- submitted by Linda Keenan on 02/06/2008
To Hell With Political Correctness. I Love Starbucks!
By Linda Keenan
I'm about to admit something that will get me run out of sophisticated society with people wielding deadly demitasse spoons: I love Starbucks. I don't want the company to close any of their stores as part of a global retrenchment. Not the one that, according to the company locator, is 0.8 miles away from me. Or 1.1 miles away. Or 2.2 miles away. Or even the one 4.8 miles away. I especially love the drive-thru one in Harpswell, Maine, where my mother-in-law lives. Not that her coffee is bad, of course. But it isn't Starbucks.
I am 38, and in 20 or so years of hard-core coffee drinking I have followed Starbucks from a smattering of urban stores (my local store in the mid-90s was Astor Place in Manhattan, one of the busiest in the world) to ubiquity in the city, to blessed saturation in the suburbs where I now live.
I well remember the era before Starbucks was on every corner, and from my perspective that was a benighted time for those who wanted a consistently good cup of coffee. I've been to innumerable coffee houses, often taken there by friends who couldn't stomach the idea of drinking "corporate" coffee. And I, in turn, found I often couldn't stomach the coffee they served. My experiences there were wildly inconsistent, and the employees often far more insolent and pretentious than any I've met at Starbucks. Of course there are terrific independent coffee houses, but I'm happy to note that those places I do remember fondly have continued to thrive in spite of Starbucks.
I should say that I am pathologically non-nostalgic, and I've never romanticized the "coffee experience," which is precisely what the Starbucks CEO seems intent on resurrecting. I don't long for spirited discussions of Voltaire with strangers when I get my coffee. I don't imagine a caffeine-fueled Algonquin Roundtable translated to my coffee shop off the interstate. Mostly what I want is to go to a place where my coffee is always good, where the lighting and furnishings are less dreary than, say, "Drunken Dognuts," where I can hear music that may be cynically chosen but undeniably better than most chain stores, where I can plug in my computer to join the modern café society I actually do belong to: the internet.
Is Starbucks good or bad for the world? Has the company exported coffee-drinking homogeneity around the globe? Does it treat growers fairly? Those questions are valid ones and I wouldn't attempt to answer them here, nor do I have the expertise to do so. But as for this committed coffee fiend, when it comes to consistent quality, a Starbucks Venti Bold is just my cup of tea.
Linda Keenan worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that, she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at
www.thoroughlymodernmommy.blogspot.com ...read more rants
88 likes 
