mail order enterprise, Starbucks
Coffee. Established in Seattle's Pike Place market in 1971 by three partners—Jerry
Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker—Starbucks grew slowly but steadily in its
first decade or so of operations, restricting itself to selling high-quality, whole-bean
coffee and accessories. It was Charles Schultz, Starbucks' current CEO and president,
who initiated the transition to a coffee bar format after buying out the founders in
1987. Growth since then has been phenomenal, with the company expanding from
only 11 stores in 1987, all in the Seattle area, to over 200 in 1993, extending first along
the West Coast (including Vancouver, where it now has over 25 stores) and then across
the United States. Store design and location are central to the company's marketing
strategy: each outlet is tastefully (and apparently uniformly) appointed in tones of
earthy green and brown, brassy trim, and lots of glass, with coffee beans and
paraphernalia on prominent display; stores typically are located in areas with high
volumes of pedestrian traffic, frequently in the urban core or in fashionable shopping
districts, utilizing but also helping to shape social interaction in the streetscapes and
consumer cultures of the urban setting. Equally important to Starbucks' marketing
strategy is the discourse of specialty or gourmet coffee itself, with its displays,
decoration, and literature stressing motifs of quality, authenticity, variety, and "exot-
icism" (the latter through diverse evocations of coffee production). In the first part of
the paper, therefore, I want to draw upon some of the main themes in the consumption
literature to offer a "reading" of Starbucks as the site of a specific set of local
consumption practices.
The name "Starbucks" itself derives from the eponymous first mate in Herman
Melville's Moby Dick, a character distinguished by, among other things, his unslakable
thirst for coffee. Whether the original owners of Starbucks had any deeper signifi-
cance in mind by so naming their company is unclear, and perhaps irrelevant, but it is
intriguing to observe what others have made of Melville's classic of nineteenth-
century American literature. For Said (1993, p. 288), the narrative of Ahab's relentless
quest for the elusive Moby Dick coincides with the formation of a myth of American
identity ("a new race of people, independent of the sin-darkened heritage of man,
seeking a totally new and original relationship to pure nature as hunters, explorers,
pioneers, and seekers"), which was indissolubly linked with its emergence as an
imperial power in the mid- 19th century, marking Ahab as an "allegorical representa-
tive of the American world-quest." Kiernan links it more specifically to the geography
of the whaling industry: "In this industry, New England held sway, keeping up the
ferocious pursuit of profit which Melville ennobled into Ahab's pursuit of Moby
Dick . . . a spirit nurtured in the past by New England's leading place in the slave
trade, where American business enterprise learned how not to let its right hand know
what its left hand was doing" (Kiernan, 1978, pp. 49-50).
I offer this literary digression because it speaks directly to the second part of the
paper, in which I propose to offer another "reading" of Starbucks, one that situates it
within a broader historical and contemporary geography of coffee production closely
linked to various phases in the history of Euroamerican colonialism and imperialism.
These sketches provide a crucial background for understanding my subsequent
analysis of the racialized—and thoroughly spatialized—discourses that Starbucks
utilizes to market its coffee today, discourses that play upon pre-existing discursive
formations associated with colonialism while reconfiguring them within its own
cultural geography of coffee consumption in late 20th-century North America. This
second reading is informed in part by some of the recent critiques of consumption as
well as postcolonial theory, and is offered to suggest how consumption and produc-
tion, the symbolic and the real, the local and the global, all are indissolubly bound up
one with the other, and must be analyzed together.2
I should stipulate from the outset that in emphasizing this colonial dimension I am
addressing only certain aspects of the multifaceted phenomenon that is Starbucks.
North American coffee consumption always has been imbued with multiple layers of
significance, from the "intrinsic" gustatory pleasure of the "morning cuppa" to the
functional link between its stimulant properties and the competitive pressures of life
under (post)modern capitalism (Jimenez, 1995). My purpose is not to deny these
factors, but simply to suggest that in deciphering the cultural politics of Starbucks,
coffee's colonial past and neo-colonial present are essential considerations.
Finally, I ought to confess that as an inveterate coffee drinker and occasional
Starbucks patron, I am thoroughly implicated in most aspects of the consumption
culture I describe. My portrait of Starbucks as a consumption space is based in part on
my own experience as an irregular but thoroughly satisfied customer over the last
several years, more likely to buy take-out beans or beverages than to utilize Starbucks
space, but an active and appreciative participant nonetheless. I have come to realize,
however, particularly as this research has proceeded, that pleasures often are predi-
cated upon privileges, as well as upon exploitation and oppression, and need to be
interrogated as such. So it is with the pleasures of Starbucks, which relies not simply
on the sweated labor of Third World people but on their discursive appropriation to
sell its coffee.
STYLING STARBUCKS
I will begin my discussion by highlighting certain aspects of the local cultural

geography of Starbucks in terms of the key themes emerging from recent consump-
tion studies: consumption as an intensely symbolic practice and commodities as
cultural signs involved in the social production of meaning; consumption as an activity
shaped decisively by place and space; and consumption as a pivotal moment in the
fashioning and expression of identity.
Two features of the symbolic economy of Starbucks stand out: its positioning vis-à-
vis the explosive increase in consumer demand for "specialty" or "gourmet" coffee in
the 1990s, and its extraordinarily successful model for coffee service. The populariza-
tion of gourmet coffee must be seen as part of a much larger trend within consumption
patterns of the middle classes within rich industrialized countries in the last decade or
so, which have witnessed a dramatic rise in the popularity of so-called "designer"
products, ranging from jeans and other types of clothing to pizza and ice cream. The
creation of designer appeal rests, I think, on a particular configuration of symbolic
qualities that combine to "reanimate" the aura surrounding hitherto mundane, mass-
produced products: novelty, which has been central to modern consumption, particu-
larly where the value of a commodity is somehow associated with fashion; authen-
ticity, that quality that somehow connects the commodity to a place or time with
special significance, often rooted in notions of tradition; and taste (or distinction, in
Bourdieu's [1984] sense), which calls attention to the way that the consumption of this
particular product marks the consumer as somehow different, exceptional, and,
indeed, superior.
In the context of Starbucks, all of these elements are readily apparent. The company
seeks deliberately to distinguish its product from regular coffee, endlessly repeating
the claim that its coffees are the best in the world. Moreover, it is quite obviously
engaged in a strategy to turn coffee into a beverage that carries with it the mark of
distinction. The idea that not all coffees are the same, and are subject to the
assessments of the discerning drinker, is suggested most directly by the frequent
parallels drawn within Starbucks' discourse between its coffee and fine wine. Schultz's
statement in a New York Times interview that "coffee is the wine of the nineties" is
perhaps emblematic in this regard (Fabricant, 1992). It is intriguing to note that
Starbucks' discourse of distinction is consciously designed to set its coffee apart from
the the same mass-marketed varieties whose development during the latter half of
the 19th century popularized what had hitherto been a bourgeois luxury in North
America (Jimenez, 1995).
The symbolic appeal of Starbucks coffee cannot be separated from the manner in
which it is served, since service is so central to the Starbucks model. The preparation
of specialized coffee drinks—cafe latte, espresso—is integral to the act of consump-
tion. There is thus a performative element in Starbucks, an aestheticization of the
commodity, as the "baristas" (Italian for "bartender") transform the formerly mun-
dane act of serving coffee into a theatrics of consumption:
The coffee bar approach has evolved into the existing pattern of Starbucks
stores. The atmosphere is theatrical.. . . Sleek black stools ring the typical
store, mahogany trim accents the countertops, and opera music fills the air.
Employees . . . create $3 coffee drinks from a raised stage in clear view of the
customer.
Starbucks is part and parcel of what Zukin, in her analysis of New York restaurants,
has identified as "the Artistic Mode of Production [which] transforms urban space
from manufacturing to service sector use by establishing a built environment for the
performance, display, sale, and production of cultural symbols" (Zukin et al., 1992,
p. 108).
PLACING STARBUCKS
Geographically speaking, a salient feature of Starbucks is its particular evocation of

a sense of place. Now at one level this seems counterintuitive since, like many other
successful retail chains (for example McDonald's, The Body Shop, or Benetton),
Starbucks relies on a rather rigid and formulaic design strategy for its outlets and
hence seems rather to create a sense of placelessness. Yet however much the
uniformity of design might seem to produce a quality of sameness, it is a sameness
that nonetheless is designed to convey particular messages. It is clear that Starbucks
is playing upon the historical and cultural associations of the coffee bar and the
coffeehouse with a European sensibility. Indeed, the original concept to transform
Starbucks from a a mere vendor of roasted coffee beans into a fashionable coffee bar
resulted from a trip that Schultz made to Italy in the early 1980s. "Coffee bars are the
mainstay of every Italian neighborhood," he has stated; "that's what I wanted to bring
back to Seattle" {Inc., January 1993, p. 60). Europe thus becomes the cultural
reservoir for new models of North American urban consumption (and, in a thoroughly
postmodern irony, a target market for Starbucks' ersatz cafe culture, as the chain
proceeds with plans to expand beyond the United States and Canada).
Starbucks has also cultivated an image as a Pacific Northwest phenomenon. This
not only conjures up associations with the West Coast, which have been used before to
market particular products or services, but also serves to distinguish it from dominant
meanings connected in popular culture to California. This is not the place to discuss
the emergence (or not) of a distinctive regional culture in the Pacific Northwest, but it
is important to note that the rise of Starbucks has coincided with the efflorescence of a
"Seattle scene," defined in part by the image of an easygoing, latte-sipping, "ski to
sea" lifestyle projected by boosters of the self-styled Emerald City. Seattle in the
1990s has has gained a new prominence in U.S. popular culture as the setting for top-
grossing movies (Sleepless in Seattle, Singles) and TV sitcoms (Frasier) and as the
birthplace of grunge; this connection has been played up as Starbucks has expanded
eastward in the United States, with arty New York magazines like Interview (Septem-
ber, 1992, p. 74) offering articles on "Coffee Talk, Seattle Style." Interestingly, as
Starbucks has moved into the Canadian market, Vancouver has become known within
Canada for a similar type of coffee culture, strongly associated with its "West Coast"
lifestyle.
Notably, both the European and "Pacific Northwest" associations draw upon a
particular notion of the urban. The "cafe culture" centered on the coffee bar (of which
Starbucks is a paragon) is a quintessentially urban phenomenon. It depends upon, and
appropriates, elements of the urban streetscape in order to foster a particular sense of
urbanity.3 It is thus entangled in the somewhat broader but still local milieu of other
consumption practices, an urban analogue to the market cafes described by Shields
(1992, p. 10):
Many markets have diverged from functional provisions and cut-rate goods to
embrace craft stalls and boutiques in surrounding stores whose specialty wares
can only be supported by the presence of large crowds. Restaurants and cafes
offer vantage points and settings which exploit the colourful atmosphere of the
"market" thus created.
But these are no ordinary streetscapes, because they are inevitably those streets that
are the habitual haunts of the so-called new middle class. In Vancouver, for example, it
is no accident that some of the earliest Starbucks locations were in the West End along
a revitalized Robson Street ("Robsonstrasse"), and subsequently in the gentrified

district of Kitsilano. Starbucks outlets are integrally connected to those "landscapes of
leisure" (Warren, 1993) where people with disposable income, not to mention cultural
capital, go to consume, display themselves, and watch others; as such they are part and
parcel of the cultural geography associated with the "recolonization" of North
American inner cities by the yuppie shock troops of a putatively post-industrial
capitalism. Starbucks store design thus relies upon its links not only with the city, but
with those gentrified neighborhoods and districts whose cachet it has absorbed, even
as the chain expands into suburban streetscapes, airport arcades, and shopping malls.
As a social space, Starbucks represents a somewhat unique configuration of public
and private elements. Coffeehouses have a long history as public spaces, becoming
focal points in their previous European incarnations for bourgeois merchants and
financiers, literati, and even the radical intelligentsia. It is for this reason that
Habermas (1989) uses the coffeehouse as a paragadigm in his discussion of the
formation of the (masculine) bourgeois public sphere. Yet Starbucks seems to have
given this tradition a new inflection by combining it with a particular way of
interacting with the streetscape and street culture referred to above.
Whereas for Mike Davis, an authoritarian impulse to "kill the street" is one of the
leitmotifs of contemporary urban restructuring in U.S. cities like Los Angeles (Davis,
1992), Starbucks' retail design could be said to revolve around an enticement to "eat
the street." All Starbucks outlets are equipped with floor-to-ceiling windows, behind
which are lined counters and rows of elevated stools providing a perfect and
legitimized vantage point for the individual voyeur. Patrons are meant to watch when
at Starbucks, to take in the streetscape as they sip their coffee. Starbucks thus
produces a sort of visual grammar (a gloss on what Shields [1992] calls a "language of
looks"), with two intriguing consequences: first, it produces a hybridized public space
in which the social milieu of the coffee bar becomes the venue for a private experience
of looking. Secondly, however, that gaze creates a fascinating reversal of the standard
relationship between store and streetscape. Here we can invoke Benjamin to see how
Starbucks has, in a sense, split the figure of the flaneur, his roving metonym for
modernity, by severing the link between movement and visual primacy. The flaneur
has been both immobilized and objectified, the gaze emanating from a sedentary
consumer whose object is the tableau vivant of the street, including the strolling
subject. This latter figure is no longer the peripatetic, all-seeing agent, but an object on
display whose gaze is returned from behind the glass.4
These observations are not meant to suggest that Starbucks precludes other, more
conventional modes of interaction, for in each store there are also small tables and
chairs that allow for direct social contact. The complexities of the social milieu thus
created are nicely evoked in the following passage, which suggests that Starbucks
serves as the venue for a wide range of "performances" (Murrills, 1993):
Work here long enough and they'll let you in on the special secret code that
counter spies have always suspected: a cup with the siren logo facing outwards
means one thing, a cup upside down means something else. They also reveal that
drinking a cup at Starbucks on the north side of Robson Street is always a more
laid-back experience than slugging it down at the Starbucks kitty-corner, or, as
they put it succinctly: "We get the suits and they get the bikers." Lap tops or
leather. The former drink double tall lattes, a beverage that lasts long enough for
a business meeting (cellulars recline like houris on the table) or a job interview
or a langourous wallow through the Italian Vogue you've just sold your soul for
at Manhattan Books next door, or even a low-key pickup: coffee bars are
becoming the kinder, gentler meat market of the 90's.
That both the gaze and the pickup (to say nothing of the "meatmarket") are
profoundly gendered practices is simply to remind us that the consumption and leisure
practices encouraged by Starbucks are never too far removed from the wider politics
of social space.
The ways in which Starbucks both shapes and enables the expression of social
identities is a topic worthy of a separate paper. Indeed, all of the features I have
discussed thus far contribute in one way or another to the particular identities
constituted in and through the consumption practices that take place in Starbucks. I
wish here, then, to limit my discussion to the point made initially about the cultural
symbolism associated with gourmet coffee, since clearly the consumption of this type
of coffee carries with it a certain status that serves to separate the Starbucks coffee
drinker from the regular coffee drinker. But Starbucks takes this several steps further
by transforming coffee drinking from a simple, taken-for-granted act of consumption
into something resembling a hobby. Offering a perfect example of Featherstone's
point about "lifestyle as a life project" (Featherstone, 1987, p. 59), Starbucks has
created a marketing strategy in which one must know coffee to consume it. This
educative element is in a sense required, given the proliferation of coffee drinks and
"varietals" on offer, and every Starbucks store has racks of pamphlets explaining the
difference between a doppio and a macchiatto, or between New Guinea Peaberry and
Colombian Supremo. Starbucks, whose employees are required to undergo a 24-hour
training course (referred to by Schultz as "Coffee Knowledge 101"), therefore offers a
variation on Zukin's notion of cultural producers as intermediaries who transmit the
information necessary to take up new consumption practices (Zukin, 1990, p. 46).
The cultural capital thus created, however, is only nominally exclusive: the literature
and the product are made available to almost anyone with the disposable income to
make a habit of specialty coffee. As Schultz says, "for ninety-five cents you can have
the best cup of coffee in the world. Almost everyone can afford luxury for a dollar"
{Forbes, November 26, 1990, p. 212). Thus Starbucks, with its delicate balance
between exclusivity and popularization, fits squarely within Zukin's characterization
of the consumption spaces associated with gentrification:
5 10 MICHAEL D. SMITH
Such shops and restaurants are also fundamentally democratic spaces. They
offer cultural capital that anyone can "buy into" without knowing the rules of
auction houses or traditional French cuisine or having a personal introduction.
In this sense the public consumption spaces of gentrification resemble both
suburban shopping malls and the department store, except that they carry the
inherited, stone-and-mortar cachet of central urban spaces (Zukin, 1990, p. 41).
Of course, to address adequately questions concerning place, meaning, and identity

in the Starbucks context would require detailed ethnographic research, particularly if
we want to measure the extent to which the positions that Starbucks constructs for its
consumers are in fact taken up. Here again, recent studies of consumption have helped
to draw attention to the modes of reception, as well as transmission, of different
commercial strategies, emphasizing people's capacity to create their own readings,

and fashion their own identities, "against the grain" of marketers' come-hither
formulas.
CONSUMING QUANDARIES
Thus far I have provided a conventional account of Starbucks as a site of

consumption, using some of the main themes in the consumption literature to focus on
its local, consumptive, and semiotic aspects. Yet, as I have already noted, this literature
has not escaped criticism. As far as I can see, these criticisms can be condensed into
three basic points. First, many of the recent studies of consumption can be accused of
localism, that is, a tendency to view consumption practices in isolation from their
broader geographical contexts. This takes place despite the recent emphasis—
particularly in the literature on postmodernism and postmodernity, which is so central
to cultural studies—on trends toward globalization and global culture. The essential
task is to develop approaches that will take specific, local settings as their starting
points, but will then try to connect them to the broader processes and stuctures of a
regional or world system.
Second, many of the recent studies exhibit a certain idealism over-emphasizing the
cultural dimension and neglecting the material underpinnings of the symbolic
economy they describe. The essence of this criticism has been expressed by McRob-
bie, who has said that "the interest in consumerism . . . has led to an extrapolation of
cultural objects out of the contexts of their usefulness (or their materiality); they have
been prised away from their place in history [and geography] and their role in social
relations, and have been posited instead in a kind of vacuum of aesthetic pleasure and
personal style" (McRobbie, 1991, p. 3). What this does, arguably, is to discount the
very real structures and practices that impinge on people practically in their everyday
dealings with the world, what Cornel West has called "the ragged edges of the real"
(cited in Koptiuch, 1991, p. 89). This tendency is expressed in the consumption
literature in several ways: the reduction of consumption to leisure, thereby minimizing
the extent to which much of consumption occurs in the context of social reproduction
performed by women, work that is by no means always relaxing or pleasurable
(McRobbie, 1991); scarce regard for the ways in which various people might be
excluded from this pleasurable realm of consumption; and a relative lack of interest in
attempting to connect consumption with production and distribution. This is prob-
lematic because it tends to reverse the culture-economy dualism it was seeking to

overthrow: it has simply replaced culture with economy as the primary realm of
analysis, rather than transcending the terms of that opposition. Surely the point to be
made here is that the two realms now have become inseparable (and perhaps always
were) so that we must now grapple with the implications of recognizing that there is,
as it were, production in culture and culture in production.
The third point concerns a tendency in the consumption literature towards a certain
populism, by which I mean a penchant for valorizing consumerism, and popular
culture more generally, without raising too many critical questions about the identities
and "sociabilities" created in and through these realms. In reaction to the "mandarin
Marxism" (Freeman and Lazarus, 1988) of Horkheimer and Adorno, for whom mass
culture was a sedative produced by the culture industry to subdue the gullible masses,
recent studies of consumption have tended to be overly sanguine about the value, and
particularly the oppositional value, of popular consumption. As Peter Jackson has
suggested, "an impression can be given by some of this literature that shopping is a
truly subversive activity with revolutionary potential" (Jackson, 1993, p. 216). Rather
than either categorical denunciation or uncritical celebration, there is a need, I
believe, for critical engagement with popular culture and consumption practices; it is,
as Morley aptly puts it, "a question of steering between the dangers of an improper
romanticism of 'consumer freedoms,' on the one hand, and a paranoiac fantasy of
'global control' on the other" (Morley, 1991, p. 1).
So what sort of approach do these criticisms suggest? A starting point is offered by
McRobbie, who argues that we ought to heed Stuart Hall's call for work that is
"structural, historical, and ethnographic" (Hall, cited in McRobbie, 1991, p. 14). I
agree with this statement, but would add that we also require work that is geograph-
ical. Here we might usefully draw upon Smith's (1993) notion of "scaling places,"
beginning with detailed ethnographic studies in one location and connecting them
sequentially with other "moments" in other places that somehow are part of the same
process. Pioneering work in this regard has been conducted by David Morley (1991),
who has attempted to combine detailed empirical analysis of television viewing with
more macrolevel studies of television production and programming. By undertaking
this sort of study, we can, I think, begin to break down some of those troublesome
dualisms while charting a new course between "improper romanticisms" and "para-
noiac fantasies."
With these comments as background, I shall now take, as it were, a second cut at
Starbucks, focusing on two topics. First, I will situate the company within a richer
spatio-temporal context by sketching very briefly some key features of the political
economy of coffee production. I then will examine in more detail the particular
manner in which Starbucks incorporates these features to produce its own unique
discourse on production.
TAKEOUT
I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I
do know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two
great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on
which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to
cultivate them (J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Voyage to Isle de France, Isle de
Bourbon, The Cape of Good Hope . . . With New Observations on Nature and
Mankind by an Officer of the King, Vol. 1, 1773; cited in Mintz, 1985).
The modern history of coffee production began in earnest at the turn of the 18th
century, when Dutch and then English mercantile interests managed to break the
Ottoman sultanate's closely guarded monopoly on indigenous production in northern
Africa. Thereafter cultivation followed in the wake of European colonization of
Central and South America, and later Africa (Graubard, 1943; Tannahil, 1973;
Wilson, 1973). By the early 19th century, large plantations had been established in
many of these colonial territories, most of them relying on some form of slave or
indentured labor, to service the growing popular demand in an industrializing and
increasingly urbanized Europe. Galeano (1973, p. 10) has tartly observed that "coffee
brought inflation to Brazil. Between 1824 and 1854 the price of a man doubled." With
the rise of abolitionism in the mid- to late 19th century, slavery gradually was phased
out and replaced with forms of free labor more congenial to an expanding system of
private property, thereby establishing profoundly unequal patterns of landholding that
would in the main persist, with some modifications, to the present day. The point, then,
is that the history of coffee is indefeasibly bound up with the rise of capitalism and the
overseas expansion of European colonialism, establishing relations of domination and
dependency both between Europe and its (ex-)colonies and within them.
Currently, coffee remains the most important tropical commodity in the interna-
tional agricultural trade, ranking second only to oil among commodities as a whole,
with an annual trade value approaching $10 billion (Finlayson and Zacher, 1988).
It reflects unambiguously the relationships of dependency that connect the poor,
underdeveloped nations of the South to the rich, industrialized countries of the North:
the former produce a relatively constant 98% of the world's coffee, whereas the latter
consistently consume 85-90% of total production. Of that, 85% is absorbed by Japan,
the EEC, and the United States, the world's single largest consumer (Ibid). For most
producing countries, coffee remains a crucial sector of the economy, accounting in
many cases for well over half of all foreign export earnings, the main engine of
economic growth.
It also remains, however, an industry dominated by large trading companies and
multinational food corporations based in the North, which control the processing and
distribution of coffee in import markets. The industry as a whole has become
increasingly concentrated over the last three decades, with ten firms based in a small
number of consuming countries now controlling over two-thirds of the world market
in roasting. This concentration is intensified in certain national markets and market
segments: a Sara Lee subsidiary controls half the roast coffee market in the Nether-
lands, for example, while two firms, Nestle and Phillip Morris/General Foods, have
acquired two-thirds of the world market for soluble or instant coffee (Clairmonte and
Cavanagh, 1990, p. 28). Nestlé, along with other processing giants, is now involved in
a process of backward integration in which it has begun to market processed (mainly
instant) coffee to developing countries (Pieterse and Silvis, 1988, p. 28).
The economic consequences of this industry structure are readily discernible: 50%
of the retail price of coffee reflects manufacturing and distribution value added,
whereas 25% constitutes gross margins (profits) on trading, processing, and distribut-
ing, leaving only 25% of total revenue for the producing country, of which a small
fraction goes to those (smallholders, permanent waged laborers, seasonal pickers)
who actually cultivate the crop (e.g., White, 1973, p. 121). Between 1962 and 1989,
the world market was regulated under the International Coffee Agreement, an accord
reached by 50 producing countries and 24 consuming countries that sought to
stabilize supply and demand through a system of export quotas and pricing mecha-
nisms. The collapse of the Agreement in July 1989 after disagreement over how to
modify quotas precipitated a 50% decrease in the world coffee price. Symp-
tomatically, it was small-scale producers who suffered the loss in revenues, while
multinational processors and distributors enjoyed record profits (Steif, 1990). For
large U.S. coffee companies, profit margins actually expanded during the same period,
the drop in world price being accompanied by a 10% increase in the retail price of
coffee (New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1989, p. 8).

Systems of coffee production are diverse, but their common denominator is a labor-
intensive production process in which the actual work of cultivation is extremely
arduous and poorly remunerated.5 As elsewhere, women often bear a disproportion-
ate share of the burden of social reproduction, and Stolcke's description of working
conditions on a Sao Paulo plantation is probably not untypical:
For these women a typical working day starts between three and four in the
morning. If they also work, the men and children get up at about five. Most of the
time before leaving for work is taken up with cooking the family's midday meal
and with tidying up the home. If there is no gas cooker this means a fire has to be
lit, often in the yard in the dark. Breakfast is eaten, if at all, standing up and then,
around six o'clock, all the working members of the family leave. Those who
work in a gang go to a stop where the contractor picks them up in his truck.
Work starts at seven and goes on until five with a one-hour lunch break and a
half-hour coffee break somewhat later. If they are doing piece-work they hardly
stop to eat. Around six, they are back home. After changing their clothes, the
men either sit down to watch television or go to the bar. The women prepare the
evening meal, go down to the river to fetch water, do some urgent washing, feed
the family, clear up and, when they can manage, drop into bed. On Saturdays,
work goes on until one o'clock. The afternoon is used to clean the house and do
the washing. On Sundays women can get up a bit later and they may even be able
to take a nap in the afternoon. A few of the women even did washing on the side
as an additional source of income (Stolcke, 1988, p. 147).
Living conditions tend to vary with the location and system of production, but
generally are poor. In Central and South America, where roughly 60% of the world's
coffee is grown, housing typically is makeshift, cramped, and lacking in electricity or
running water (Scrimshaw and Cosminsky, 1991). Work in coffee, whether as a
waged laborer or smallholder, tends not to provide a subsistence income, and thus is
frequently combined with self-provisioning on small plots of land, which provides a
significant proportion of household food, although malnutrition remains a persistent
problem and health conditions generally are poor (Foy and Daly, 1989, p. 13). The
problem is compounded by environmental degradation associated with the use of
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which not only damage soil conditions (and
thereby threaten the long-term viability of coffee cropping on particular plots of land),
but poison groundwater and food supplies. In their review of environmental conditions
in El Salvador, for example, Foy and Daly determined that "after deforestation, the
most serious environmental problem in El Salvador is the poisoning of people, land,
rivers, and groundwater due to the increasing use of pesticides in the export
agriculture sector." Even more telling, however, is their analysis of the antecedents of
this problem:
The primary reason for pesticide overuse is the great difference in market power
between El Salvadoran agricultural workers and the large landowners who buy
the pesticides and hire the help. Due to lack of regulations, illiteracy, virtually no
job alternatives, and repressive working conditions, even pesticides considered
"safe" in the United States can be deadly in Third World countries. Labour has
no bargaining position, and producers would only lower short term profits by
spending money on safety measures. Hence we have the high level of poisonings
in El Salvador which is likely to be much lower than the actual chronic and acute
poisonings due to poor reporting. The negative environmental effects of
pesticide abuse of course extend well beyond agricultural workers (Foy and
Daly, 1989, p. 15).
The situation in El Salvador, while no doubt extreme, appears to differ quantitatively,
rather than qualitatively, from other coffee-producing countries in the region, and
indeed beyond it, and is indicative of more general patterns in the export agricultural
sectors of many Third World economies (Race and Class, Vol. 34, No. 1, 1992).
So where in this historico-geographical matrix of coffee relations, whose details
I have managed to sketch here only crudely, does Starbucks fit? Perhaps one way of
answering that question is to observe that while the last two decades have witnessed
an historic decline in regular coffee consumption in the United States, sales of
specialty coffees have averaged 30% growth in recent years, reaching $2 billion in
1992 (Toronto Globe and Mail, June 27,1992, p. B20). Starbucks, perhaps the leading
company in this specialty market, has managed to carve out a niche within the
industry by establishing itself as a retailer of both whole beans and beverages (one of
its chief innovations) and as an independent buyer and roaster. As Roly Morris,
Starbucks' vice-president for Canadian operations, proudly has noted, "we're a
vertically integrated retailer. We buy our own own green beans, we roast them in our
own roasting plant by our trained roasters, and they are sold in our own retail stores"
(Marketing, Vol. 98, No. 26, 1993, p. 12).
The formula, enhanced by Starbucks' particular flair for design, service, and
promotion, has been remarkably successful and would seem to support Galeano's
contention that "it is much more profitable to consume coffee than to produce it"
(Galeano, 1973, p. 114). Starbucks had only 11 stores in 1987, all in the Seattle area,
but by the end of 1992 there were 190 Starbucks outlets across the United States, and
627 midway through 1995 (Vancouver Sun, August 11, 1995, p. D1). Starbucks' first
British Columbia outlet opened in 1987 in Vancouver's old CPR terminal, the first
Starbucks outside Washington state; by August 1995, there were 73 stores in the
province. This phenomenal growth also is reflected in Starbucks' revenues, which
skyrocketed from $1.3 million in 1987 to $40 million in 1990 and $92 million in
1992, and profits, described thus in a 1990 Forbes article (November 26, p. 212):
It's a nice business. Competitors say Schultz probably pays, after shrinkage
during the roasting process, about $2 for a pound of Colombian coffee.
Packaging, shipping and store and labor costs add another $2 per pound or so.
But he sells Colombian for $8 a pound in his stores as beans, or, as brewed coffee
of the day, for the liquid equivalent of $20 a pound. Total annual turnover at
Starbucks is over 4 million pounds.
With some industry analysts projecting annual sales of $ 1 billion by the year 2000, the
company has quickly become a darling of the U.S. business press, less even for its rates
of growth and profitability than for its supposed adumbration—especially in the neo-
paternalism that characterizes relations with its legions of part-time, Gen X bar-
istas—of the new wave of sleek, young, and trendy service corporations to which the
hopes of a "post-industrial" U.S. capitalism are thought to be pinned.6
Starbucks can thus be seen as one of the more recent and successful entrants into an
international market whose establishment coincided with—indeed, was part and
parcel of—the project of Euroamerican colonialism and imperialism. The structural
inequalities of an international coffee trade that is increasingly dominated by Western
multinationals, viewed against the general backdrop of an ever-deepening gulf
between the rich and poor nations, serves as yet another reminder that the period of
Northern domination did not end, to borrow Said's paraphrase of Fanon, "when the
last white policeman left and the last European flag came down" (Said, 1989, p. 207).
What makes Starbucks particularly interesting is that it trades not only in the 300-
year-old market for this tropical commodity, but in an equally enduring if less tangible
symbolic economy of images and representations that are the cultural correlates of
Euroamerican domination.
ORDERING COFFEE: THIRD WORLDING WITH STARBUCKS
Where's Java? Put head, arms and legs on a huge coffee berry that was
aesthetically roasted and a Java pygmy would be suggested . . . (cited in
Armstrong, 1992/1993, p. 224).
Gayatri Spivak has described the process of European conquest and colonization
during the period of high imperialism in the 19th century as the "worlding of the Third
World" (Spivak, 1985, p. 243). The phrase can be adapted to describe the discourses
and discursive strategies of a firm like Starbucks, which appropriates, refashions, and
redistributes elements from the history and contemporary economic geography of
coffee production to produce its own "cognitive map" of coffee. This is not merely an
embellishment of the Starbucks marketing strategy, but is, on the contrary, an integral
component of the Starbucks product, not only in the form of the commodity itself
but in the symbolic meaning that is invested in that commodity and in the act of
consuming it. It is for precisely this reason that, as I noted earlier, production and
consumption are inseparable in the case of Starbucks, which has succeeded in
creating what we might term a "cultural geography of production."7
The cultural meaning of coffee cannot be dissociated from its place within the
history of European overseas expansion, conquest, and colonization. Indeed, it is
arguable that it is precisely in the quotidian objects of everyday life—coffee,
chocolate, tea—that imperialism insinuated itself into the popular imagination, these
and other commodities becoming cultural icons connotatively associated with colo-
nization and European racial superiority; here the perceived "exoticism" of coffee's
geographical origins in places beyond Europe meant that coffee consumption was
from an early period implicated in an emerging "imaginative geography" of the
"Orient" and the "New World":
In a word, coffee is the drunkard's settle-brain, the fool's pastime, who admires
it for being the production of Asia, and is ravished with delight when he hears the
berries grow in the deserts of Arabia, but would not give a farthing for an
hogshead of it, if it were to be had on Hampstead-Heath or Banstead-Downs . . .
(cited in Wilson, 1973, p. 406).
Such a statement, though derisive, does indicate that the relationship between
coffee consumption and an imaginative geography of the "exotic" lands beyond

Europe was forged early on and remains deeply embedded in the cultures of
consuming countries. It is precisely this notion of cultural embeddedness that Stuart
Hall captures when he refers to the "ways in which the colonizing experience had,
indeed, threaded itself through the imaginary of the whole culture, what one can only
call racism as the cup of tea at the bottom of every English experience, as the unstirred
spoonful of sugar in every English child's sweet tooth, as the threads of cotton that
kept the cotton mills going, as the cup of cocoa that sweetened the dreams of every
English child . . ." (Hall, 1992a, p. 13). Although he is speaking of British culture, a
similar colonial sediment undoubtedly persists in the cultures of other Western
societies, providing what one might term the conditions of intelligibility for contem-
porary discourses on specialty coffee.
One of the constitutive features of the Starbucks marketing strategy is its ordering
or "reterritorializing" of the world in terms of its own coffee geography. It designates,
evaluates, and organizes coffee production according to its own taxonomy of regions
(the Americas, the Pacific, and Arabia/Africa), subregions (Central America, East
Africa), and countries (Indonesia, Mexico, Kenya). Some of these national categories
then are further decomposed in terms of coffee "varietals"; Indonesia becomes
Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Estate Java, for instance, whereas Ethiopia is disaggregated
into Yergacheffe, Sidamo, and Harrari.8 Although these classifications do correspond
to some extent to the conventional categories of physical and political geography, the
operative criterion has less to do with such categories—Kona is included in the
Americas rather than in the Pacific, for example, while Arabia has no readily
identifiable spatial referent—than with quality and taste. Indeed, Starbucks essen-
tially admits as much: "While geographically a Pacific coffee, Kona's flavors more
closely resemble Latin American varietals." Each of the three main regions is
classified according to a list of general gustatory characteristics, as are the "varietals."
What this classificatory system does, in effect, is produce its own geography based on
a taxonomy of North American taste preferences, reducing the non-Western world to
a collection of coffee varietals that in a sense replace, metonymically, the complex
configuration of social, cultural, and economic systems in which they are produced.
Starbucks is not content, however, simply to formulate this cartography of coffee,
because it elaborates on this mapping in several ways. An important manifestation of
this is discernible in the narrativized geographies and evocations of exotic, far-off
realms that it provides, which tend to deploy many of the colonial tropes and writing
strategies that have been identified in recent postcolonial theory. Some rely on stock
symbols of "Otherness" to evoke images of exotic difference and timelessness.
Sulawesi, for example, is described as "a place where dwarf buffalo run wild, pythons
measure 18 feet, and tribal kings hold sway" (Starbucks, 1993), whereas Arabian
Mocha Sanani coffee is characterized in the following terms:
Ancient. Complex. Veiled in centuries of ritual and mystery. Sanani's a coffee

that hints of wildness, fine wine, dark chocolate, and sun-blasted Bedouin tents
where coffee ceremonies are still performed (Ibid).
Others invoke particular representations of non-Western history to reinforce
notions of difference but also authenticity. Africa, for example, considered to be the
origin of the coffee plant, is coded as "Roots" at one moment and "Arabian Nights" at
another, and in both cases the underlying emphasis is on origins: "Coffea Arabica
. . . was growing wild in its birthplace of Ethiopia long before the first known human,
"Lucy," made her home there over three million years ago" (Coffee Matters, 1992).
Even contemporary descriptions resort to familiar strategies:
Arriving in Guatemala City is a little like flying into a kaleidoscope. Familiar

sensations are broken into tiny fragments and reflected back in dizzying
intensity. I can visualize during my night arrival the deeply carved landscape of
the city, the lights of the neighborhoods ending abruptly at the edges of deep
precipices. I anticipate the morning and the first sights of the breathtaking
volcanoes Pacaya and Agua, the colors and wonders of this place over the days to
come. Starbucks president Howard Schultz, with me for his first visit to
Guatemala, reported being in "total sensory overload" the entire time (Ibid).
Here we have an instance, quite common in colonial travel writing, where Western
ways of seeing and habits of description are held to break down in the face of the
overwhelming "otherness" of non-Western countries (e.g., Pratt, 1990). Press
accounts of Starbucks have enthusiastically taken up this exoticizing discourse,
signaling the success of Starbucks' marketing strategy as well as the continuing
currency of Western discourses that originate in the imperial (as opposed to the neo-
imperial) epoch. A 1993 Success cover story, for example, dubbed Starbucks'chief
coffee buyer "Coffee's Indiana Jones," a man "who roams the equator searching for
the world's finest coffee beans. In his quest for coffee, he has traveled hours by jeep
through tropical downpours in Indonesia, negotiated with tribesmen in Papua New
Guinea, and gotten his foot stung by a Guatemalan scorpion" (Abramovitch, 1993,
p. 26).
These descriptions are revealing in and of themselves, stirring up as they do images
of exotic Third World locales that persist as a sort of colonial sediment in the popular
imaginary of the West. But they must also be seen in the context of what is perhaps
more fundamental to the whole project of Starbucks' worlding, namely the idea that
the consumer need not resign himself or herself to receiving these images second-
hand, that with Starbucks as a guide, one can actually visit these places oneself.
Starbucks has indeed constructed a form of "coffee tourism" in which the act of
consumption becomes a vehicle for symbolic adventures overseas. Thus, at Starbucks
the consumer is not only consuming coffee but consuming metaphorical Third World
5 18 MICHAEL D. SMITH
spaces. This basic notion is stressed again and again in Starbucks discourse, whether
in relation to coffee itself ( "to brew African coffee is to pour travel, adventure, and
exotic intensity straight into your home cup") or to its associated paraphernalia (the
"World Stamp Commuter Mug," which puts "The World in Your Hands" and "could
inspire any armchair traveller") (Starbucks, 1993, p. 29).
But this leitmotif of Starbucks' interpellative strategy is perhaps given its most
astonishingly overt expression in one of the company's promotional tools: the
Starbucks Passport. An introductory statement from Starbucks' president Howard
Schultz sums up the promotion, but also an essential feature of its colonizing
discourse, as follows:
From the exotic islands of Indonesia to the misty peaks of the Andes, Starbucks
travels the world to bring you the finest coffees available. Each coffee growing
region has something special to offer, a unique taste to experience. It's an
adventure we want to share. Now you can travel the world with Starbucks,
collecting colorful coffee destination stamps and passport entries along the way,
redeemable for free coffee. The world of coffee is a vast, exotic and colorful
place. I hope you enjoy the trip. Bon Voyage!
Starbucks customers are "issued" their own individualized "travel documents"

containing both passport entries—a condensed version of the coffee taxonomy
described above, replete with space for "traveller's notes"—and pages designated for
the accumulation of "destination stamps" that enable the customer to partake of the
"Frequent Buyer (not flyer) Bonus" or "World Coffee Tour," a sort of "buy ten, get one
free" offer.
In one sense "coffee tourism" can be read as an attempt to play upon the pleasure,
excitement, and novelty associated with foreign travel. In this way, it might be
analogized to other contemporary forms of consumption that seek to combine, for
example, the appeal of shopping and tourism. Rob Shields has noted how markets have
been transformed into tourist destinations, "not just for sightseeing but for the taste
of exotic food, their odors, cries and shouts and tactile experiences of crowds of not
only buyers and sellers but of other tourists . . . " (Shields, 1992, p. 110). Shields is
concerned with the constitution of a sense of community within certain consumption
cultures, but he fails to address how the "exotic" elements he describes (and his
references to odors and cries and shouts do evoke images of "foreignness") contribute
to the formation of a collective consumption sensibility precisely by playing on deeply
embedded notions of cultural and racial difference that themselves are rooted in the
various phases of Western colonialism and imperialism. It is these notions of
difference, and the phenomenology of difference, that are so central to the manner in
which Starbucks attempts to position its consumer as an "explorer
. . . touring the world of coffee" (Starbucks, 1993) through its selection and descrip-
tion of Third World spaces as destinations.
WHITENING COFFEE
Thus far I have been emphasizing the "Third Worlding" that takes place in the
discourse and practices of Starbucks consumption, the production of particular
imaginary geographies based on essentialist, hierarchical differences between "the
West and the rest" (Hall, 1992b). I now want to sharpen the point somewhat by
examining how Starbucks also plays upon distinctions between people, particularly
between white and black or brown, through its racialized descriptions of coffee itself.
I hardly need give more than a few examples here:
Gautemala Antigua: Central American complexity and elegance is celebrated

in this seductive combination of chocolatey sweetness and lively, almost
peppery spice.
Powerful, pungent, and peppery! Estate Java is the serious coffee drinker's
coffee, thick and full-bodied.
The great Sumatras are like the tigers that stalk her forests: rare, exotic, earthy,
powerful. With enough full-bodied muscle to stand up to cream.
. . . Harrar roars onto the palate with tangy acidity, lingers for a while, then
finishes with wild and racy aromas and a question: "what was that?" (Starbucks,
1993).
At one level, these descriptions can be analyzed merely as elements within the
inflated discourse of "trade talk," a discourse that, as Starbucks reveals, revolves
around the analogical assessments of flavor, acidity, and body (Ibid, p. 7). But I want to
argue that in the context of a commodity like coffee, so closely intertwined with the
history of colonialism and the labor of people of color, these terms carry an additional
connotation. At the very least, Starbucks is able to exploit the semantic richness of
certain terms—"spicy," "chocolatey," "full-bodied," "earthy"—which have both
gustative and racial connotations. bell hooks has noted that "within commodity
culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is
mainstream white culture" (hooks, 1992, p. 21). This contemporary blandness
reflects a number of felt absences in the white cultural milieu of the late 20th century:
"anhedonia" (an inability to experience genuine pleasure); alienation, from the white
body, Others, and Nature; and the death of spirituality. This sense of deprivation is
given expression through the generalized desire for contact with and immersion in
cultural/racial Others, especially those outside the modern urban context, for their
traditional communities and lifeways are imagined as the last redoubt of an authentic
human connection to the Body, Nature, and Spirituality.
In the above examples, we can see these themes reflected in the various allusions to
the exotic ("tangy," "racy," "pungent," "peppery spice"), Nature ("wild," "earthy"),
bestial power (stalking tiger), the body ("thick and full-bodied," "muscle," "power-
ful"), and sexuality ("seductive"), all of which are also historically connected to
dominant white discourses on "blackness" or, perhaps more precisely, "darkness."
These themes can then be seen to constellate around a more general discursive
formation concerning "primitivism," which, as many have argued, occupies a central,
even constitutive place in the formation of European modernity (e.g., Hall, 1992b).
As hooks has pointed out, in the post-colonial period this formation has become
somewhat atavistic but no less pervasive:
In mass culture, imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and

reritualizing in different ways the imperialist, colonizing journey as narrative
fantasy of power and desire, of seduction by the Other. This longing is rooted in
the atavistic belief that the spirit of the "primitive" resides in the bodies of dark
Others whose cultures, traditions, and lifestyles may indeed be irrevocably
changed by imperialism, colonization, and racist domination. The desire to
make contact with those bodies deemed Other, with no apparent will to
dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, even takes the form of a defiant gesture
where one denies accountability and historical connection. Most importantly, it
establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures
of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on
seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one's
image but to become the Other (hooks, 1992, p. 25).
It is precisely this "deflection through desire" that I believe characterizes Star-

bucks' discourse on Third World spaces and peoples, rather than the sort of complete
effacement suggested in the quotation from Jameson with which I began my
discussion. We live increasingly in a period in which corporate capital, rather than
imposing a "veil of ignorance," actively seeks to accommodate the Western consumer
to the "realities" and inequities of globalized production and consumption through its
own articulatory practices and, in the words of Paul Smith, "to evacuate antagonism
from the actual history and to install that history as the origin of contemporary and
readily available benefits" (Smith, 1988, p. 144).
In Starbucks this reappropriative strategy becomes most apparent if we examine
how the relations and politics of production are incorporated into its discourse.
Consider the following example:
. . . in the highlands of Antigua, you'll find some of the most peaceful coffee
plantations in the world. Traditional bourbon arabica trees are cultivated here,
on 100-year-old fincas (farms) where the old ways still stand. QUALITY
COUNTS. Time slows down. Families run the show. And a warm greeting and a
cold fruit drink upon arrival go without saying. RELATIONSHIPS ARE
IMPORTANT EVERYWHERE. But in Guatemala, a country we've been
calling on for years, our friendships have allowed us to have a hand in actually
shaping the coffee. WE TALK WITH FARMERS THERE ABOUT QUALITY,
and what we are looking for. The kinds of quantities we'll need down the road.
And over conversation of crops, children, weather, dinner, prices, dogs, and
business, we strengthen ties that'll make a difference in the harvests ahead
(Starbucks, 1993, p. 10).
We need not belabor the details of production in Guatemala (beyond what I already
have provided), nor is it probably necessary to rehearse here many of the details of the
country's torturous history under murderous, U.S.-supported military regimes. We
may instructively contrast this rather bloody reality with Starbucks' unabashedly
sanitized version: while in the "developed" world tranquility, hospitality, friendship,
congeniality, and equality may be the bywords of a bygone era, in countries like
Guatemala (so the passage suggests) these archaic virtues persist in the commodious
relationship between Starbucks and its producers. Indeed, Starbucks' chief buyer has
described his main task, that of "educating" producers about quality, as "missionary
work" (Abramovitch, 1993, p. 26).
A further example is provided by a retail manager who accompanied Starbucks'
chief buyer on a recent trip to Costa Rica and described her visit to a coffee plantation
thus:
We walked along the dirt road between rows of coffee trees, a view of the hills,
green with vegetation, in the background. The coffee pickers were singing—
mostly women, with high voices and not all together. It was beautiful. . . . The
people we met were so very proud of their country. They share such commit-
ment, investing time and care into the quality of the coffee before we ever see it.
When you describe coffee processing to a customer over the bean counter, you
reduce it all down into simple, easy steps. But there's so much more to it than
that. . . . I want to let everyone who drinks a cup of coffee know about all the
people who came before. Everything matters {Coffee Matters, Vol. 1, No. 3,
1993).
In these examples, production is not so much effaced as it is featured. What is effaced,

however, are structures of domination and exploitation. It is this that Starbucks,
otherwise so thorough in its efforts to educate the consuming public, sedulously
avoids. To do so, Starbucks consciously produces a disarming and incorporative
discourse that deliberately emphasizes the relations of production and makes them
part of the commodity itself. The issue, therefore, contra Jameson, is not so much the
fetishism of commodities, but the commodification of its critique.
CONCLUSION
I will conclude by offering a few comments on what I perceive to be the main

shortcomings of my analysis. First, although I have expressed a desire to overcome the
artificial distinctions between the local and the global, or culture and economy, the
structure of the paper largely reproduces those oppositions. In part this reveals the
exploratory nature of the project, which has not yet proceeded to the stage where such
categorizations can be discarded. And in part it reflects the fact that conventional
research paradigms have not yet been broadened sufficiently to incorporate such an
approach, that, as Neil Smith notes, "we have no coherent, critically thought-out
language for different scales" (Smith, 1993, p. 101). But it also discloses a deliberate
choice on my part to follow an approach commonly found in the consumption
literature in order to highlight some of its shortcomings. Ideally, the sort of study I have
in mind would combine detailed ethnographic research at both endpoints of the
cultural economy of coffee—pickers and drinkers, so to speak—as well as various key
nodal points in between, to analyze the relations between these elements.
Second, my evaluation of Starbucks' "Third Worlding" seems to leave us with
precious few options for responsible consumption. For at one level it appears as if my
"critical interrogation" leads directly to the nihilistic inference that (predominantly)
white, Western consumers are racist dupes and/or callous beneficiaries of an exploita-
tive system. Yet, as I hope I have made clear, my intent here has been merely to
describe the subject positions that are made available in the discourses of Starbucks,
not the ways in which consumers respond to them. Notable in this regard is the
emergence in the last two years of North American activist groups working in
solidarity with Guatemalan coffee pickers to pressure Starbucks to live up to the
claim—"Caring for those who grow our coffee"—emblazoned on takeout cups and
trumpeted in its promotional literature by adopting a code of conduct vis-a-vis its
Guatemalan suppliers. This is a prime example of the kinds of transnational organiz-
ing among producers and consumers that will be required to challenge the predations
of multinational capital in the future (Zielinski, 1995).
But even if some people do respond favourably to Starbucks' colonial strategies, this
need not be seen only negatively. hooks (1992) concludes the essay cited above by
discussing the costs and benefits of the trend toward globalized culture and ethnic
consumption, viewing it as an advance insofar as it begins to erode extant white
supremacist codes proscribing interracial contact. Indeed, to the extent that it
represents an inclination (especially among white consumers) to embrace difference

and create a more encompassing vision of humanity, it may be of some moment.
Conversely, insofar as it fails to address the perennial, fundamental questions of
power, domination, and exploitation, this multicultural impulse is doomed mainly to
reproduce structures of inequality. As hooks has noted, "mutual recognition of racism,
its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate, is the only
standpoint that makes possible an encounter between races that is not based on denial
and fantasy" (hooks, 1992, p. 28). A critical interrogation of this element of denial and
fantasy will continue to be, I think, a necessary, although not a sufficient, component
in any evaluation of the pleasures and politics of Starbucks, and, more generally, of the
privileged, urban(e) milieu of consumption to which it belongs.
NOTES
1
I would like to thank Derek Gregory, Sarah Jain, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments. I owe a special debt of gratitude to David Ley for his advice and encouragement
throughout the course of this project.
2
Much of the groundwork for the type of analysis I pursue here is laid in Paul Smith's (1988)
incredibly fecund analysis of the Banana Republic Clothing Company.
3
I owe this notion to David Ley.
4
I must credit Brett Christophers for this latter point, which is based on his own unsettling
experiences of objectification walking past Starbucks outlets. One reviewer has pointed out that
this technique has been used in other retail designs in the past. While I accept that Starbucks did
not originate this design principle, I think the particular configuration of windows and seating
offered by the coffee giant is distinguished by the boldness of its invitation to atomized
consumption of the streetscape.
5
In their study of a large Guatemalan coffee estateorfinca,Scrimshaw and Cosminsky (1991, p.
68) estimated that in the average quincena (two-week period) men earned between $18 and
$32, women between $3 and $15, and children between $5 and $10. Zielinski (1995) reported
that Guatemalan coffee pickers are paid 2 cents per pound to pick coffee beans that Starbucks
eventually sells for $9.
6
My discussion of Starbucks' position within the coffee industry, both domestically and
internationally, is necessarily superficial, but see Jimenez (1995) for pioneering research on the
history of the U.S. coffee industry in its formative years.
7
Credit for this term goes to Derek Gregory.
8
These varietal distinctions appear to derive their names from regions or producers within
particular countries. The information used in this section is derived from Starbucks' catalogues,
pamphlets, and the company newsletter, Coffee Matters. I will provide citations where
appropriate.
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In the conclusion to his remarkable excursus on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson

I will begin my discussion by highlighting certain aspects of the local cultural

Geographically speaking, a salient feature of Starbucks is its particular evocation of

a revitalized Robson Street ("Robsonstrasse"), and subsequently in the gentrified

Of course, to address adequately questions concerning place, meaning, and identity

commercial strategies, emphasizing people's capacity to create their own readings,

Thus far I have provided a conventional account of Starbucks as a site of

lematic because it tends to reverse the culture-economy dualism it was seeking to

coffee (New York Times Magazine, December 3, 1989, p. 8).

ORDERING COFFEE: THIRD WORLDING WITH STARBUCKS

coffee consumption and an imaginative geography of the "exotic" lands beyond

Ancient. Complex. Veiled in centuries of ritual and mystery. Sanani's a coffee

Arriving in Guatemala City is a little like flying into a kaleidoscope. Familiar

Starbucks customers are "issued" their own individualized "travel documents"

Gautemala Antigua: Central American complexity and elegance is celebrated

In mass culture, imperialist nostalgia takes the form of reenacting and

image but to become the Other (hooks, 1992, p. 25).

It is precisely this "deflection through desire" that I believe characterizes Star-

In these examples, production is not so much effaced as it is featured. What is effaced,

I will conclude by offering a few comments on what I perceive to be the main

represents an inclination (especially among white consumers) to embrace difference

Abramovitch, Ingrid, 1993, Miracles of marketing: How to reinvent your product.

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