Everything but the Coffee Read Online Free Page B

Manhattan’s packed confines, many Starbucks stores look spacious. It seems like the company only chose large, elegant Art Deco buildings with ten-, twelve-, even fifteen-foot ceilings for its coffee-houses. Sometimes the locations had multiple rooms and floors. But when you study the places, you see that no matter how big the footprint, Starbucks doesn’t put the tables and chairs in its stores too close together. Unlike a Parisian café, they aren’t pressed up against each other so tight that customers can smell their neighbor’s food and cologne. Instead, they stand apart, positioned so that users get a sense of privacy, making the stores, as mentioned in the last chapter, perfect alone-in-public spaces rather than third places. The soft sofas and chairs are often tucked in corners or face each other, forming their own little alcoves. When you add up the total number of seats, you discover there really aren’t that many places to sit at a Starbucks in proportion to the size of the space. All of this is, of course, intentional.
    Laura Paquet studies not just what shoppers say about their urges to splurge but also what they do. For the “well-heeled,” as she called them, “lots of people say good things about a place.” Drawing an important distinction, she added that crowds send negative signals. Starbucks customers associate places crammed with merchandise and shoppers with the poor, down markets, and Wal-Mart. Space says something else. Room between tables and couches communicates opulence. Paquet talked about bathrooms to underline her point. Multiple toilet stalls behind a single door convey efficiency, while a single bathroom—likeevery Starbucks has—implies money and status. A few extra feet here and there, Paquet laughed, “says we can afford empty space.”
    Like Greg Beck and Laura Paquet, Michelle Isroff thinks hard about the details of consumer places. She works for Big Red Rooster, a design, marketing, and branding firm in Columbus, Ohio. As part of her job, she studies shopping patterns and retail design. Late one June afternoon, we walked into a bank converted into a Starbucks in Bexley, Ohio, an upscale Columbus suburb. The store was huge, with a wide glass chandelier and a high vaulted ceiling. It was easy to imagine the building in the past with a line of tellers, a waiting area, loan officers’ desks, and a thick door leading to the president’s wood-paneled office. But all that was gone. What stuck out to Isroff, just like it would to Paquet, was how few tables the store actually had. There were only forty seats in the entire place. I asked her why it seemed so empty. Gaps, she explained, help shuttle the take-away customers through the store. But, even more, the wasted space—and that’s really what it is—sends a message. Starbucks is announcing, in effect, that it can afford to throw away a few hundred square feet, and you deserve it. “It’s luxury,” she said.
    The chairs, Isroff told me, also figured prominently in Starbucks’ staging of luxury. Just seeing them—extrawide and bursting at the seams with padding—announces to customers that Starbucks is an upscale place to sit and relax, both luxuries and indulgences in our go-go world.
    Not only does Isroff study interior spaces; she also analyzes color. She imagines herself, in fact, as a colorologist in training. When she went to Starbucks for the first time in the early 1990s, America, she said, was draped in beige. Tan and khaki covered everything. Those colors spoke of Starbucks’ (and other companies’) moves to connect with people seeking authenticity and more natural products—and perhaps some respite. But, as she pointed out when we visited several Columbus Starbucks, the earth-toned chairs were not the only chairs in the stores. Many outlets by that time—2006—also had a couple of overstuffed purple velour Queen Anne–style armchairs. To Isroff, these bulky upholstered pieces of furniture made Starbucks into