Next up: let’s teach toddlers how to fly planes
Siva Vaidhyanathan reminded us of this thing he wrote four years ago about Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, who has apparently announced that he’s running for president ffs.
The next time you order one of those faux-Italian-named sweetened coffee drinks at a Starbucks store, you are likely to receive a cup with the hash-tagged words “Race Together” written on it, just above your misspelled name. If you ask the Starbucks employee what it’s about, she or he will tell you that it’s part of a new corporate initiative to inspire customers to discuss racial issues with employees and among themselves.
Dear god. Why would I want to do that? Why would anyone?
Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz is no doubt sincere about his belief in Starbucks as a site and his employees as facilitators of measured deliberation about the legacies of 400 years of slavery, segregation, violence, and migration. But his commitment rests on the naïve arrogance of privilege.
Along with, I’m guessing, a generous helping of vanity.
“What can we do to create more empathy, more compassion, more understanding?,” Shultz asked his employees this week (the company calls them “partners” to mask the nature of the labor-management relationship). “Perhaps we could do something that could be catalytic for the country.”
While making hot drinks from combinations of coffee and sweet syrups, or making change at the cash register. I don’t think so.
All over the United States, teachers, clergy, police officers, and community activists have always fostered carefully moderated conversations about race. In communities large and small, these conversations have had modest but largely local effects. Even after years of experience and deep training in facilitating such discussions, those who run them don’t necessarily find them easy or comfortable. In fact, the less comfortable the discussions are, the more good they might do.
Schultz has expressed no recognition of these longstanding efforts and conversations that hard-working professionals have been pursuing through the public sector and houses of worship. He seems to think that Starbucks should fill some vacuum he perceives in American public life. In doing so, he overestimates the centrality of a corporate chain of overpriced coffee shops to that civic experience.
Which is putting it mildly. Teachers, clergy, police officers, and community activists all get some training or education in the field, especially if they’re going to be fostering conversations on it. Baristas, not so much. It’s of course possible that some or many baristas have deep experience and education on racial issues, but they don’t all have it because that’s a major part of their job.
But if he thinks his employees somehow magically know how to facilitate conversations on racial issues, no wonder he thinks he somehow magically knows how to be president.
Being president is easy – anyone can do it. After all, weren’t we all brought up on the idea that anyone can be president? (Seriously? When I looked at pictures of presidents past and present in my history books, there was no secret about it – I could not be president. My figure curved in all the wrong places).
As for race, well, we all have a race, right? We all check a box on those endless forms we’re always filling out. And many of us have friends who are other races, so why wouldn’t we be uniquely qualified to talk about race, each and every one of us?
As a college teacher, I talk about race only within the parameters of my own training, which has been narrowly focused. I do not presume to strike up conversations with strangers in coffee shops (or book stores, or libraries, or theater productions, or movies, or any of the other – not many – places that I frequent).
And Starbucks has crappy coffee.
Espresso machines are ubiquitous in Spain. Go into any dive bar in any village in any remote corner of Spain, and they will have one. You ask for “only coffee”, “coffee with milk”, or “cut coffee” (just a bit of milk). In the summer you might ask for “coffee with ice”. And of course there’s “decaffeinated coffee”. (All this in Spanish, of course, or perhaps Catalan or Gallego, because that’s what people speak there.) Sugar comes on the side. It’s all decent quality, and it doesn’t take ten effin minutes to serve it.
All of which is to say I find Starbucks terribly annoying, and the thought of Howard Shultz running for president more so.
Sadly, Schultz is no longer Chairman or CEO of Starbucks. I was all set to join a boycott of the company (for what little it matters — I sometimes buy their beans at the grocery store, but rarely set foot in one of their locations).
Same in France, as far as I know – they’re just how you get coffee: totally standard, and simple. It’s so embarrassingly American to have to sweeten them up disgustingly and then apply bogus Italian names to them.
And sweet coffee? Yuck.
Remember that time those Starbucks employees called the police because some black people came into their store?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/04/14/starbucks-apologizes-after-employee-calls-police-on-black-men-waiting-at-a-table/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1c6263e52970
latsot, who could forget? I haven’t been in a Starbucks since, and I usually only go there to use their internet when none of the other Internet in a town I’m visiting seems to be working.
You know, I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a Starbucks, even for wifi. As someone who has made some studies of wifi in public spaces, I strongly suggest that you avoid it as you would their coffee. They don’t provide wifi as an incentive for you to hang out in the same way that Amazon don’t provide a gift wrapping service to save you time and effort.
If you do use public wifi (and you shouldn’t if you can help it) make sure you know how to protect yourself to the extent you can. I’ve written software that looks for vulnerabilities in public networks so that I can try to do something about it. There are a lot more people who can and do exploit vulnerabilities. I was at Newcastle station a week or so ago and my tricorder passively found some vulnerabilities in some of the networks around the place, including Starbucks.
Be careful. And if you want proper coffee, Italy is the place to be, none of this Spain or France nonsense.
latsot, I am aware of that, but as someone who travels, and who teaches online, I often have little choice but public wifi. If you have any suggestions how to protect oneself in that situation, I would gladly hear them, because it is right now impossible for me to maintain my playwriting life if I have to stay home where my own wifi is, since I live in a smallish rural city with only a lackluster theatre community. And giving up theatre? To be told to do that (as some suggest) would be to discriminate against those of us who got stuck living in a place we don’t want to be because that is where we were able to find work.
@iknklast
I’m always a little wary of giving specific advice without a lot more conversation: the measures one takes depend on what there is to protect, from what or whom and why. And also what rigmarole you’re willing to go through and how you assess the risks.
We could certainly have that conversation if you like but at the least you should use a VPN on public wifi (and if you’re sensible, your cell and home networks too). That will protect you from a lot of casual and malicious snooping. It’s not enough by any means, but it’s a good start. It won’t stop your activities being tracked, for example and it won’t make you anonymous, but it will mostly stop idiots like me (or whoever is running the wifi) from easily stealing your passwords and traffic.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop your VPN provider from stealing your passwords and selling them to me, but you have to pick your battles. Like I said, I’m happy to have a proper conversation about this somewhere more appropriate.
Some of us have family in Spain.
Sorry, that was a bit snippy of me.
Was it? I’m not clear on what it was responding to?
Anyway, I appreciated the informative comment. I remember being informed back in the distant past that I was ordering coffee incorrectly in Paris: the correct term was “un espress.” Murkans used to think of espresso as this exotic exciting thing one drank after dinner, not just as the normal way to drink coffee.
Perhaps I was the one causing insult by saying Italian coffee is better than Spanish.
I don’t believe that, of course, I was just joking about people deciding more or less at random that there’s a true coffee culture and a somehow fake one. I find it hilarious. 25 years ago, for example, only idiot tourists would order a cappuccino after breakfast time in Italy and in certain parts of Spain. You were totally dorky and pathetic if you didn’t know that. 10 years previously, of course, nobody in Italy had ever heard of that ‘rule’, Cappuccino was thought of as mostly a morning drink but nobody actually cared if anyone had one after noon.
It was the fact that tourists who decided (after a couple of days in a country) that they were experts in how to drink coffee locally that made it seem as though there were finicky rules. Nobody local had really thought about it before.
It’s a bit like Americans constantly asserting that we Brits insist on warm beer. And we eat only offal gathered from roadkill, prepared in the least apetising way, if you believe LITERALLY EVERY AMERICAN SITCOM EVER.
But I’m not bitter. Unlike the warm beer and the roadkill offal.
Ah I’d forgotten that in the meantime. Of course it was you! It always is.
I’m doing the true/fake thing right there, aren’t I, but I stand by it. For years, decades, “normal” American coffee was weak stewed piss in a Pyrex pot. They did it better in Paris.
HEY…..
Although fair enough.
It’s not as though we British can claim much coffee expertise. Outside having owned a lot of slaves and stealing people’s land to grow coffee on and that sort of thing. We still ended up with shit coffee, somehow.
Since I’m already in disgrace I’m going to blame our shit coffee on you yanks taking too long to intervene in the war. Then coming over here with your chewing gum and teeth and sexual appeal….
Yeah, I was responding to latsot. I shouldn’t post before bedtime. (For what it’s worth, I’ve only spent a couple of weeks in Italy, mostly in and around Palermo.)
Re American coffee, it’s a lot like American beer: most of what you get is tasteless crap, but on the margins we have some of the best in the world. I actually prefer drip coffee when it’s done well. I’ve been roasting my own beans for the past few years, and I’ve come to appreciate lighter roasts–done right, and with the right beans, they produce an interesting variety of flavors (don’t ask me to describe them–I’ve never been good at that). Whereas Starbucks-style burnt roast just tastes burnt.
I’ve never really been a big fan of coffee but having lived in various bits of Europe I love that you can sit outside a cafe or bar at 10pm and order an espresso or a little plate of something to eat then go home or back to work or to a club or to another bar for a different coffee or tapas.
I love the more British attitude of *caning* it once you clock off at 5pm too, but that’s definitely a young person’s game. Things are changing. We Brits have learned a lot about how to have relaxed, brilliant nights out from our European cousins over the last few decades.
Kind of a shame we’re telling them all to fuck off in the next few weeks, isn’t it?
We try to get out of Spain for at least a week during our annual trip. This year our son is tasked with the planning and so initially it was going to be built around his twin obsessions: the Beatles and the World Wars. So a day in Liverpool, a day in London, then over to the north of France.
Now we’re thinking Germany.
Do spend some time in Germany if you can. Berlin is great – not as much weird fun as it used to be but still an amazing place. The past is printed everywhere if you know where to look. I love the smaller towns, too, especially in the former East. Micro-breweries on every corner and people who want to talk about everything.
When I visited Spain some years ago, I tried coffee prepared a variety of locally popular ways. I decided my favorite was cortado, “cut” with a little steamed milk. I hadn’t seen on a menu in the US until I noticed it at a new coffee shop here in Montgomery (well, the shop is a few years old and recently moved and expanded). I ordered their cortado, and it was heavenly, by far the best coffee I’ve had in town. They also make excellent latte and cappuccino, but the cortado is again my favorite. I still go to Starbucks for convenience; they have many locations, a drive thru, and reliably acceptable concoctions. But when downtown, only one place will do now.
Yeah, I like cortado too. (And as far as I can tell, “macchiato” is Italian for “cortado”.)
There are subtle differences: warm milk versus milk foam, and the ratio of milk to coffee. But they are close enough that there are a bunch of articles addressing the question of how they differ.
You could throw a flat white (Australasian) into that camp as well. Again, minor but important differences in milk texture, coffee:milk:foam ratios.