I still feel a little like a spy at my local Starbucks.  It's not like I've never been to one, but I have never actually had one in the neighborhood. Strange as it may seem these days. Whenever I go in, I still think the Starbucks SWAT team's about to bust out and take me down at the least hint of sedition. Those baristas are so serious.

If it weren't in my neighborhood I would say "small" instead of "tall," but seeing as I may need a safe place, I have to make an effort here. Show the baristas I'm game. When in Rome, you know. When I start striding in and barking "Get me a venti extra-hot soya milk toffee-nut latte, no cream, extra sprinkles!" You'll know it's time for an intervention.

I'll be honest.  When the weather's like it has been the last few days—with this cold snap—and your cheap rental in the attic of some dilapidated Victorian doesn't have a built-in heat source (for real), and your local Starbucks is about a three minute walk from your door and they have a big hearth in the middle of the cafe with a gas fire in it, and big, cozy overstuffed purple velour armchairs all around it, and ethereal music, and hot drinks on tap, and cookies, too, well, what would you do?  Where would you go? I'm no martyr.


I have been a denizen of coffeehouses since I was a kid, practically. There was a dark, funky little cafe in Broadripple Village where I hung out in high school chain-smoking Viceroys (in those days you could still smoke indoors) and trying to tease out Michael Stipe's lyrics to "Gardening at Night." I had one of those "European berets" advertised in The New Yorker I used to wear around:

The turtleneck, too.

My mother hated it. But it had the intended effect. She said I was "bohemian." (She rolled her eyes when she said it, but still she said it.) Once she even told me when she was my age they called boys like me "beatniks." I didn't even know my mother knew about bohemians and beatniks. And if she could tell, then probably everybody thought so. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlenghetti, Mennonno. Yes, that's how it would be.

From my humble beginnings in Cafe Espresso on Broadripple Avenue and the Runcible Spoon on E. 6th Street in Bloomington, I eventually graduated to the cafes of legend. From Queen's Lane Coffee House in Oxford, The Bulldog at No. 90 Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam, and Le Procope on rue de l'Ancienne Comedie in St-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, to Cafe Kranzler on the Ku’damm in Berlin, Café Florian in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Vienna's Café Central, Malostranská Kavárná in Prague, and the Gerbeaud House in Budapest, I lingered, loitered, loafed and lounged in the best of them, with the best of them, all through my twenties and into my early thirties.

But I have been to my fair share of Starbucks, too. I even remember my first. It was 1993 in Portland, Oregon, where I was staying for a spell. At the time Starbucks was still something of a novelty, a regional chain, seemingly harmless. There was also a Torrefazione Italia—another Seattle-based coffee chain—in my little neighborhood there, which actually suited my tastes better, but as you might know, Starbuck's gobbled them up, too, back in '03 (before that, they even coexisted peacefully for a short time on our own Newbury Street right here in Boston).

Maybe because I've spent so much of my time in Boston in neighborhoods without any kind of cafe culture—without anywhere but bars and pubs for people to gather, and nowhere you could go on your own and read the paper or sit with a book, or people-watch, like you can in a coffeehouse—I'm not a Starbucks hater. They do what they do, and they do it well. To say that Starbucks is some kind of evil may be accurate on some levels (more about which in a moment), but the rebirth of the coffeehouse is most emphatically a social good.

What Starbucks has done with remarkable success is adapt a venerable institution central to Western civilization for the last several centuries but recently in serious decline to a certain modern temperament. What is irksome to many is that modern temperament itself, and the fact that Starbucks has taken an institution that was traditionally and by nature urban and cosmopolitan, and seems to have pretty thoroughly suburbanized it. Somehow, it doesn't feel authentic—even though it looks very much like a real coffeehouse, it feels like a body-snatched coffeehouse, a coffeehouse without a soul.

But this is a concern mainly for aesthetes, self-styled or certified, who make it their business to judge the authenticity of things. I suspect it's not such a concern for other coffeehouse patrons, who are more concerned that there are enough electrical outlets for their laptops and a good strong wifi signal to go with their double tall non-fat extra-dry cappuccino. But the important thing for aesthetes is that there are "real people" populating their coffeehouses, not just pod people. (Let's put aside for the moment the fact that people who set themselves above the fray, judging the authenticity of things, are already suspect—and, just to be perfectly clear, I never said I wasn't a pod person.)

Davis Square's now long gone but not forgotten Someday Cafe seemed the epitome of the aesthete's ideal. One of my housemates, who has been in Davis Square for some years, always gets a little misty-eyed when anyone mentions Someday. He says it embodied the idea of a coffeehouse as a place where people of all strata of society were welcome to come, regardless of whether they could afford a cup of joe or not, and mix and mingle, old-school style.

Well, that's one way to look at it. But a lot of folks saw it otherwise. Like javanaut here, whose take on the Someday—offered up just before it was shuttered for good—was somewhat different:

[Mismanagement resulted in] repeated PREVENTABLE robberies, sewer-like sanitation, and belligerent townie junkies staring at customers as if it was a 1975 winter hill tavern.

the someday is a HEROIN shooting gallery with refugees from central square urinating on the couches , passed out in their own filth.

bulldoze the dump immediately.

Hmm. I'm not necessarily hearing a different story from my housemate about the kind of place Someday was, just maybe a different idea of what a coffeehouse should aspire to be.

For aesthetes someplace like Someday was a gold mine, of course. It was like a Fantagraphics Comix come to life. Someplace seedy where sordid scenes were de rigueur. There was always a story to tell. Even the name of the cafe seemed to capture the wistfulness of killing time, the desperate sense of ennui, the gallows humor of the permanent underclass. And a strong argument can certainly be made that such preserves of wistfulness, desperation, and boredom should be protected, as they balance out the sharp-edged, soul-sucking industriousness of city life.

Starbucks seems to be more a fixture of the soul-sucking, and not so much the playful bohemian cityscape that gave rise to the beats and protest singers of yesteryear and more recently provided aid and comfort to schizophrenics and junkies.

Starbucks isn't shy about being square, either. It proudly advertises itself as an office away from the office. But coffeehouses have not traditionally been home away from home to the abacus and spreadsheet. More often they have been a refuge for cranks and malcontents, jittery paranoiacs, frantic artists, manic scribes, and strategists of revolution. I mean, it's caffeine their selling, people, not percocet.

But that's what I find most impressive about the atmosphere of your typical urban Starbucks: the sedulous use to which so many Starbucks junkies seem to be able to put a drug the abuse of which "results in symptoms of caffeinism which include agitation, disorientation and a syndrome which may be mistaken for anxiety/neurosis" (from this study in Orthomolecular Psychiatry).

You have to admire the discipline of Starbucks denizens, who put their caffeine buzz to such industrious good use. Not only do they dutifully learn to order their caffeinated concoctions in fluent, accentless Starbucksese, but after waiting patiently for them they set right to work at whatever little task they've taken on with such concentration you'd think they were splitting atoms with their laser-vision.

What may be missing from Starbucks is the winsomeness of wasting time, that luxury of luxuries in a world where even leisure is work. The faint scent of petty ambition—from the mastery of the lingo to the clackity-clack of keyboards to the yackity-yack of one-sided cellphone conversations—pervades the place (granted, it's subtle—you can hardly smell it under the stink of burnt coffee).

Of course caffeine is the world's most popular drug because in moderate quantities it appears to sharpen our focus and boost our productivity. But it has not always been appreciated as the tool of enhanced corporate productivity it is today.

While the European coffeehouse has been associated from the very beginning with the academy, and has even served as a sort of adjunct to it, a center of informal discussion and lively debate, it has also occasionally been the birthplace of a revolution.

This incarnation of the coffeehouse premiered in Oxford, England, in 1650. It hit American shores (in Boston, of course) in 1670, a year before making its debut in Paris.  The cafe was a center of the Enlightenment, which, face it, would probably never have happened without caffeine. We'd still be in the Middle Ages, drinking grog and talking about how flat the world is, if not for the coffeehouse.

English coffeehouses were seen as petrie dishes of democracy, "seats of English liberty," "where you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government." King Charles II called them "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers." He tried to stamp them out, but to no avail. (He would be very happy that a crepe place has moved in where Someday used to be, that's for sure.)

But by the nineteenth century the coffeehouse had become a staple of the urban bourgeois lifestyle. The last revolution to be plotted from a coffeehouse, to my knowledge, was the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, which ended in shambles.

Coffeehouses in the twentieth century have been an urban commonplace, though in recent years they had begun to fade from the cityscape. By the time Starbucks came along, in earnest in the mid-eighties (they were founded in '71 as a coffee bean retailer, but did not become what they are today until Howard Schultz acquired the company in '87), American cities were in a pretty bleak state.

In recent years, with American cities making a tentative comeback, "resettled" and rejuvenated neighborhood centers have undergone—and continue to undergo—radical change. Part of the change in the landscape has been the introduction of one-stop shopping in the form of big box stores that have had enormous success in the suburbs, and with them the parade of cookie-cutter chain retailers and restaurateurs.

Starbucks fits nicely into this wave of colonization of the urban landscape by global chains. Like your neighborhood Applebee's you always know what you'll find there.

Beyond the aesthetic's objections to Starbucks you will find those of a more political bent have a lot to complain about. To many of them Starbucks and its devoted patrons seem to personify the fetishization of commodities Marx alerted us to in Das Kapital.

Starbucks has, in not so subtle ways, acknowledged and sought to address problems Marx and his followers recognized in the labor theory of value, by offering a line of "fair-trade" products. Everyone knows that Starbucks employees around the country have unionized and de-unionized, and maybe even re-unionized over the years. Starbucks labor practices have even become a marketing tool in some sectors.

Still, many strident foes of globalization (which is a little like being a strident foe of the weather, but never mind) see Starbucks patrons as dupes of capitalist ideology.  This is the Frankfurt School faction.  But students of the Birmingham School take a kinder, gentler view. In Vince Carducci's words (from "The Critique of Capital: Reloaded"):

[C]onsumption can and should also be viewed as an active form of expression. Active consumers express individual sovereignty through identities constructed by acquiring and displaying goods that convey information about themselves and their self-proclaimed position within a constellation of social networks. And as the reception theory of the Birmingham School of cultural studies maintains, these expressions may concede to capitalist hegemony, oppose it, or seek to negotiate a position somewhere in between.

This passage fairly captures the Starbucks/Dunkins Dichotomy here in Boston.  Part of being a Starbucks regular is proudly displaying your Starbucks cup as you walk the streets of Back Bay, say. It is not just coffee, after all. If it were, you could get it at McDonald's, which, according to Consumer Reports, has better coffee, anyway—and since its partnership with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc., offers Fair Trade Certified and organic specialty coffees, too. No, your Starbucks cup is information about yourself and your self-proclaimed position within a constellation of social networks.

Again, what is irksome to those who do not consider themselves a part of that particular "constellation of social networks" is the concession to capitalist hegemony those who do represent for them. The irony is that many of those who use their opposition to Starbucks to illustrate their opposition to capitalist hegemony have allegiances to other products or brands with which they themselves have constructed their own social identities.  Unless you are walking around naked—God forbid, in this weather—you are likely a walking billboard for someone or something.

There is a generation gap here, I'll admit. Younger people today don't really see the irony in all of this, I've gathered. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. We must all acknowledge at some point that we are what we buy. The question for someone who reflexively rejects a global or globalizing brand in favor of a local brand is whether the local brand is any better on the same grounds on which they are judging their global competitors. This judgment takes more than a knee-jerk reaction. The same level of scrutiny should be given to small-business labor and fair-trade practices using global commodity chain analysis, before hailing or condemning one or the other.

Local businesses have to buy into that chain just like global ones do, so any reflexive judgment would be rash, particularly considering the unique challenges of the small-business bottom-line that often cause corner-cutting. Globals can at least afford fair-trade. Want to change the world? It's harder than just "buying local" these days.

You can see that the political complaints are far more complex than the aesthetic ones. And, frankly, judging by merely aesthetic ones smacks of snobbery.

The funny thing is, whether I end up at locally-owned and operated Diesel or global giant Starbucks, once I get my buzz on I can't really tell that much of a difference between them. As I've noted before their clientele is almost interchangeable. You've got brainy lesbians at Starbucks and yuppisauruses at Diesel. Everybody's got a laptop, ipod and cellphone, regardless of where you go.

You want to find the "locals"? "Authentic" old-school denizens of Davis Square? Maybe a well-behaved junkie or two, too? They're all down the block at McDonald's, where you can still get a cup of joe for about a buck-nineteen.

Free-trade certified and organic, no less.