I just received an SMS message from our Samizdatista at large, Michael Jennings, who is currently in Shanghai, China, expressing his relief at arriving in a Starbucks coffee house.
It should be no surprise that Starbucks, that monolith of globalisation and spearhead of Western Imperialism, decadence and coffee beans, should be found in Shanghai, fast becoming one of the key cities of the 21st century.
The ambience of a coffee house generates rational discussion. Many of the key figures of the 18th Century Enlightenment honed their ideas around Java beans. Naturally, with coffee providing a stimulus, it is the natural clearinghouse of ideas for clever people, as sociable as a pub, but without the side-effects of a pint of ale.The culture of coffee beans was gradually displaced by tea in the tastes of English people in the 19th century, and coffee only gradually emerged as the favourite beverage of Americans.
Of course, it may or may not be a coincidence that since Starbucks was founded in 1971, technological change and artistic innovation based on the sort of ‘grass-root’ initative that Glenn Reynolds talks about in his new book has skyrocketed. And it continues to grow at an ever expanding rate. This has done a great deal to enrich our current post-industrial civillization, and the humble coffee bean has proven itself to be a great support for all manners of high culture.
And for those moments when one has just climbed out of bed at 1 in the afternoon, when one vaguely recalls having a Chinese meal at about 4am, but one is otherwise attempting to figure out what hour/day/continent it is, a caffeine hit at Starbucks is a wonderful thing.
Has to be black coffee, however – they use horrible long life milk EVERYWHERE in China (including Starbucks), which gives the beverage an odd smell and taste. It also leaves an unpleasant grease film around your lips.
Sadly, fresh milk (esp. in coffee) is a distant delight for the Chinese and expatriates alike.
So true. But life did not begin with Starbucks. All through the years I was student, grad student and a decade later as staff researcher at CMU, the large, airy Skibo Hall fast food area was where I got much heavy duty technology thinking and calculating done. For any old CMU Alum out there who will know what I mean, I was a balcony resident 🙂 (The new campus layout is nice, but I miss ‘the wall’.)
While I was with my first start up in the mid 1970’s, I did much of my PDP-11 and 6502 Assembly code hacking in a Papa Joe’s in Squirrel Hill… I knew the students who worked there and in fact hired two of them! They let me sit there at one of their tables for hours on end with the big old line printer listings in binders while they fed me a continuous stream of coffee refills.
They in the late 1990’s when I was doing consulting in NYC I discovered Starbucks and it became my morning office. Laptop, mobile phone, some paper and a pen… hey, what else do you need?
With the WiFi revolution coming along, I can see people spending less and less time in the office and instead working independently and getting the energy of being surrounded by people from the coffee shop office instead of the old form of office.
I’m there already. I wonder how many others are?
And of course Lloyds of London, the insurance outfit, started out in a coffee house.
One of the things I love about Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Trilogy” is how he shows this sort of stuff: bewigged merchants and “natural philosophers” exchanging thoughts over coffee.
It is fashionable for the anti-globalistas to rag on the big coffee chains, but arguably they have done rather more for the welfare of mankind than all the government departments put together.
We’ll know when China has overtaken the West–there’ll be franchised opium dens all over London.
I’m thinking of registering the name ‘Chinese Junk’ for the business. Early morning commuters will be seduced with the slogan ‘Wake up and smell the tea’.
Does this mean that Starbucks is one of the Illuminati(Link)?
I love drinking coffee all day long, but nowadays only consume decaf blends. If I do drink caffienated, it interferes with my sleep, and I miss my morning and afternoon naps.
We know. Steve is one of… us 😉
Comedy entry of the year.
Good show, old man.
IIRC, the Enlightenment-era coffee houses – places that attracted people from all walks of life – were a British phenomenon, not a French one. The breeding grounds for France’s Enlightenment were its elites-only salons. England had a blogosphere; France had think tanks.
Alan, there is an article in that comment, methinks!
The Starbucks phenomenon is something a lot of our young folk studying the social sciences just don’t understand. Their Ward Churchilll clone professors teach them the old Marxxian paradigm of the exploiters and exploited and I used to try to straighten them out by pointing out that if the confrontational life view of winners and losers were in fact the case, civilization as we know it would never have developed and we’d all still be running around in animal skins bashing each others heads in.
Facts such as innovation, creativity transactions which are mutually satisfying just don’t get a look in which is why so many young folk are twisted, suspicious and bitter. They should all be locked up and forced to read An Army of Davids.
Pshaw! Ninny-broth.
We’ve also got think tanks in Britain these days. Far too bloody many of them, called the Institute for this or the Centre for that as if they were respectable academic institutions, not pressure groups full of young pups with bumfluff telling us our business.
I find Starbucks coffee bland and will go out of my way to find an alternative shop offering real coffee. In France or Italy, you can get great coffee almost on every street corner. I imagine that the old London coffee houses dispensed something closer to real coffee than Starbucks. Down in “downtown” Campbell, CA, near to the library, there is a place which has a genuine French coffee machine clearly visible from the window. I went in and found terrific coffee, as well as Starbucky options for those who preferred such. Three cheers for choice!
I find Starbucks coffee bland and will go out of my way to find an alternative shop offering real coffee. In France or Italy, you can get great coffee almost on every street corner. I imagine that the old London coffee houses dispensed something closer to real coffee than Starbucks. Down in “downtown” Campbell, CA, near to the library, there is a place which has a genuine French coffee machine clearly visible from the window. I went in and found terrific coffee, as well as Starbucky options for those who preferred such. Three cheers for choice!
On the subject of coffee, can anyone recommend a good brand of decaf? Yeah, decaf isn’t the same as caf, but I’m trying to eat and drink a little healthier. And decaf is still loaded with antioxidants.
Starucks coffee is crap. They overcook the beans, which gives the coffee a taste of burned water, and then overcharge the gullible and re-invent the measuring system (vente, grande, massivo, mussolini, whatever) instead of the small-medium-large measures everyone is comfortable with.
I have no problem with Starbucks The Business Model. But their coffee is expensive shit, and their attitude about it pretentious. It plays well to the trendies and the insecure, but for normal people, it’s a total turnoff.
Incidentally, the last time I had Starbucks coffee was in similar circumstances to Brian’s. Back in 2000, The Mrs. and I ducked into one in Edinburgh, after two weeks of trying in vain to find decent coffee in Britain outside Valerie’s in Knightsbridge.
I managed half a cup of the Vente Latto before giving up. We went to a pub and drank beer instead.
The best commercially-available coffee in the U.S. is made by the Dunkin’ Donuts chain. We get the lovely stuff delivered by the case each month, and drink about four (large, not Grande) cups each, per day.
Quoth my high school history teacher:
“Without caffeine, Western Civilization as we know it would not exist.”