Drip grind: Taylor Clark's weak case against Starbucks.

• Author: Taussig, Doron
• Position: Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture - Book review

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Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark Little Brown and Company, 289 pp.

It was about halfway through Taylor Clark's Starbucked that I decided I should read the book inside a Starbucks establishment. Not as some sort of anthropological experiment (though certainly, if material were to present itself ...), but because, as part of the minority of American adults that doesn't drink coffee, I'm just not that familiar with the stores. I had been in them, sure, and understood that Starbucks was a major chain. But the omnipresent, possibly villainous cultural entity Clark was describing didn't resemble the hazy little dark-green cafes I saw in the back of my mind.

The half of the book I had already read was basically just a biography of a company. Clark begins with a few examples of Starbucks's ubiquity--did you know there's a Starbucks at Guantanamo Bay? along the Great Wall of China?--and then explains how this situation came to pass. In brief: coffee in America was popular but crappy; some guy from Seattle started driving to Vancouver to buy better beans, then went into business selling the stuff; a housewares salesman from New York named Howard Schultz noticed that a small Seattle outfit was selling huge numbers of his coffeemakers, and got involved with the company; Schultz visited Italy, found the latte, and now there's a Starbucks on every damn corner in the country.

More fascinating than the early chronology is Clark's research into Starbucks's painstaking marketplace maneuverings. Stathucks is well known for its utilization of the "third place" concept, but we get to read about the focus groups where Americans first revealed that they were willing to pay more for their coffee--even if they were just getting it to go--if they were in what felt like a "public living room." We also get clued in to the thinking behind Starbucks's unique vernacular (names like "grande Valencia latte" not only lend a patina of sophistication to a product, but also build brand loyalty); we learn that Starbucks deliberately locates stores on the driver's righthand side as she heads downtown so she won't have to make a left turn across traffic; we shake our heads at the revelation that, in 2002, Starbucks introduced the vanilla and coconut Creme Frappucino in order "to capitalize on the expected popularity of the color white."

All of this is the product of able and enthusiastic reporting, though I...