Everything but the Coffee Read Online Free Page A

comfortable feelings, she said. By contrast, “You don’t get rap music and screaming twelve-year-olds there.”
    “But,” I asked, “how can coffee—coffee loaded up with caffeine— make for a soothing environment?”
    “It’s like the cigarette break,” she declared. “Cigarettes, of course, are filled with nicotine, which is a stimulant. But by going outside to smoke, it slows you down mentally and you feel relaxed.”
    Same with Starbucks. When we have negative feelings, Kacen continued, “we know something is amiss and our goals are being thwarted.” One way to get back on track is to do something different or change environments. For lots of people, she noted, buying is the answer, and Starbucks has become that place to “relax and let go . . . because it reads as comfortable.” Consumers, then, pay the premium for access to this warm, safe, and reassuring space—just as second and third place seekers do.
    At the start of the Starbucks moment, McDonald’s was the most visited retailer in America. As a place, the Golden Arches stood for valueand efficiency. It was not a site for self-gifting, except perhaps the occasional present to moms (and some dads) of not having to cook for the family. Close-up, in the details, Starbucks—the whole store, the whole experience—represents a rejection of the Golden Arches’ functional values. At Starbucks, there is no obvious plastic. No mascot. No Formica. No gray linoleum floors. No bright overhead fluorescent lighting. No blaring oranges and yellows. And seemingly no processed foods and products. McDonald’s, in contrast, doesn’t hide its rationality, even its artificiality. It is a place built with right angles and straight lines. Starbucks stores do just the opposite; they curve and bend. Few outlets are simple squares or rectangles. Some are round. Others look like
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s or pie slices. Overlapping circles and ovals hang over the coffee bar. The counters swoosh and roll. Squiggly lines and loops dance under the counters and across the murals on the walls. James Twitchell, the author of
Living It Up
, a chronicle on the emergence of the luxury economy in the United States in the 1980s, described the inside of Starbucks stores to me as almost “inappropriately elegant spaces.” Elegance, he added, reads as a reward for success and helps turn these places into ideal built environments for self-gifting.
    I talked about Starbucks’ design with experience architect Greg Beck. Broad shouldered and basketball player tall, Beck exudes a quiet, thoughtful command of things that belies his size. It seems to serve him well. Over the last decade, Beck has had a hand in designing interactive places like the CNN Center in Atlanta and the Sony Store in New York. I spent an afternoon with him in Manhattan going from one Starbucks to another. An effective teacher, he took me through a crash course in interior design. “What do you see?” I asked him as we walked into a crowded Starbucks store in the middle of the block across the street from Rockefeller Center in Midtown. After a second cup of coffee in as many hours, I started firing questions at him. “What’s that? What’s this? What does this mean?” He never appeared overcaffeinated, not for a minute.
    Calmly, Beck talked about color first. He pointed to the wood floors, earth-tone tiles, and chairs and tables stained in light to medium shadesof beige, brown, and cherry. All of this, Beck observed, communicated informality, relaxation, and naturalness. Together, they turn Starbucks stores into respites from the city—places, just as Jackie Kacen had suggested, to give yourself the gift of time and a calm moment.
    “What’s your overall impression?” I asked Beck as he strolled off to another appointment.
    “Well,” he said, pausing as he looked around again, “everything is high quality, at least not too cheap. There is a kind of luxury to the place that customers get to drink in.”
    Even in