Starbucks and the death of hipster capitalism

Taster's choice? Hard to imagine

Howard Schultz, the visionary behind Starbucks, is worth $1.1 billion, which makes him one of the most successful businessmen of the Boomer cohort, and I’m saddened to read that he has completely lost his mind.

I began to question the lad’s commercial sense a year ago, when Schultz introduced instant oatmeal into his stores, and insisted it was a superior offering, absolutely the best oatmeal ever. I tried it. It was swill. At the time, you had to wonder the extent to which Schultz’s instincts would eventually decline, and I pondered the seemingly ludicrous notion that Starbucks might soon try to sell instant coffee to accompany the dreadful reconstituted oatmeal.

Well, as you’ve probably read, Schultz has gone and done that unlikely thing — but it’s even worse than that.

During the coming 72 hours, Starbucks will try to persuade you, by giving away samples of their new instant coffee, that the buck-a-cup synthetic is just as good as the three-dollar brewed coffee they’ve been pouring.

"You see? I told you it wasn't that bad..."

Toward what end? In the highly improbable case that the instant may not taste like something procured in bulk by the provisioning agents at the state Department of Corrections, Starbucks will have succeeded in conditioning their patrons to trade down, thus reducing their corporate revenues. Indeed, if discerning coffee-drinkers come to realize that the powdered substitute ain’t that bad, what is to prevent them from gravitating toward the neighborhood Wal-Mart, where the canny consumer can snare an entire month’s supply of the stuff, at the same price Schultz seeks for a single cup?

The question is moot, of course. Everyone knows that instant coffee is never going to be equivalent to the real stuff, in the same way that shaking a dose of generic “coffee whitener” on top of your joe is not the same as mixing in a daub of half-and-half. You can fib to yourself (or to your company’s directors), as Schultz has done, but it’s madness to think that you can pass the con along to your customers, and not suffer the consequence. There was a media buyer I used to visit, a fellow named Roy Chernoff, who used to offer up truly terrible instant coffee, out of an Old World impulse to be hospitable. I’d sip it politely and suffer silently, because Roy was a gentleman, and because I wanted very much for him to give me money. That was an altogether different set of circumstances from allowing Howard Schultz to think that I’m prepared to hand him cash to revisit my wretched-coffee-with-Roy moment. Heck with that.

What has gone wrong at Starbucks? It’s not simply that management seems anxious to diminish their brand by offering inferior new products. I’d say it’s more an issue of general entropy, the usual course of what happens when time passes by.

It isn’t Schultz’s fault that he’s become a stumble-bum overseeing an empire-in-retreat. It’s simply, sadly, that it isn’t 1984 any more, and the old acumen is likely to have suffered some wear-and-tear.

Ah, if we could all go back to the day when Howard and his buddies, all those baby boomer businessmen, used to be so adorable, as they opened their head shops and jeans stores and macrobiotic food kiosks and used record and comic book stores and leather outlets and stained-glass studios, sandblasting the walls and stripping the floors of the cheap retail space in the hip neighborhood, playing that same Moody Blues LP over and over again, filling the world’s nostrils with the stench of patchouli oil. They began as outsiders up against the forces of mainstream retailing, hipsters with a practical cut-throat streak.

Up here in Canada, once upon a time, the government even went so far as to tax funds from struggling wage-earners and redistribute them over to the little whipper-snappers who dreamed of opening up a funky candle store somewhere near the Farmer’s Market. And damned if the government didn’t want the money back — ever! It was free! Why? Just because it was so irresistable to encourage a rebellious, disaffected B.Comm.-grad who was starting a fresh new business venture in the cruel, cold world. Not very many of the hip capitalists endured for longer than a few months. As for the working-class families who financed these experiments, for their contributions they received the privilege of continuing to pay income tax until death. Hardly equitable, but that’s Canadian economics  for you.

“My dream is to bring lattes and chai tea to the masses,” is what Howard and all the other Howards might have inscribed in their high school yearbooks. (And if you’d told them then and there that they would survive only to become the kind of people who would just-add-water to packets of Nescafe and Quaker’s Oats, they probably would have threatened to idealistically pop you in the snoot.)

Things change — indeed they do — but I still can’t see this development at Starbucks as anything less than the curtain coming down on the age of the groovy entrepreneur. For Schultz won’t be content with merely trying to sell instant coffee. Watch for other, more absurd product introductions in the months to come: The world’s greatest instant chocolate pudding, accompanied with a superb spoonful of Dream Whip. The ultimate Spam sandwich on Wonder bread, topped with excellent mock-mayonnaise. A breakthrough in instant orange-y drinks, that you’ll swear is tastier than Tang, garnished with one pristine ice cube.

This isn’t what anyone would admiringly declare to be retro-chic. I fear it’s just time running out.

The Summer the Morons Took Over Town

Toronto native Glenn Gould, who was both a grand musician and, irrefutably, an all-out whack-job, used to say that the area of his home town where he felt most at home was Don Mills, and that comment was taken by many as proof of his eccentricity. He explained that he felt completely at peace driving alone in his automobile, amid the anonymity and featurelessness, the order and hollowness of the place, which was developed at a post-war planned community. My public school geography textbooks, and possibly yours, contained lithographed photos of the Don Mills Center, an outdoor shopping mall that epitomized the Atomic Age. The soundtrack to that low-slung, artfully treed architectural vision was Gould massaging the ivories, letting loose the Goldberg Variations.

Don Mills: A mid-century urban paradise

By the time I scored a big-time publishing job and went to work in Don Mills, in the 1980s, the Center had been enclosed, like most of its counterparts among suburban retailing complexes. A couple of parts of the original plaza that had not been covered became satellites of the indoor mall, such as the government-run liquor store, and the Dominion supermarket. Further outposts had been opened, including the pizza stand where our company’s hard-charging CEO sometimes could be observed scoring his bag of cocaine after a long day of boardroom strategizing. Safe and warm inside the mall, there was a second-story bar that I happened to like. It was patterned after the standard-issue airport cocktail lounges of 15 years earlier. The fellows who brought you beer and peanuts wore old-timey cocktail-waiter jackets, and the sound system offered up Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, during this period when Cyndi Lauper reigned on the airwaves.

As will happen over time, the mall became rundown and seedy. The anchor tenant, an Eaton’s department store, famously closed and spiralled downmarket as an ever-grubbier succession of flea markets took over the space. The swank bar was replaced by an unswank fitness club. The landlord had seen these signs occurring in other retail centers, and went back to the drawing board. Boom went the wrecking balls.

The reborn Don Mills Center opened late this Spring, returned to its Modernist roots as an outdoor plaza. The new old center opened to generally good reviews, if not throngs of customers dying to spend their money on designer gee-gaws.

Post-modern Don Mills: Back to the nearly stench-free future

I wandered over yesterday, and liked what I saw. It`s little different from those new post-modern retail recreations of small-town Main Street that are popping up all over the continent. It reminded me a little of Kierland Commons, in the Phoenix suburbs — but right now that isn’t the main selling point.

First and foremost, the center is just about the only place in Toronto that doesn’t currently carry an offensive stench, or reward the sightseer with vistas of refuse, stemming from the disruption of garbage-collection services by unionized workers. The strike is now into its second month, and there is no end in sight.

The mayor of Toronto, a moron co-incidentally named Miller, but not Don Miller, went on CNN the other week to deny that his practice of dumping household waste in public parks and gardens detracts in any way from the city’s appeal as a tourist destination this summer. Reaching out to the blue-collar U.S. tourists who used to pack picnic hampers and sit in minivans for a couple of hours to enjoy Toronto’s theme parks, baseball stadium and shopping drags, he urged viewers to come see our new opera house, with its ‘world class’ acoustics — like it would occur to Mr. and Mrs. Hamtramck that it’s time to put on their Tigers caps, and visit Toronto to catch the fat broad warbling through Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Lest you think this mayoral nincompoop has lost his judgment as a stress-induced consequence of prolonged negotiations with intransigent unions, be assured that he was widely regarded as an idiot long before any of this unpleasantness started.

Looks appealing, certainly, but will it pass the smell-test?

There’s a tourist attraction not far from my house that is a popular spot for summer weddings. It faces the Humber River and adjacent parkland and jogging trails. The park, named for the explorer Etienne Brule, is a wonderful garden that has been converted into a temporary garbage dump for the duration of the strike. You should see how unhappy the wedding parties seem, when the stink begins to waft over. A couple of dozen strikers hang around all day, standing by an oil-drum fire, providing added atmosphere by haranguing area residents who wish to dump their garbage. One of the elements key to their dispute is that the workers felt entitled to bank their unused ‘sick days’ and accumulate them to apply toward early retirement. I heard a proponent of this fanciful  notion on the radio, explaining that it was only fair, because in the private sector, employees receive big bonuses just for showing up for work on time. Evidently, this demand has been dropped, but the two sides remain far apart.

God, we used to be smug in Toronto. Back when Peter Ustinov wittily described the city as ‘New York run by the Swiss,’ we bragged about our litter-free streets, our inspiring parks, our reliable public transportation, our upright coppers, our dependable civic government.

I’m no chauvinist, but I remember urging friends from New York to try out the graffiti-free subway system, as a novel experience. We were so insufferably superior, in yapping about our egalitarian streets, schools, and systems.

Now, just look at the place. Every visitor who had to listen to any Torontocentric creep condescendingly explain about how we don’t have the private gated residential communities you-all have in the states must be laughing like Ricky Ricardo. If I had out-of-towners coming in this summer, I’d be embarrassed to have them set foot in most parts of this trashy burg. Instead, I’d run them over to the Don Mills Center, for an antiseptic, hollow,  pleasant, stench-free evening of drinks, dinner, and bookstore-browsing.  ”This,” I would tell them, “this is what things used to be like here, before that half-wit Miller and those brain-damaged unions ruined the city forever.”

The Taliban, Cheney, and humankind’s frenzied race to the bottom

Yesterday, a man named Nigel Wrench, who is the BBC’s evening newsreader, said this, following a reporter’s item about the Pakistani Taliban’s habit of kidnapping children for deployment as suicide-bombers: “Children as lethal weapons. Humanity reaches a new low.”

Is he live, or merely a creation of Chester Gould?

Impossible to argue. That’s why we in the western world don’t think twice about assigning people the task of keeping us safe from those who would turn children into exploding devices and send them out into crowds, to be detonated.

What we could not have imagined, and never factored in, as part of this bargain, was Dick Cheney. And yet, here he is, insistently making his case that because our enemies are monstrous, it behooves us to engage them on their terms, matching tit for tat.

 

Chester, the occasional molestor of rationality

When I say that ”we” couldn’t imagine the Cheney chain of logic, I must exclude Chester Gould. The creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, who late in his life became something of a rabid right-wing lunatic, sketched out an invented character, Diet Smith, who was an unapologetic weapons merchant and a special pal of police departments everywhere. Mr. Smith created a death-ray that instantly vaporized miscreants, and he demonstrated its effective use to his cop buddies. “Where’d the bad guys go?” Detective Tracy asked the arms salesman, who replied, “You’re breathing them.” The cartoonist, Mr. Gould, specialized in drawings of middle-aged white men with heads tilted back and teeth exposed, roaring with laughter, and here he employed just such a panel, framed with the credo, “Violence is golden… when it’s used to put down evil.”

 

Capitalist Smith (with moustache) and his tool, Det. Tracy

 

 

I recall this comic strip appeared in the early 1970s. As a kid reading this stuff, it struck me as more than a little silly, kind of gross, and out of step with the times. Regardless, it was something out of the funny papers, and not to be taken seriously.

 

Gould's gang: Paving the way for a character named 'Chainy'

Flash forward 35 years, and you have a serious-looking fellow who looks like he was rendered in the stylized manner of artist Gould, drawn as a balding lard-tub with curled lip, connoting malevolence, and this cartoonish fellow is out there reviving the Diet Smith dialogs. Mr. Gould, who never failed to find a way to clamber over the top, would have insisted on making his fictive character, his own private take on Dick Cheney, into something more memorable than merely another sadistic nut. (That would be in keeping with his inventions of characters with eccentric personas such as ‘Half and Half,’ ‘Mumbles,’ and ‘Pruneface.’) So, continuing this string of uncanny depictions, Mr. Gould likely would have made his imaginary Mr. Cheney as ‘Chainy,’ a former high-ranking elected official, — say, a retired vice-president of the United States — turned invalid, who bitterly criss-crosses the planet in a personal rocket-propelled wheelchair, flailing out with a rusty motorcycle chain while mumbling his tough-guy philosophy. Mr. Gould might have been wrong about the rocket-chair, possibly, but, otherwise he’s mapped out this comic-strip Chainy right down to the 1930s-vintage baggy serge suiting. “Violence is golden… when it’s used to put down evil.”

 

Today’s paper contains the stunning claim that US soldiers raped suspected enemy combatants during interrogations. That’s the allegation, and as much as you don’t want to believe it, you wait for Dick Cheney to fly overhead in his rocket-chair and shriek, “So what? Look what they did during 9/11!” He, and the proponents of what they call “enhanced interrogation methods,” because people seem to get squeamish around words such as “torture,” will deny that rape occurred, and are bound to describe it instead as “assault with a friendly weapon,” appropriating Lee Marvin’s line from “Cat Ballou.”

However, even in the sometimes morally ambiguous world of Chester Gould (which, it occurs to me, really should be the name of a theme park, somewhere), it should be hard to put a virtuous spin on the practice of raping prisoners. The stark realities of current politics require us to take sides, and we’re with the side whose aim is to prevent occurrences such as innocent children being strapped to incendiary devices. That doesn’t mean we’d ever wish to hear some angry old jackass encouraging the institutionalized policy of abusing prisoners, either theirs or ours. That’s the kind of argument that was born of the comics page, and, for the well-being of our race, for the good of humankind, it really does need to stay there.