“What Starbucks says about America”
A radio show on Public Radio International (PRI) used Starbucks as an example of American abundance and excess. The show attributed its success to its positioning as a communal hub.
According to Temple University professor Bryant Simon, “what Starbucks identified was a very important shift and a very important need in American society. Throughout the post-WWII era, Americans moved to the suburbs, they became locked in their cars, for fear they would increasingly live behind gated communities.
“At the same time they were securing themselves, they began to feel as though they were missing something: a kind of community that we often associate with older city neighborhoods. Starbucks understood that desire. From the very beginning, they suggested that their stores, like the old coffee houses, were something called ‘third places’: a place between work and home where people would gather. Starbucks aggressively marketed itself as the place where community would be constructed, maintained, and renewed.”
The individualistic nature American culture developed in the latter half of the 20th century was certainly a step away from a more group-oriented past. Simon argues that their move to foster a community experience was only the means to a very profitable end.
“If Starbucks tells us again and again from its marketing…that this is what community is, it makes it harder to find truer versions of it some place else,” says Simon.
How would you define community, and where would you go to find it in the US?
Click here to read the article and listen to the radio show.
Joshua
