ETHNOGRAPHIC REPORT

Ethnographic report: Starbucks Cafe



Ethnographic report: Starbucks Cafe

Introduction

A prominent retailer of fair trade coffee is Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee shop chain that in 2010 boasts over 15,000 stores in 50 countries and has capitalized on the interest in specialty coffees to define a new consuming urban lifestyle at the turn of the twenty-first century. Starbucks sells a variety of coffees with multiple options in size, preparation (iced, espresso, macchiato, decaf, etc.), and accompaniment of pastries and sandwiches, at a decent price/value. The lounge setting, sometimes featuring couches and sofas, designs Starbucks coffee shops into mass-produced replicas of the eighteenth-century European coffeehouses and their relaxed atmosphere for conversation and reading (Highmore, 2002, pp. 35).

Description

The Starbucks chain cafe originally conceptualized as being the “third place”: neither the place of work nor the place of leisure—but a location to which the worker brings his co-worker to socialize as well as talk business or brings his partner to meet other co-workers. The Starbucks environment, with furniture style neither office nor home, food neither fast nor slow, and free wireless internet access, can be read in just this way. In this context, the waitress can be understood to engage in all-important affective labor: creating this environment, so that the environment agreeably insinuates itself into everyday life and becomes the area for commerce. The move from blue collar to white collar is a move ever further toward affective labor. The waitress engages in standard material labor (food preparation and serving), but it is her immaterial labor (smiling, chatting) that becomes crucial—particularly at the point of hire (Schultz, 1997, pp. 351).

At the same time, the importation of Italian coffee culture, the freedom for customers to hang out in the premises for as long as they want, and even the very ubiquity of Starbucks makes it a close response to the idealized notion of an Italian bar, the community pub that local people visit informally to reinforce existing relationships and create new ones. In fact, it been theorized that the popularity of Starbucks has resulted from its ability to supply, along with coffee, a “third space” between the isolation of the suburban home and a workplace that no longer provides security and predictable socialization of the past. This third space, made safe by the brand-name assurance mainstream America seeks for and projected into the global network by the free Wi-Fi Internet connection that allows customers to continue to work and shop, incorporates the coffeehouse cultures pre-Starbucks and effectively readapts them to the present social environment (Blumenthal, 2007, pp. 309).

In this café, the waitress might engage with “no-collar” workers (i.e., no office dress code; the ease of the T-shirt, collar free, favored by cultural workers and IT workers), who in turn will be socializing or talking business with their clients. If self-employed, they have no need for an office—and the café effectively functions as an appropriately informal meeting place for those who work in industries that have no more need of the formal spaces (offices, conference rooms) of ...