The Soul of Wit

My affair with Starbucks® is not clandestine, but neither is it ostentatious. Anyone may know of my regard for it, a just and sensible affection that almost attains the status of a passion each time I take the first warming sip of a milky espresso drink on a blustery morning. And so my loyalty to Starbucks is unwavering, although not to an unreasonable extent. I admit that I patronize other coffee shops not infrequently, simply because they are in my way and both Starbucks locations in Berkeley are rather out of it. College students are slaves to convenience, certainly, so this small betrayal shouldn't surprise. The truly curious fact of the matter is that I am willing to walk 15 minutes each way, early on a weekend morning, just for Starbucks.

I enjoy coffee for itself: bittersweet, steaming, aromatic. It evokes memories of home, of breakfast on leisurely Sunday mornings with my family. To use coffee for caffeine is to somehow cheapen its value in my eyes. I do it, of course—I defy anyone to get through one of my semesters without—but I can never bring myself to do it to Starbucks. Those other, more convenient coffee shops serve this purpose, and sometimes even serve a decent drink, but Starbucks remains near and dear to my heart. No white mocha or indeterminate café latte from another source has ever shaken the belief, lodged firmly in my core, that Starbucks is superior to all its imitators and competitors, superior enough to merit an exertion on my part.

I have always said (and still maintain) that the comfort of rampant commercialism, so rare in a place like Berkeley, is worth far more to me than a half hour of my time and $3.35.

While I admire originality and independence, I feel like the fierce revolt against convention characteristic of this day and age often amounts to irrationality. To dislike a brand or product simply because it is popular renders one as pathetic, as much of a caitiff to convention, as the tools who like the brand or product for the same reason. Starbucks may be a big, impersonal corporation, but it is a big, impersonal corporation that offers the comfort of conformity in order to make a profit; that in itself is an act of courage in today's world, with its radical devotion to individuality, charity, and absolute, abstract freedoms.

If you choose to hate Starbucks because you want to advertise your political, economic, or social individuality on a disposable cup, you are no doubt as disposable as both the packaging and the substandard beverage contained within. At Starbucks, however, even that impulse is superbly regularized in the form of "The Way I See It" statements on each cup: individuality stamped with a catchy title, numbered, and mass-produced. I rejoice if this corrupted, compromised form of self-expression offends you. I drink my coffee as a respite and a pleasure, not as a statement of self-righteous, self-referential nonconformism.

Starbucks provides the novelty of choices, and the security of their insignificance: regardless of what you order, you can rest assured that it will be consistent, formulaic, and delightful. One feels standard at Starbucks, no matter what. Employees in other coffee shops have balked or bristled when I ordered their equivalent of a tall, nonfat dulce de leche latte, iced with no ice, which I fully admit is a contradictory sort of concoction. Starbucks baristas simply inquire whether I would like whipped cream on that.

No, I would not. There is solace in exercising freedom within such strict constraints. The trouble with our contemporary tendency to deny limitations entirely, to shatter the fourth wall of the stage and to erase the horizon line on the canvas is that we erase too any sense of what freedom is and why we value it. For a moment in a day, it is such a relief to set down the burden of uniqueness and to be forced to exercise all my creativity and liberty within the confines of a coffee cup.