Two teachers and a writer. Hardly the kind of people you’d expect to lay the foundation for Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee shop chain operating in 50 countries with 16,000 stores. Still, it was longtime friends Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, all of them sharing a passion for coffee, who decided to bring superior arabica coffee to their hometown Seattle. It was Bowker who hit upon the name Starbuck, derived from a character’s name in Moby Dick. A major inspiration for Starbucks was Peet’s Coffee & Tea, run by Alfred Peet. With some training from Peet, the trio opened the first Starbucks store in 1971.
It was not the Starbucks as we know it today. Apart from selling coffee-brewing equipment, it offered beverage samples for customers, but did not try the full-fledged caf? business?a concept rather alien to the US culture of the Seventies. But Starbucks wasn’t destined to remain a non- descript coffee retailer.
In 1982, Howard Schultz, who headed Hammarplast in US, noticed that Starbucks was buying large numbers of its coffee equipment. He visited the coffee vendor, and was convinced of its potential to become a big cafe network. Schultz joined a marketing job at the company, and after much persuasion by him, Starbucks opened a coffeehouse as part of its coffee-selling operation. It was an instant hit.
However, the founders wanted to continue selling ground coffee and saw the beverage business as a distraction. Schultz disagreed and quit to start Il Giornale, a coffee house chain. In 1987, the founders sold Starbucks to a team led by Schultz, who initiated rapid expansion. As the biggest coffee retailer in the world, Starbucks sure has come a long way.
It is the story behind Starbucks and the spirit of its triumphant journey that Marie Bussing-Burks’s How Starbucks Changed The World fails to capture. The book disappoints in more ways than one. The style of writing is repetitive: you read in the third chapter what you already read in the first and second chapters. It repeatedly runs down robusta as an inferior coffee (?harsh taste?) in favour of the arabica variety (?top quality?) sold by Starbucks. The quizzes in the book come across as insults to adult intelligence. The book relies massively on company press releases and content from the Starbucks website, which are quoted wholesale in every chapter, adding little value to the narrative. Bussing-Burks offers little, if any, original research into the wonderful world of Starbucks. For all the adulation for Starbucks, the author hasn’t managed to speak to Schultz or anyone else in the Starbucks universe. The book doesn’t do justice to its title, leaving the question of how Starbucks changed the world unanswered. Did it change the world at all? Doubtful.
The book airbrushes controversies which surrounded Starbucks’ global expansion, while spending several pages over how it promotes ?coffee equity? and ?fair trade?. There is no mention of Starbucks altering its logo in Saudi Arabia and practising gender segregation to suit local sensibilities. Allegations of market abuse are glossed over. There is no mention of the lawsuit over the company forcing baristas to share tips with supervisors.
The worst part about How Starbucks Changed The World is not that it does a puff job for Starbucks, but that it it fails pathetically in that attempt. Definitely not a steaming cup of arabica coffee. More like robusta gone cold.