25 years ago (gulp) when I was a student in Chapel Hill, you could go to the Carolina Coffee Shop and get a fairly bad cup of coffee. By 1986 could you get a really first rate cup of coffee only if you went to Broad Street Roasters in Carrboro.
Even the Ninth Street Bakery, with its tremendous Bear Claws could not give you a decent brew. Magnolia Grill (where I would work) had not yet opened and Lex Alexander had not yet bought the old grocery across the way and turn it into the Wellspring (eventually to be Whole Foods).
After college while living in Washington, DC it was the same story. No decent coffee. So I arranged for Broad Street to send me three pounds of beans a month. A pound of Guatemalan Coffee. A pound of French Roast. And a pound of Sumatra, which I would blend.
Each month the box came to my apartment on Lincoln Park, smelling wonderful.
I traveled in 1990 to Portland and had a great cup of coffee at Starbucks, and not long afterwards, Broad Street told me they would not be able to keep shipping me coffee. I called Starbucks and they happily filled my orders and every month my shipments came. About two years later Starbucks too ceased to deliver beans to my house, but by then they had begun to open retail outlets in the DC area – and elsewhere – and I could get beans that way. Their influence began to widen, of course, and it became possible to obtain coffee from Peets and other retailers.
In 1995 I and others started a farmers market in my new community – Del Ray, a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia. But the retail strip we ventured onto was merely storefront churches, beauty salons, decrepid redneck bars, and vacant lots. No coffee.
We found a street vendor who occupied a spot across from the Library of Congress and she agreed to come each saturday to our new and young and tiny farmer’s market. Between her arrival and those of a few farmers, neighbors could get heirloom tomatoes and apples before they became vogue and also get a great cup of coffee.
A local developer watched and saw an opportunity and put in a local coffee shop – St Elmos – on Mount Vernon Avenue, so now we had a farmer’s market on one side of the street and good coffee on the other. The demographics had been shifting over the years so such an enterprise could work.
Del Ray had become less blue collar, more professional. The trucks yielded to the Volvos. The petunias gave way to lavender beds. Sub-zeros were delivered to homes undergoing rehab. Fancy baby strollers appeared. But for me, having a good cup of coffee so close was what mattered.
Of course demand for the coffee at the local shop was not always there. There didn’t magically appear pent up demand and knowledge. It was grown, and in my view not by the coffee fairy but by Starbucks. Much the same way Wellspring and Fresh Fields grew demand for organic produce beyond the hippie dippy set.
This presented no difficulty whatsoever to me. However hostile towards Wal-Mart and Borders Books and McDonald’s I may be, I loved – and still retain some love – for Starbucks, for what they did was expose people accustomed to drinking water that had had a brown crayon dipped in it and was masquerading as coffee to what a decent cup of real coffee could be. It’s not a latte that you would find on Le Boulevard Haussman, but it was not meant to be. It’s a strong cup of three dimensional coffee for a reasonable price now available almost (but still not) anywhere. As Americans migrated from fake bread to the real thing, so too did we leave behind Maxwells and Folgers for something better. A-fukcing men.
Amid this some very interesting class warfare issues took root and hold to this day.
Starbucks became associated with McDonalds and with everything we think about when we think about sprawl and corporate farming and the Earl Butzing of corporate Iowa corn. Why? Ubiquity has much to do with it. But so too does upper class ignorance.
Peets is no less present in some markets, but the Berkeley crowd fitted Peets with a badge of authenticity.
Which brings me to something else that happened 20 some years ago. I was in a poor South Carolina community working on housing issues when the mayor said, beaming with pride, in a slow southern drawl, “we got us a Piggly Wiggly!” A store no wealthy community would want he had recruited and was glad to have.
His pride was instructive, for it illustrated that we all look at retail as something of a proxy for how far we have come, the extent to which we’ve arrived, or how far we have yet to travel. Which it surely is.
Middle income communities want a Nordstrom instead of a Macy’s. Working class communities want to be a step up from Sears. In Mill Valley California when I was polling people there in 2002, they did not want a Starbucks, for that was seen as beneath them. At the same time, residents in derascinated Richmond couldn’t get a 7-Eleven. Santa Cruz could afford to fight a Borders (which is valiantly tried to fend off), while less affluent and less educated places like Fresno were thrilled to have a Barnes & Noble.
In my community in Alexandria, some of the older blue collar types get their coffee today at the 7-Eleven, and have personally told me they do not feel welcomed at the local shop – St. Elmo’s. This is sad and instructive.
In the strangest places you find a Starbucks – off highway 99 north of Madera, California in the middle of grape orchards. Some locals there will still gather at the Fruit Basket and drink light brown water claiming to be coffee, but others have seen Starbucks-induced customer knowledge and subsequent demand as opportunities for local entreprenurialism.
I saw this last week in upstate NY in the weak market city of Jamestown. Jamestown is too weak to induce Starbucks perhaps, but the community has for ten years now been exposed in other markets to what coffee can be and so even in small Jamestown there are two places where you can get local brew that’s quite tasty if not perfect. There, people are employed selling a product for which there was no demand just a few years ago.
Along this journey, two interesting storylines are not often acknowledged.
First is that thousands of coffee shops are flourishing in America only because Starbucks educated a pallid whitebread American palette. Second, they did so while providing health insurance and a great working environment and a growing environmental ethic.
What troubles me about the gripes you hear about Starbucks – and I myself have plenty starting with the proliferation of silly sugar bombs ten inches tall that have nothing to do with food and coffee and everything to do with tasteless kitch – is that Starbucks’ everpresence somehow is aesthetically unappealing and beneath us. That’s the worst kind of elitism and I say this occupying shaky ground on that front.
And worse, other coffee outlets like Peets – which I like fine – are somehow okay, and that the 3,000 small shops across the country that are locally owned would somehow have materialized on their own and become successful.
In elite communities like Santa Fe, NM you hear at the Aztec or in other places the refrain to “buy local”, which is crucial.
I started a Farmer’s Market that had as its original proviso a buy local requirement, and did this 15 years ago.
But the gripes about Starbucks are the same as those hollow ones about Whole Foods, for neither see that Starbucks and Whole Foods made possible the financial success of local coffee shops and local small farms by educating a rather ignorant America on one hand, and aggregating buying power on the other but in responsible if imperfect ways. And both are exemplars of responsible business stewardship.
Across America poor communities (which is where I work) pray for retail of the sort that Starbucks and Whole Foods bring. A stamp of arrival. Responsible stewardship of business relationships. Ethical employment opportunity. Tax base. They pray for grocery stores that might bring fresh produce and quality products. Jobs – imagine that!
On the other sides of those same towns, snotty buy local efforts miss the forest they want to save for the trees they themselves are milling, by looking down their noses at a Whole Foods or a Starbucks as insufficiently perfect.
Fifteen years ago two tiny farms came to my farmer’s market: an apple grower from Pennsylvania and a vegetable grower from Maryland. Neither could really make much money. They had only a few markets as outlets. No big buyers. They were eeking out a living as organic farmers and neither Safeway nor Giant had any interest in them.
Last year my Whole Foods in Alexandria had a display of local tomatoes and other produce featuring both those farms, which are now flourishing. My local farms can finance their organic aspirations because an admittedly imperfect buyer arrived to make it possible and now educated consumers demand such things. This is the same with Starbucks.
Welcome to the real world.
An astonishing challenge I face everyday in poor communities is that the good my work can often usher in is challenged not by them, but by their putative advocates who allow an achievable good to be killed in want of a distant perfect. They do this in housing circles when they resist making distressed neighborhood better for fear of gentrification and they do this when it comes to retail that is not perfect.
Is Whole Foods perfect? Far from it.
But I was there in Chapel Hill and Durham when Lex Alexander made Wellspring a beautiful contribution to our palettes and community and I welcome Whole Foods today.
Is Starbucks perfect? Far from it. But you can be sure the person making your coffee – even if they are making some stupid cream swirl thing for someone else – has health insurance and a good wage. These are not to be trifled. This is what community development is all about.
Our work in strong economies is to soften the harsh edges of a healthy market to create opportunities for people otherwise left behind, and do it in ways that don’t weaken market incentives.
Our work in already weak places is to make them strong.
The kinds of businesses we have in our communities – or don’t have – says much about the capital those communities bring to the table: social and financial.
Our work should not be about keeping an imperfect Starbucks or Whole Foods out on the basis of an ephemeral definition of authenticity, but how to move entire markets get quality products in sustainable ways to people in all kinds of circumstances, and do so in a manner cognizant of the world as it is. The achievable good is the necessary step towards anything better.
