You know I'm no Starbucks hater, but I've got to admit that the SBUX
experience can be terribly uninteresting. Part of the reason I've
remained in this town is that it offers the more frequently engaging
likes of Coffee Cat, Daily Grind, French Press, Java Jones,
etc.
But given Starbucks' still-behemothic resources, why can't it up the
interestingness? A recent
Reason
piece points to a plausible cause:
In 1989, [Howard
Schultz] initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers — it
wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival
stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months
selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as
something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a
true coffee lover would enjoy.”
[ ... ]
The chain’s
customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks
experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for
Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in
is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of
creative interaction and spirited public discourse.
Over the
years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual
environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate
and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is
interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions
Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened
Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune
described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops
of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because
customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the
proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to
leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.
My "takeaway" from the article — oh, and YHWH?
Please strike me down for using that term — is that Starbucks' dullness
comes from listening too closely to customers. Now, I realize full well
that that's not exactly the writer's angle; he argues that the chain's
recent financial stumbles are the result of not listening to them
closely enough. Starbucks, I will paraphrase him as saying, should
provide
more pumpkin Frappuccinos and pipe
more
slowed-by-five-percent Norah Jones tracks through the speakers, lest
they forget who's boss: Joe Public.
There's a certain democratic
satisfaction in pushing this sort of line — take
that,
espresso-sipping purists — but it also showcases a facet of
Reason
that I consider its dimmest. "Hey out-of-touch executives," these
articles implicitly groan, "check your fanciness at the door and do what
the market tells you to. The
really radical move, after all, is
to satiate demands as efficiently as possible." Don't get me wrong; I
understand that, if you want to produce the greatest good for the
greatest number, you follow the signals of the free market and don't
look back. I'm just willing to admit that I don't necessarily desire a
society of the greatest good for the greatest number. (And I'm not even
anti-market! But best of luck getting say, an avowed socialist to reveal
that they don't want it either.)
This is what's driven me away
from most libertarian media: it's got such a cultural tin ear, such a
penchant for a certain uncomfortable low-level artistic and/or aesthetic
luddism. Maybe it's not luddism; maybe it's just that the sort of
person inclined to go libertarian doesn't generally care about these
matters. But there's a reason I've always demurred from any alliance,
declared or formalized, with libertarianism, even though I've found it
to be the most convincing ideology out there (as ideologies go). It's
not that I disagree with libertarians' principles; it's that I disagree
with their socks under sandals, both real and metaphorical.
Know
that this is not a blanket condemnation. I have quite a few libertarian
friends to whom this doesn't apply — hell, you might be one! — and I can
point to high-profile examples of same. (
Tyler Cowen, for example,
is a libertarian economist who also happens to be the most culturally
aware man alive.) That doesn't change the fact that, taken as an
averaged-out whole, the group's taste strikes me as atrocious. I don't
necessarily mean that it's actively offensive. It's more like a lack of
discernment, or rather, the lack of effort
to discern — a
willingness to just settle for
whatever, culturally.
[
PROLEPSIS:
There exists, of course, an opposite and almost equal condition. I
think specifically of the pathological, disdainful obscurantism that the
late Susan Sontag is said to have displayed, and flamboyantly. Given
the choice between views that
(a) taste doesn't matter and
(b)
taste is only the thing that matters, I'll take the latter — by virtue
of how I spend my life, I'm natively a lot closer to it anyway — but
both stances are deeply undesirable and more than a little ridiculous.]
Many
a company has, historically, done quite well for itself by dishing out a
lot of reasonably priced
whatever. Scan most of Starbucks' menu
and that feels like their mission statement. (Some knees might jerk at
"reasonably priced," but cf. the offerings of comparable coffee shops
and see how much difference you find.) It screams "focus grouped,"
whether or not it actually was. But Starbucks' team are just plugging
into a hole, aren't they? They've iterated toward the discovery of
something people just keep wanting, and they pump it out. No shame in
that, but no interestingness 'neither.
I'm not sure if the sort
of libertarian I'm talking about has internalized a difference between
what's filling a need and what's — I don't know — pandering. Given its
elitist associations, that's probably the wrong word, but I've
committed. To my mind, there's a line, though perhaps one so fine or
fuzzy as to barely merit the name, between supplying something to
society as an act of creation and supplying something to society as an
engineering problem. It's the latter that seems to produce the
uninteresting stuff, the products/services/artworks that asymptotically
approach the Skinner Box, the enclosure in which rats die of exhaustion
after pounding day and night on the pleasure lever.
None of this
would matter if, after finishing my day's writing, I hypocritically
pound a few pumpkin Frappuccinos, buy a few
Norah-Jones-slowed-by-five-percent compilations and complain that they
weren't lighting up my reward centers as intensely as they used to. But I
don't. I ask myself this: as a consumer, do I even
want my
desires listened and directly responded to? I'm not at all confident
that I do. I'm even willing to argue that I actively
don't. I
increasingly seek out stuff that doesn't necessarily care about what I
"want" — in fact, I'm reasonably certain my favorite artists don't give a
damn about my wants — because that's the stuff that's going to surprise
me, to delight me, to knock my worldview around. Iced chai, even a
55-gallon drum of it, can't aspire to that.
This speaks to a
psychodrama roiling in my mind. No doubt it also roils in the mind of
anyone who's dedicated their life to making interesting things. What,
this psychodrama asks, constitutes a healthy relationship between the
interesting things you can get it up to supply and the pre-existing
desires of the humanity you need to become your audience? How to steer
between the Scylla of solipsistic irrelevance and the Charybdis of
allowing your profession to resemble a certain much older one? Were I of
the psychological profile they called "problem solver" in elementary
school —
i.e., one who gets off on the very act of defining and
addressing problems, regardless of the content or context of those
problems — this wouldn't be an issue. But I'm not one of those; I'm
something else. I suspect you are, too. Otherwise, you'd have quit
reading this eight paragraphs ago to go solve a problem.
I
started down this road by asking how I could do better. Longtime readers
know that I periodically express bewilderment about the low response
drawn by my various projects. None draws less of a response than
Podthoughts, the
podcast review column I've written for
The Sound of Young America's
web site since May 2008. When Jesse Thorn put out the call for someone
to take it over, I jumped at the chance, assuming it would be an ideal
platform from which to post amusing, conversation-generating short
pieces. It hasn't
quite worked out that way — it turns out to be
the exceptional Podthought indeed that I ever hear so much as a sentence
about from anybody — and for that I blame myself.
Turning to the
local forum for help, I received a number of smart suggestions — try
producing a podcast about podcasts as a companion piece? Could work —
but several slightly discomfiting ones as well:
- I haven't heard
of the show you're talking about, I don't read that far into the column.
- I
don't read an article if I haven't heard of the podcast.
- Give
me the punchiest lines at the beginning. And what about ratings?
- You
have a lovely and lyrical command of the english language, but trying
to get through the first paragraph is very difficult.
- If
i'm not grabbed by the opening, i might skip it.
- I'd
probably like it if you gave a Rating ("I give this two pod people up")
- Too
much text in the posts. I see that giant wall and I usually don't read
it.
- I guess because podcasting hasn't exactly reached
maturation as an artistic medium, I'm not interested in a critical
evaluation of them as an artform.
Uneasily received advice, I
can tell you, for one whose goal is to write belletristic critical
evaluations of podcasts as an art form focused on exposing lesser-known
shows and unencumbered by the oversimplification of quantitative
ratings. But I've already started using some of it. If readers like to
read about podcasts they've already heard —
why would they want that?
— then I'll write up more popular podcasts. If they want some up-front
vital stats, I'll swing 'em up front. If they want a podcast about
podcasts, I'll get to work on that too.
Though I'd aimed to
achieve a neat dialectical synthesis between my own vision and the
demands of the audience, one fellow still had objections:
You
just don't get it.
[ ... ]
What it smacks of is someone
who is used to the old media world of broadcaster to audience who
doesn't understand why this whole new media world doesn't work for them.
Why aren't your comments coming in? Why isn't what you are doing more
remarked upon, aka 'remarkable?" If you want to build your 'purple cow,'
I doubt Godin would think blaming the audience for lacking the
sophistication to stay with you would be the productive way to go.
What
your reaction to the commentary here said to me was that you believe
what you are doing with your column is fine, and that it's our problem
that we aren't on board. How do you think our - my - 'tone' should be?
Thank you, Mr. Marshall, for allowing us to help make your hopes and
dreams come true?
Now, that
would be a pretty awesome
tone, but it is not, for the moment, to be. This got me thinking about a
whole array of big, hairy New Media Landscape issues. The standard line
about the broader ongoing change in media is that creators and
audiences have gotten smushed into a much closer relationship. Creators
can more easily reach audiences, but audiences can
way more
easily voice their complaints or, more likely, click over to one of the
other hojillion creators vying for their precious, precious attention.
Gone are the days of so few outlets that at least some sort of audience
was essentially guaranteed for whatever media people wanted to put out.
Part of me is
still that old-school public media guy — ironic, since I've never
worked in old-school public media — who wants to use his platform in the
noblest way possible: "inform, educate, entertain" and all that.
Another part of me is that former BBC Channel 4 executive who called
that Reithian mission "a paternalistic exercise in adult education by
the wing-collared classes." But as in all interesting endeavors, there's
a balance to be attained. As in all worthwhile endeavors, it's not an
easy one, and any slip can renders the whole project futile. Even in a
line as lowly as podcast reviewing, the belletrist who has fallen to the
level of a reader-pleasing functionary might as well pack it in.
I
take comfort in the fact that Adam Carolla, a sharp dude but one never
accused of membership in the high-handed intellectual elite, said
this
by way of a mission statement in his inaugural podcast:
If I
had a microphone and it was hooked up to ten Rose Bowls that were
filled to capacity and I had it for four hours a day, I would spend half
the time watching morbidly obese guys eat hot wings? It seems
ridiculous to me, yet that's the direction. That's where we're heading.
And then it becomes one of these negative spirals, because it's like,
are we just keeping up with the dumbasses, or we causing the demise of
the intelligent people? Are we causing them to be dumb? Think
about it. That's the logic in radio: "Look, you're smart, fine, but
everyone who's listening to you is dumb, so dumb it up for them," as
opposed to try to raise their awareness a little and have them come up
and meet you.
Or, put another way, here's an e-mail that
Moby wrote to Bob Lefsetz (which would score mass points from me anyway,
but whose reference to Lynch sends it to the bonus levels):
see,
i had a quasi-epiphany last year when i heard david lynch talking about
creativity (and forgive me if this sounds new age or hokey).
he
talked about how creativity in and of itself is great, and i realized
that he was right.
and i realized that, ideally, the market
should accommodate art, but that art shouldn't accommodate the market.
i
know, it sounds idealistic.
i had been trying to make myself
happy and make radio happy and make the label happy and make press happy
and etc.
and it made me miserable.
and i also don't
really aspire to selling too many records.
see, my friends who
are writers sell 20,000 books and they're happy.
my friends who
are theater directors sell 5,000 tickets during a run and they're happy.
i
like the idea of humble and reasonable metrics for determining the
success of a record.
and i like the idea of respecting the sacred
bond that exists between musician and listener.
again, i know
this sounds hokey, but it's where i am at present.
In
conclusion: bring back the toffee almond bar, Starbucks. YOU NEED ME
