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Hacking StarbucksWhere to learn about the ghetto latte, barista gossip, and Nicole Kidman's usual.

By Michael Agger
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2007, at 7:02 PM ET
Starbucks Coffee Cups. Click image to expand.

Perhaps you've noticed: The Internet has an obsession with Starbucks. Maybe it's because the two have grown up together. In 1995, Starbucks had just launched its master plan to become "a third place for people to congregate beyond work or the home," while the Web had a lot of gray pages with text and "hyperlinks." Now, the coffee chain has become the new McDonald's (44 million customers a week), and the Web has become a 24-hour global exercise in collective intelligence gathering. Gourmet coffee culture and Internet culture have fed off each other, and Starbucks in particular has become a punching bag for the indie spirit that pervades the Web. So I wanted to discover who has the upper hand: Does Starbucks dominate us with its convenient locations and potent caffeine, or do we, thanks to the Web, ultimately call the shots?

Exhibit A in the online cheekiness and wariness toward Starbucks is an old monument: the Starbucks Oracle, which went online in 2002. You enter a drink, the oracle spits out a profile. Here's the response to my regular order, a tall coffee:

Personality type: Lame

You're a simple person with modest tastes and a reasonable lifestyle. In other words, you're boring. Going to Starbucks makes you feel sophisticated; you'd like to be snooty and order an espresso but aren't sure if you're ready for that level of excitement. ... Everyone who thinks America's Funniest Home Videos is a great show drinks tall coffee.

Sadly accurate. Then I entered Vin Diesel's drink order: decaf triple nonfat espresso.

Personality type: Freak

No person of sound mind would go to an EXPENSIVE COFFEE SHOP to get a drink WITHOUT CAFFEINE. Your hobbies include going to ski resorts in the summer and flushing $5 bills down the toilet. You are a menace to society.

How do I know Vin's drink order? Why, Starbucks Gossip, of course. The blog is run by Jim Romenesko, who also runs the popular journalism blog that bears his name. Starbucks Gossip has the tagline "Monitoring America's favorite drug dealer," and it's the Alexandria of Starbucks knowledge, with both baristas and customers frequenting the message boards. Every so often, Romenesko will ask Starbucks employees to weigh in on what celebrities have been in their stores. I'll leave you to pull out your favorite US Weekly tidbits, but this entry from "Brooklyn Barista" deserves special mention:

Nicole Kidman would get a grande cup of just nonfat milk foam. Yeah...just foam. She would eat it with a spoon. Hugh Jackman gets grande soy cappuccinos. Toby [sic] Maguire gets a doppio and he kinda assembles the drink himself at the bar with some stuff that he carries around in his pocket. He's actually pretty creepy.

Based on this evidence, it would seem that Spider-Man has stepped into the extra hot center of the "ghetto latte" debate. The e-mail that started it all had been languishing in Romenekso's inbox until a slow day in September of 2006:

Is it fair/right for a customer to order what we, at my store, call a "ghetto-latte"?

The "ghetto-latte" is ordering any size Iced Americano, with no water and half ice (This lady's drink is an Iced Venti, no water, half ice, Americano). She then takes the drink and goes to the condiments bar and adds her own half and half.

She and her boy toy came in the other day and both ordered a Venti and Grande ghetto-latte. We just happened to not have the half and half out at the condiment bar. When she ordered the drink, I then immediately said, "and ma'am what kind of dairy would you like?" She then said, "Oh I'll add it myself thank you." But I had to let her know we didn't have any out at the very moment. She asked for half and half of course.

What followed were hundreds of comments, pro and con; an op-ed in the Seattle Times; an article in the New York Times; and so on. Is the ghetto latte racist? (The more P.C. might call it a bootleg latte.) Is it stealing? Or sticking it to the man? Are employees obliged to tirelessly refill the half-and-half, in order to observe the Starbucks mandate of "Legendary Service"? The debate demonstrates why Starbucks is such a magnet for invective: It's a perfect target for our anti-corporate righteousness, because it's something we all share. Douglas Coupland made the point long ago in Generation X: that the mockery and analysis of corporate sameness is an activity that can unite us.

The ghetto latte joins a pantheon of hallowed Starbucks hacks. Tim Harford of Slate contributed a classic to the genre, "Starbucks Economics: Solving the Mystery of the Short Cappuccino," where he revealed that the best-tasting cappuccino, the short cappuccino, is not on the menu. When Starbucks introduced its store locator, someone devised an effective delocator, which directs you toward independent cafes. The site Consumerist recently explained how to get a Tazo Chai Latte at half the price.

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Michael Agger is a Slate senior editor. You can reach him at
Photograph of Starbucks cups by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I guess I run the risk of sounding like a franchise-avoiding elitist here, isn't this media obsession with Starbucks way over the top? Granted, they have a huge market share, but this coffee culture is spread over plenty of cafes, either independent ones or other chains. If Starbucks were to drop off and be overtaken by Seattle's Best or Caribou or Peet's I don't see what the difference would be. Can someone give a good reason for the single-minded focus on Starbucks in these articles?

--kurtosis

(To reply, click here.)

You can't deny its importance in the evolution of coffee culture in the United States. Without the explosive popularity of Starbucks, there would be only a fraction of the small, independently-owned coffee shops that exist today. These small business owners are capitalizing on the America's still fairly new craziness for the high-quality caffeine fix. Starbucks has also helped to drive sales of better home coffee machines, including pump-driven espresso machines, pod-based coffee makers, the French press and high quality drip coffee makers. If not for Starbucks, most of us would still be making Folgers crystals at home and drinking whatever's warm from the office coffee machine. We would not even have the option of shuffling through the grocery store with a latte on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a new independent coffee shop. I discovered it a few weeks ago and I'm here today for the first time. I ordered a double espresso and it was way too large, tasted watered down and was served in a generic Styrofoam cup. The point, however, is that this family-owned shop would not exist if not for Starbucks. These people opened this place because they love coffee and they thought that they could operate a fantastic coffee shop. Even though I'm not enjoying it, their success remains to be seen. Without Starbucks, this shop and many others like it would not exist at all. For all the successful independent coffee shops in the US, we owe Starbucks a debt of gratitude for turning Americans on to the joys of better coffee.

--TravelinMatt

(To reply, click here.)

Arguing that Starbucks has become so ubiquitous simply because people think carrying around a cup with their logo on it gives them some kind of cachet is like claiming that 7-11 succeeded because of their stylish slurpee cups.

Before 7-11, most places opened at 9 and closed at 6, and if you needed a cup of coffee or a pack of diapers between 6:01 pm and 8:59 am, you were SOL. 7-11 tapped a need in our culture previously unmet, garnered immense success, spawned legions of imitators and now few of us do not live within 5 square miles of a place to grab a soda and a box of tampons at 3am.

Starbucks offered something, besides coffee, to American culture that we did not have before. Before Starbucks, there were no places that people could either arrange to meet, or sit by themselves, that were not restaurants or bars. I went to college in the old days, before Starbucks was everywhere. We used to gather for study sessions at Denny's, much to the wait staff dismay. Gradually there started to be more and more rules. You had to order at least a pot of coffee. Groups of more than two had to order at least $10 worth of something. You couldn't stay for longer than x after your plates were cleared.

This was understandable from a Denny's waiter POV. Twelve kids at a table for six hours ordering nothing but a 99 cent cup of coffee is a disaster for their tips. But for that group, there was a need too: someplace to go that wasn't home or work where they could just sit and be, the third place.

Starbucks has institutionalized and mass marketed the third place, and it has become successful because there was a need in our society for that. It has spawned legions of chain and independent coffee houses which are also successful. I live in the Pacific Northwest and you cannot spin a cat without hitting a coffee place, most of which are not Starbucks.

If you want to understand Starbucks by focusing on the coffee, you're focusing on the wrong thing.

--katidid0913

(To reply, click here.)

They're wondering if [ghetto latte] is racist? Using a term that is largely associated with negative black stereotypes and equating it with the action of taking advantage of a company for profit aka stealing....

A lot of the time when people ask that question, they already know the answer. So for all those who still aren't sure, I'm here to tell you that yes it is indeed very racist.

--statgirl

(To reply, click here.)

(8/19)

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