Starbucks, babies, etc.
Until an acquaintance pointed it out to me, I hadn’t noticed that there’s something eerily missing from Starbucks, namely the sound of beans grinding. Starbucks now uses a push-button system of some sort, to make their product even more aggressively mediocre than it already is. There is no prospect of greatness in any coffee from Starbucks, but neither is there the prospect of failure. There is just sweet, sweet boredom.
I googled a bit, on the well-known website Google.com, and found a decent argument for the positive effects of Starbucks. (Ignore the bit about its being written by a libertarian. Normally that would give me hives as well.) The strongest argument seems to be that Starbucks has introduced people to new kinds of coffee, from which they can then branch out to other, better stuff (like Murky Coffee, say), and that Starbucks is just one step in a long sequence in which Americans have moved away from, say, Maxwell House to higher-end Starbucks stuff. Nick Cho of Murky describes what the third stage in the evolution will address:
If wine was sold the way coffee is usually sold today, you’d go to a store and see a row of five to twelve bottles, with labels that say, “FRENCH WINE,” “AMERICAN WINE,” “ITALIAN WINE,” “AUSTRALIAN WINE,” etc. No vineyard or winery name, no vintage year, no nothing. Just country of origin, and that’s it.
The next step, so they say, is to make coffee into a real artisan product.
Adam and I, incidentally, lament the lack of artisanal coffee in Boston. I was deeply saddened to note that one of my favorite near-downtown coffeeshops in Boston, Torrefazione Italia (at the top of Newbury Street, across from The New England and a block or so from the Public Garden), was bought by Starbucks and then promptly shut down. Bostonians of a certain age remember the Coffee Connection fondly. I also remember fondly that there was a time when the New York Times would bother to describe Starbucks as “a 300-store, specialty coffee chain based in Seattle”. As of ‘98, Starbucks was planning to invade Italy; until my friend Laura told me recently that it failed, I had no idea of the project’s status.
I’d love to start a little hole-in-the-wall espresso joint in downtown Boston — barely large enough to contain a coffee counter; maybe something the size of Chacarero, where you can get the singularly best lunch in downtown — that just makes good espresso drinks and nothing more. Real estate would still be expensive, of course, and labor costs would have to be kept to a minimum by only keeping the place open during business hours. Maybe eventually it could stay open longer hours, but in order to do so it would have to be in some place that doesn’t go dead at night (like Downtown Crossing) or dead during the day (like any purely residential area).
All of this somehow seems connected to a New Yorker article from a couple months ago on the increased mechanization of baby delivery. Caesarean sections seem to make pregnancy safer, so the article says, but they present their own problems and take much of the artistry out of being a doctor. C-sections exist because medicine has become an industry. I’ve spoken with a few women who’ve delivered babies by now, and the story is frighteningly similar from case to case:
- doctor gets exceedingly cautious and induces delivery
- induction doesn’t get baby out, and mother’s muscles now can’t push
- doctor performs C-section
- on first night in the hospital, baby goes into nursery with all the other babies
- mother, being exhausted, can’t get over to the nursery, and for whatever reason doctors won’t bring the baby to her
- since the doctors haven’t given her and the baby time to adjust to one another, the baby hasn’t learned how to breast-feed from her
- doctors apply great pressure and guilt to the mother, telling her that she is being irresponsible to her baby by not giving the baby formula — even though the only reason it needs formula is that they’ve not let it learn how to breast feed
And so it goes.
In general, I don’t know how to reply to the arguments that all of this industrialization — of everything from coffee to food to birth — is ultimately good. I do see the benefits, of course; the American food supply may well be safer because we can concentrate our food inspectors on one giant factory rather than 10,000 farms. More to the point, industrialization is the reality, and an industry like medicine has to respond appropriately: it can’t expect that doctors will all be able to learn intricate intra-uteral baby-rotation techniques. Or can it? I don’t know enough about the industry, but I have to wonder whether industrialization makes people forget that any third way is possible.
Also, 50 years ago it seems like most American mothers gave their babies formula, because somewhere along the line we came to believe that formula could do the job better than breast milk, which has had several million years to evolve to the perfection of nutrition that it is. The mindset that could believe this has always fascinated me. Are we going to look back on the spread of C-sections in the same way? I realize that it’s in some ways different from breast-milk-versus-formula, but it has enough similarities that I wonder.
In general, some industrialization is obviously good, in the limited sense of standardizing procedures. It’s good for doctors to wash their hands, sterilize their instruments, etc; I’ve heard that American surgeons are always famous for backing into doors rather than walking straight through them, because they’ve been trained not to touch handles before going into surgery. All these procedures are good. It needn’t follow that industrializing everything in the medical process is a good idea. We might get 90% of the sanitation benefits, and none of the dehumanization, if we stopped the industrialization somewhat earlier. But that’s probably impossible, of course; industrialization probably becomes an all-consuming habit (ideology?) like anything else.
P.S.: I should note that in conversation with Friend Laura, I’ve become suspicious that maybe these Big Scary Doctor stories are more true in cities than they are little towns in Vermont, such as the one where she’ll be delivering her baby in early 2007. That seems like a worthwhile caveat.
Cripes, did my post get eaten because it says breastfeeding?
Comment by mrz — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
I’ll have to remember to use that trick next time I need to say a controversial word like fuck or what-have-you. I laugh at your spm filter now!
Comment by mrz — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
Your post got blocked because it contains the name of a card game that’s often featured at the back of bars that feature liquor in the front. I’ll repost it for you.
(And yes, nearly everyone who posts about that card game is a spammer.)
Comment by Steve Laniel — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
I think the only thing Coffee and C-Sections have in common is the letter C…Cue Big Bird.
I think the delivery scenario you’re talking must be regional or vary by doctor or something. I think most moms do get to deliver just fine. I think where C sections are getting popular are people who do them electively.
As far as post-birth, I think that must vary by doctor/nurse. I haven’t heard any discouraging words about breastfeeding from any doctors or nurses. They usually seem quite pro with talk of antibodies and what-not. However, my sister got enormous pressure against breastfeeding in the UK. Luckily, she gave them the old Agincourt salute.
As far as artisanal coffee, I’d say it’s like any other artisanal thing. If you want the real deal, you have to find a mom & pop hole in the wall. The corps just can’t do it. They’re too busy cutting this and that to make their stock price look good. So you end up with places like Starbucks for coffee or Panera for bread, where the product is consistant and decent, but nothing to write home about. But that’s all they can really do given their constraints.
I mean, some things just don’t scale up well. If you want real art, go find a starving artist. Otherwise, you go to the mall and get a lithograph of Ansel Adams or Dogs Playing Poker or whatever. The latter must sell to the broadest population it can. They might offer some cool pictures and help elevate people’s awareness, but at the end of the day, they have to make $$$ to raise stock prices. Sell, sell, sell what sells! And in America, that’s consistancy, baby!
Comment by mrz — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
C-sections being elective: read the article.
Now, as for artisanal coffee being impossible from an industrial sort of place … wouldn’t you think there’d be a chance that they’d do it better than a mom-and-pop place? My suspicion is that it’s less the industrialization than it is some very specific facts about American corporations — namely the legally mandated need for profit maximization — that lead to the low quality. You could industrialize, in the sense of buying all your supplies in enormous quantities and mass-training lots of people according to a rigidly-adhered-to set of standards, and you might actually get a good product at the other end. In other words, why must it be consistently mediocre, rather than consistently good? It seems to me that industrialization is more about the consistency than about the quality, or at least it needn’t be about the quality.
What seems to affect the quality is more the need to maximize profits, which means cutting costs, which means things like buying less-good coffee beans and spending less time training your employees (See “Donalds, Mc.”).
Comment by Steve Laniel — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
I quickly read it. Obstetricians like it, I’m sure but also, women are choosing to have it at their own behest well before entering the hospital for labor. But frankly, the woman whose baby was transverse, I don’t blame them for wanting to do a C-section. That’s hard to deal with.
I do agree that C-sections will likely get more common, maybe even the default, but I think there will be a long “conversation” on this over time and I think a lot of women want to give birth vaginally. So I don’t think the techniques to deal with non-C-section births will disappear, even if C-section becomes the safest alternative.
I’ll talk more about coffee later, but I think you’re agreeing with mrz on the point of profit maximization causing problems in the “Why can’t big companies produce artisanal coffee” area.
Comment by mrz — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
This is “the libertarian” of the linked article here. If you don’t mind the hives, I’ll add a few thoughts.
Based on my experience in the industry, the problem isn’t profit maximization so much as it is scalability (as mrz says). Espresso preparation is an extremely finicky process given current technology. You’ve got to have skilled baristas who care about what they’re doing, paying attention to all the little details that can make a potentially great drink mediocre if the variables wander off track. Those people are hard to find. Despite the perks of being a barista, the odd hours, physically demanding work, and comparatively low wages mean that career baristas are hard to come by. Most people working in coffee shops want something short-term or on the side; finding the few who will get passionate about quality is hard to do. And if it’s tough to staff a boutique coffee shop with such people, it’d be nearly impossible in a big chain.
I was recently hired to revamp the coffee program at a bakery and coffee shop in DC’s Georgetown area. The owners became sincerely interested in making great coffee a few months ago and invested significantly in better beans, new equipment, and my own salary. As a coffee lover, I admire them for that. But there’s no doubt that they’re after profit maximization, too. They’re taking a financial hit now with the expectation that their sales will increase in the long term. If they don’t, I’m sure they’ll start reverting back to some of their old ways and drop my pay. Financially, they’ll have to.
To give a concrete example, our shop has eliminated 20 oz. espresso and milk drinks. If the highly automated Starbucks did that they’d be throwing money away. For us, it’s a way of projecting an image of quality through the things we say “no” to and of speeding up our production process. Maybe we lost a few customers; we’d probably lose more if we wasted time in the morning rushes pulling extra shots and steaming bigger pitchers of milk. Love of espresso played a role in the decision, of course — more than it would in a large corporation — but given the realities of running a small business, the need for maximizing profits is a constant factor and constraint.
A second consideration is the pool of employees and customers a shop can draw from. In cities like Seattle where there are lots of people with barista skills and customers with demanding palates, it’s easier to maximize profits by pursuing quality. In DC, both of those pools are a lot smaller. Fewer coffee lovers, fewer baristas who can walk into a new shop and learn the ropes right away. Niche markets are smaller and training takes longer. This city’s getting better though.
I do agree with you that the corporate focus on profit maximization does tend to emphasize consistency over quality compared to a dedicated small business, especially given the relatively low demands made by the majority of coffee consumers today. But even if a big corporation suddenly decided to convert to best practices, they’d face huge problems of scale.
Good luck on the espresso hunt in Boston!
Comment by Jacob Grier — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
Hi Jacob!
Thanks for all the great and insightful comments. And sorry for the knock on libertarians. At some point I’ll explain the hives business.
I live in D.C., actually, and Murky is my idol. At which caf
Comment by Steve Laniel — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
(1) I agree with mrz.
(2) This entry is a egregious conflation of topics that should never be discussed together. You will never be president.
(3) They just opened the fifth Starbucks within a block of my office.
Comment by Adam Rosi-Kessel — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
No worries, Steve, I make jokes about libertarians, too. And I’m glad you like Murky. Their Arlington store is where I first learned the ropes.
The place I work at now is Baked and Wired, on Thomas Jefferson St. by the canal. We’ve got a new La Marzocco espresso machine and are serving up Counter Culture beans. We don’t have all the pieces in place yet — still lots of training to do, still waiting for some ceramic cups to arrive — but things are improving. Stop in some time and I’ll hook you up.
We’re open 7-6 on weekdays. As business expands beyond the nearby offices, we’ll expand hours and hopefully open Saturdays.
Comment by Jacob Grier — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am
As safe as C-sections may become, they’re still major surgery. And doctors in this country are far too quick to decide a woman needs an “emergency” C-section: Both my kids were born at home with a midwife, and I know my daughter would’ve been an “emergency” C-section if we were in a hospital simply because nature wasn’t moving as quickly as the medical industry would like.
Comment by KJC — January 1, 1970 @ 8:00 am