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I knew a guy who was worried about his teenage son. He was a good kid,
but he was struggling and he had just called to tell his father he was
going to drop out of college. Years ago, the father fretted, he’d have
shipped the kid off to the military – forced some discipline on him to
help him grow up. That had worked for his generation. But the
inflammatory world situation no longer made that a viable option in his
(or his wife’s!) mind. He was at his wits’ end. So what did he do?
Suggested a job at Starbucks.
Everyone talks about the community the Starbucks brand has
created among those who frequent its ubiquitous stores. What they speak about
less is the community of workers it has created. This election season,
candidates are starting to debate the value of a national compulsory service.
But the fact is, among a certain group of young adults, a stint at Starbucks is
a kind of evolutionary experience, a rite of passage – one that provides
discipline, cash and benefits and the structure in which to grow up. So it’s in the service of coffee – is that
necessarily a bad thing?
A year later, my father friend now raves about what the
experience did for his son. “He had to
get up at 4:30 a.m. to open,” he says.
“He had to learn to work with a team.”
And he is now linked to a Starbucks community of baristas which makes it easy for him to continue to work there even though he has
returned to school in another state.
There are plenty of stories about how this generation no
longer has common experiences thanks to a fragmenting digital universe. And it’s true they may not be gathered around
the national TV set passively absorbing a common imagination provided courtesy
of the media elites – but now some of them are gathered around the coffee bar
talking. Starbucks offers them a shared
perspective, a specific way of looking at the world, standardized expectations,
tangible benefits and a team.
And now comes “How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like
Everyone Else” written by a 63-year-old Yale graduate and former ad exec
who, after his life falls apart, finds himself employed at Starbucks in order
to get the health benefits. You can
imagine that what he learns has nothing to do with coffee. There is already a
film version in the works with Tom Hanks set to star.
Makes you think about the notion of social community - the
real life kind vs. the virtual kind - and the experience of that community for
both customers and employees.
Is a brand stronger if it delivers on both sides of the
counter?
*To see more work by this author, click on the name under the headline.*
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