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MOST of the occasional emails that Somers passes on to me from the readers of this little column are complaints about my attitude--the basic point is usually that I should stop wasting energy complaining about things. Why people bother with this, I'll never know--the whole point of the column is what sucks. If I stopped writing about what sucks, there wouldn't be any more column. If you don't want to hear about what sucks, don't read the column--certainly 99.9% of the human race is way ahead of you there. Still, I'll begin this essay with a sop to my critics, and discuss one thing I like: Coffee. Now, I've given everything away in my title, as usual, so you know that I'm going to quickly jump into lambasting the Starbucks corporation's suckiness. Let me preface this by saying that I know I am not the only person to write about how much they suck, and probably a few of the points I make here will be the same points other--and better--writers have already made. Too bad. Go write an essay titled Tim, The Angry Clown Sucks and be happy in your work. Getting back to the point, I do like coffee. Coffee is one of those triumphs of humanity, that we took a bitter, unattractive plant and somehow figured out how to coax something amazing from it--a good cup of coffee on a cold morning is one of the few truly heavenly pleasures we have. I'm not a coffee snob or a true gourmet, but I think I know a good cup from a bad cup, at least within the usual boundaries of shifting tastes. We may not agree exactly on what makes a good cup of coffee, but I'm sure we could agree on certain loose guidelines. I don't have any insane devotion to any particular type of coffee, and I'm not particularly anti-corporate. In fact, I think Dunkin' Donuts makes a pretty fine cup of coffee. I don't think there would ever be an occasion for me to write an essay called DUNKIN DONUTS SUCKS--though never say never. Starbucks, on the other hand, does suck. And hard--it sucks hard, bubba. There are many reasons for this: One, its coffee sucks. It's drinkable, but barely. I have no data to back this up, but I think most people buy the sugary fancy drinks in a Starbucks and not the actual down-and-dirty coffee. I could be wrong, but if people are actually drinking the coffee and coming back for more, they have no sense of taste whatsoever. Two, it's expensive. You can get better coffee for a third of the price, my friends, although you will have to sacrifice the ambiance and brand status of that logo. The main reason Starbucks sucks, though, is a little less obvious: The whole fucking chain is run like a cult, and I resent it every time I go in there. Why, if it sucks so much, do I go in? Well, two main reasons: One, I actually do like their hot chocolate. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. If so, I think I will survive the shame. Two, Starbucks stores are generally places you can pop into and do some work, often without even buying anything. So I've been in a few Starbucks, and the atmosphere in each is nothing if not a little creepy. If you think about it, Starbucks actually does use some of the classic brainwashing techniques of a cult. First of all, they force a whole second language on you. Instead of simply calling things small, medium, and large, you have their bizarre terms. This is partly to obscure the size of the beverages from you--paying $2 for a small coffee might seem crazy, but who the hell knows how much a fucking venti costs. You walk into a Starbucks, and suddenly the terms small, medium, large and underpaid coffee jockey are magically replaced by tall, Grande, Venti and Barista. Barista, of course, is Italian for "bartender" so while that is incredibly annoying and pretentious, it at least makes sense. The fact that I am supposed to adopt a whole other set of words just to order coffee is, of course, ridiculous. Aside from obscuring the size and cost of things, the language forces you to accept the way Starbucks sees the world. It might seem trivial, but allowing some other entity to control your vocabulary is always evil. On the other hand, if you walk into a McDonald's, you can't just order a hamburger, can you? You've got to order a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder or some such bullshit. So maybe I'm not being fair. . .nope, it annoys me about McDonald's, too. It annoys me because it's basically MarketerSpeak being forced on us. Some twat in a 3-piece suit invented these terms, and now we're all supposed to just start using them, despite the fact that there are perfectly good English words for all these things already? Screw that. So we have the common complaints of bad, overpriced coffee and the not-so-common complaint of brainwashing and language-bullying. I can't imagine a town or city in this country that doesn't have some alternative to overpriced corporate coffee--a local diner, a cart on the street--so why not walk past the world of baristas and order a simple small, medium, or large coffee, without all the bullshit? If you work at or love Starbucks, please don't bother sending me abusive emails. I don't care. This has been Tim, asking you to remember that everything sucks. |
February 1, 2005