Starbucks Memories

Loving Starbucks is archetypally basic, and I don’t care. I love to hold those little paper cups in my hand, get excited for the seasonal drinks, sit in those identikit cafés. I stare out of the window from a barstool, even as I know it’s overpriced, even as I know chains are ruining my city, even as I know it’s not good coffee. I don’t even really like coffee. My buying habits are generally informed by some level of market research, by left-wing political consciousness, by middle-class, semi-hipster sensibility; yet Starbucks is somehow immune to all of that, and I don’t mind. It bothers me that I don’t mind – but still, I find myself in the queue at Starbucks more than any other coffee chain, more than any other store in the precinct by my house. Study my relationship with Starbucks, for it holds insight into modern life.

My first memories of Starbucks are in Las Vegas, aged ten. There was a mall between the main strip and our hotel and we had breakfast at their sidewalk Starbucks most days on our ten-day family holiday. American-style blueberry scones, chocolate chunk shortbread, lemon-poppyseed muffins filled with curd – it was probably the truest embodiment of American culture I could have had, wrapped, as all of Vegas is, in caricature. This was my first time truly abroad (never before further than the ferry to northern France) and it was a true holiday experience. Like some kind of Shirley Valentine I took it home, along with boxed bath soap from the hotel and a Caesar’s Palace shirt. After that I liked to go to their store by Leicester market and drink bottled iced tea, heavily sugared and fruity, and enjoy this attempt at European café culture filtered through an American lens.

Eventually I graduated to the Starbucks in Leicester’s Highcross (The Shires, as was). I was a regular at this Starbucks, walking into town and sitting alone, facing outwards towards the shoppers on a barstool. It was opposite the Waterstone’s and next to Zavvi, the stores I shopped in most. I was a teen, coming here to feel like an adult. I sought a slice of independence, and chains and shopping centres felt safe and aspirational. Back in the days when ‘mall culture’ was the ideal for a teen, when I looked at pictures of celebrities with shopping bags piled in the crook of their arm and a Frappucino in every magazine, I wanted to run away to the big city, and Starbucks and shopping were commonalities between myself and Christina Aguilera, myself and Daisy Lowe, between my life in a mid-size city of little consequence and the celebrities in London and LA. Whether it was off-duty paparazzi pics of Mischa Barton or my own attempts to cultivate an adult self, Starbucks made my world feel bigger. In these halcyon days where I didn’t interrogate the implications of my own actions I developed and finessed my order (still, to this day, my default) – and felt a swell of pride the first day the barista called it my regular, feeling like I was on an episode of Frasier. Pure sophistication, aged 16. The baristas were young-ish women, friendly, and I could shop, people-watch, or read some heavy book pulled out of a TK Maxx handbag I wore in the crook of my arm like I was an it-girl. Starbucks was the separation between myself and my friends who lived in the county, whose teenage lives I hoped to transcend by not needing to be driven around by my parents, by having my own money, and by drinking coffee. There was a whole clique of coffee girls that were my friends in 6th form – they all idealised the city, too, seeing themselves as lawyers in New York, actresses in London, or party girls in LA. We sat around with coffee – sweetened, because we liked what it stood for more than the taste – and read magazines, imagining our small lives expanded.

There’s a ‘Starbucks lover’ in my past – more than one memory of this dumb chain in my dating life. The person who, after I ordered, looked at me straight with something akin to admiration, and said ‘you speak Starbucks?’ The person who, when there weren’t enough seats and I had to share his table, moderated the phone call to his sister to sound more impressive, who took me on a walk to Battersea park, who I dated for six months and somewhere, stuffed under a bed or in a moving box I never unpacked, are film photographs of us in the kitchen in my old house in Bounds Green wearing matching Christmas sweaters. Living on the outskirts of London, I would come into the city to wander aimlessly or write, finding myself so often in Starbucks as a respite from the cold or as an attainable slice of Mayfair. Underpaid baristas don’t care how long you sit in their café, and the notes I made in those days still find themselves the basis for the poems I write now.

International Starbuckses are different. At the first academic conference I went to – a big one, in Boston – there was a Starbucks in the hotel that was our venue. It became the conference’s watering hole, detached from the provided breakfast coffee in the packed hall for me to make friends and talk to them. Once again, cosmopolitan, a semiotic signifier of my desire for the city and what that might represent. Boston! I was an academic in Boston! I had made friends with scholars of Schubert, fanfic, and Sylvia Plath! At malls in China Starbucks was somewhere I could sit alone, familiar enough for me to order without knowing the language, the menu full of cherry blossom and mooncakes – more easily palatable Western versions than what I’d find in the malls and the grocery stores. Beijing and Boston were both incredible experiences, sensory overload, and when I felt small in such a big, wide world I had a place right there that looked almost the same as it had back in Leicester, decades earlier, to act something like a comfort zone whilst I looked out. It’s a place I can go anywhere, where nothing’s grown. Where existential dread pales into whatever new thing is on my iPod. Spotify. Whatever, nothing’s changed.

What is ‘brand loyalty’? It’s silly, as a consumer, to go to your favourite company instead of the most competitive, as if this multi-national corporation cares about you, or their staff – or even their product, beyond whatever about it is driving sales. Brands cannot be trusted. Starbucks doesn’t mean any of the things I associate with it, except in my heart. Most companies that embodied positive small experiences growing up have gone gently into that good night for me: I enjoy Wagamama’s, but I don’t rate it, even if it was the first place I tried ramen; the £10 Rimmel bags at The Clothes Show didn’t turn me into a lifelong buyer of their products; my attachment to my Boots card and the thousands of loyalty points I stacked up stopped mattering in the face of how they treated workers and women, and I stopped shopping there; yet somehow all my tiny good times at Starbucks have created loyalty, brand nostalgia, and a cache of memories that have – somehow, ridiculously – become a core aspect of my personality. Become something I go back to, regardless of circumstance. My Starbucks card is the same one I had at 15, and even as they change the terms to be more or less favourable, even as it moves onto the app and not a physical card, even as I no longer buy my one drink a week to get free espresso shots and syrups (I was a ‘gold member’ for about six years), I still have enough money on it for a treat, even when I’m stone broke. Growing up and growing out of Starbucks would be like saying a final goodbye to the girl I once was, and the woman she wanted to be. I am that woman: city-dwelling, educated, streamlined – but sometimes I need to prove it to myself, or comfort her, and nowhere will do that like Starbucks. My head wishes it were somewhere else, but the heart wants what it wants.

On This Topic:

• Brennan Lee Mulligan doesn’t get enough credit for being delightful. His Defender of the Basic sketch is perfect.
• Cheap hair and makeup weren’t the best thing about The Clothes Show, and neither were the catwalk shows… I will take my bragging rights, thank you
• God I love an obscure blog

To-Do:

• Claim my final Christmas present – a Nintendo Online subscription – and get on Reddit to find somebody who will bring me my white whale, pears and cherries, to my Animal Crossing island. I have 800 hours in this game and have not yet achieved what most people did in the first week.
• Write something that doesn’t sound like it comes from the Starbucks equivalent of the British Airways in-flight magazine.
• Reply to SPS website enquiries (!)

Today’s Culture:

• Finding a signed Paul Muldoon in an Oxfam shop for £3! Score!
• Decolonising my listening. There are definitely POC making folk / pop / singer-songwriter music, and I need to get it in rotation.
• I’ve been entering a lot of poetry competitions this year, so wish me luck.