The California Complainer

"I know this is gonna sound strange, but tell me again why I hate Starbucks so much?"

I was embarrassed to have to ask. Our dinner party went silent. I had obviously violated one of the unspoken rules of our liberal soirée. Who was I to question the holy trinity of hate aimed at Starbucks, Wal-Mart and McDonald's?

The truth was, after years of boycotting Starbucks and encouraging friends and relatives to do the same, I had forgotten why I was so pissed off at that giant green goddess in the first place.

I'm no fan of big business, which Starbucks undoubtedly is. But now that I'm nearing the quarter-century mark, I can't just dismiss something because it's big. Sometimes big is bad, but sometimes it's better. Bigger can mean lower prices, wider availability of goods, more production and more stores, which can lead to more jobs on all levels of the labor chain.

Until recently, the charge most frequently leveled at Starbucks was that its coffee wasn't fair trade. The implication was that your $4 latte was made possible only by the ridiculously low wages paid to coffee growers in poor, developing countries. But the story is a bit more complicated than that. In 2003, Starbucks purchased 2.1 million pounds of coffee at fair trade prices. That's a lot of coffee, although it only amounted to about one percent of Starbucks' total coffee purchases.

The only problem is that something is still missing, something less tangible than fair-trade coffee but equally vital. Last time I checked, most coffee shops don't stay in business just because they buy fair trade coffee. People go to a coffee house because it's a funky environment, a unique place that has a sense of culture. Culture comes in many forms -- Espresso Royale's constantly changing color scheme, for example, or the foul smell emanating from the corners of my favorite shop back in California. What's unique, cool or different about Starbucks culture?

The best answer to my question about why I should avoid Starbucks came from a friend. She pointed out that Starbucks is one of the most overtly predatory companies in the urban jungle. Not only is its policy to eliminate mom-and-pop coffee shops, but to throw its weight around when it shows up -- and Starbucks has a lot of heft. With more than 5,000 stores in the United States and an additional 2,500 in other countries, Starbucks can afford to play tough.

This point was driven home while visiting a friend in San Francisco. She was mourning the recent loss of her favorite neighborhood coffee shop. Although the place had been in business for years, had a loyal clientele and paid its employees a living wage and benefits, it was recently forced out of business by Starbucks.

Stage one of the Starbucks eradication program was to saturate the entire neighborhood with shops. In a short amount of time, there was at least one Starbucks per block. The shops stayed mostly empty, but Starbucks was able to use its huge size (and profits) to subsidize stores that were temporarily losing money. The company's hope was that, by saturating the neighborhood and subsidizing the losses, it would be able to squeeze the local shop out of business. Then Starbucks could close down some of the excess shops and venture back into the black.

Stage two. Well, typically, there is no stage two to the plan, but the clientele at this local establishment were especially hard-headed. Business continued as the locals chortled about all of the empty Starbucks. But when the lease ran out at the local place, the landlord informed the owner that Starbucks had offered 10 times the current rent to occupy the space.

Game, set ... $4, big-business, homogenized, partially fair-trade coffee had arrived.

Admittedly, the story isn't quite as black and white as it might appear. Competitiveness -- even to the extent of being predatory -- in business isn't exactly a new concept. But common sense dictates that some competition is legal and some is illegal. The difficulty is in differentiating between a good, clean fight and one full of low blows and sucker punches.

For me, it doesn't really matter whether Starbucks' behavior is illegal. Knowing just how brutal Starbucks can be to local businesses is enough to keep me out of its stores and tell my friends to do the same. I don't dislike Starbucks because it's big, or because it doesn't buy fair trade. I dislike it because local businesses and the distinctiveness of coffee shop "culture" are eliminated when that scary green goddess comes to town.

If you're still not convinced, here's a quick rundown of some other disconcerting Starbucks facts: the company is overtly anti-union; less than half of its employees are covered by company health care; only 20 percent of Starbucks employees are full-time; and, except for management, none of its employees are guaranteed a minimum number of weekly hours.

And in case you hadn't noticed, the coffee tastes like [expletive], too.

Melissa Graboyes, a graduate student in the School of Public Health, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at graboyes@bu.edu.