Coffee (and the sugar to sweeten it) was one of early capitalism’s defining “mass luxuries.” While pre-modern world trade centered on luxuries worth hauling around the world for small consumer elites, modernity was ushered in by new, cheap commodities the rising middle and working classes could afford.

Coffee had the added benefit of helping super-exploited workers toil longer and faster on less food. Before I knew about its history, I intuited the capitalist nature of coffee while contemplating why my high school summer job, a small-town sandwich shop, offered it for free (I righteously decided to forego it, thwarting the boss’s ploy to get more panini out of me).

Today, coffee shops are are a “third place” between home and work (rather like the street, the park, the grocery aisle, the subway car, etc), according to Kevin Johnson (annual salary $13,382,500). But they have some unique mystical properties (the smells of burnt coffee and artificial pumpkin flavor). I got to listen as this and numerous other corporate bromides were sucked down with the focus of six-a.m. commuters by Starbucks’s several hundred MBA student interns. A few minutes prior, I'd personally handed Johnson a glass of rosé from my post behind the bar (hourly wage $18, or $36,000 yearly in that fantasy world where I get full-time hours). I was struck by the perversity of the CEO’s lack of purple ermine-lined robes trailing on the floor—our feudal overlords shouldn’t be allowed to go around looking like mere mortals; it gives them the added advantage of stealth. As an added disguise, Johnson waxed rhapsodic about “putting on the green apron,” going down among his serfs, “those who wear the green apron,” where he “wore the green apron” and did something or other before heading back to 112th floor (actually the Starbucks HQ that towers over Seattle’s industrial SoDo isn’t that tall, though Johnson himself is quite imposing, making him more statistically probable.

Speaking of feudalism, one of the clergy—sorry, economics professors—over at Forbes recently suggested paying baristas piece rates instead of hourly wages, though I guess that’s actually more a feature of early/peripheral capitalism, and he was making the suggestion as a means of arguing the “green aprons” deserve a raise. Why do they deserve a raise? Because their productivity has recently been unceremoniously raised by app-based ordering, an innovation as dazzlingly new as the assembly-line speedup, which is itself almost as innovative as the outright wage cut.

Meanwhile, my own class antagonism is directed downwards and/or laterally as well as up into the stratosphere where beings like Johnson stride among the clouds: I want to know what kind of basic excuse for a coffee-drinker orders their alleged “latte” not only from Starbucks but using a smartphone app. But these app-ordering cretins have further to fall: they could become the people who stand around taking pictures outside the company’s tragically hilarious imitation of a real coffee shop here in Capitol Hill, Seattle (I think it’s called “Reserve Roastery” or some such name like they put on box wine). Which brings me to the even more tragic Business Insider article quoting corporate hacks about their attempts to ape real coffee shops. Their pronouncements are worth reproducing at some length:

“We're still not seeing any one competitor or even a smaller number of group of competitors being an influence on our business at any time," Maw said at the UBS Global Consumer and Retail Conference on Thursday. "But what we have acknowledged ... is the collective group of independent coffee shops out there, they are doing a lot of what Starbucks has been so good at for so long."

Starbucks and Gentrificaton The Story on Partayke

IDK, doth he protest too much? For the record, I unwittingly entered a stealth-Starbucks “pilot” shop here in Seattle, and was irked when the green logo popped up on the screen that neglected to solicit a tip on my $6 pour-over purchase (which might as well have come from Dunkin Donuts). Why was I irked? Because that week in Seattle, patronizing Starbucks felt like crossing a picket-line: the company had just dumped tens of thousands into the campaign to kill off a corporate tax for affordable housing, and in fact Kshama Sawant’s angry red hordes marched by while I was finishing my coffee, protesting that very action (I left the dregs and joined them). A while after this debacle, former CEO and founder Howard Schultz announced his pro-business, libertarian-ish presidential run, to universal groans in his hometown ewspapers. Altweekly The Stranger was, as usual, most vitriolic, running a #NoHowardNo cover story.

But Starbucks has more to worry about than pissed-off Seattleites who can’t make rent and don't want a spoiler throwing the election to the Donald: its plucky indie competitors are advancing their newest tactics: “Third Wave” shops with zero-tolerance policies on “additives” (read: cream and sugar). You wouldn’t dump sugar in wine today, though they used to in the Middle Ages all the time. Why dump it in single-origin Lake Kivu you just paid $7.50 for? Contrast Seattle’s Ghost Note where the specialty is high-end flavored drinks like the Sun Ship: espresso with smoked grapefruit rosemary syrup, coconut milk, lime and soda. A glance through the US Coffee Championships’ Instagram account shows such mixology to be a fairly widespread practice at the high end where coffee imbibes some tricks from craft cocktails.

According to some, the threat such delicious snobbery poses isn’t to multibillion-dollar Starbucks but to gentrifying neighborhoods, as one North Denver shop and another in LA recently found out. What interests me about these cases is the way all parties—the media, the activists, and contrite owner—frame their discourse in terms of race and “culture.” The notion that the consumption preferences of the upper working classes are somehow causing the financialized boom in urban housing prices is gleefully amplified by outlets like the Bezos-owned Washington Post, which includes a peppy video busting “myths of gentrification” on the same page as the article about the coffee shop furor. None of this discounts the lived experience of racialized people whose communities are caught in the crosshairs of global finance capital’s algorithmic predator drones with their yield-seeking missiles (cash offers) targeting every modest split-level on the block. But the notion that white people or even high-paid tech workers—let alone ultra-petty bourgeois coffee shop owners and their precarious workers—are the causes of gentrification (rather than its mere shock troops) is a distraction from the global asset managers and their local developer henchmen who actually drive the process.

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