Regardless what you do for a living, when you wake up in the morning, you have a routine. Some may be more streamlined than others – say a rock star verse a doctor – but a routine is still in place. Whether you are a musician, lawyer, doctor, teacher, businessman/woman, you name it, we all have our own morning rituals that we have for one way or another incorporated into our daily activities. Some days you may stray from one, like not being able to watch your local news or read the paper or even taking a different route to the office, but for the most part the routine stays intact. For me, the one thing that I can honestly say never gets left behind is coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee, how do I love thee? For the past ten yeas, coffee has been a staple in my daily routine. On most days I have two cups, but every day I have at least one. 

My coffee comes from all sorts of coffee establishments; the big chains to the independent coffee shops, the latter of which I enjoy the most.  I’m not a snob, just a devotee to the beverage so most of the times I’m not too-too picky. With that, deciding on where I get my coffee from that morning is about all the thought process I put into it. So when Bryant Simon was sent my way, the university professor who visited over 450 Starbucks in ten countries doing research for his book, “Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks” (University of California Press, 2009), I knew I had to check him out.  After all, if you visit 450 Starbucks from all over the world, you must be onto something big in the world of coffee. And what Simon discovered will shock you. I was fortunate enough to chat with Simon about his book and tap into his unique view of the coffee business.

Richie Frieman (RF):  A professor of history and director of the American Studies program at Temple University in Philadelphia, you spent over the last five years, visiting more than 450 Starbucks in ten countries doing research for your new book, "Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks". Tell us, what can readers expect from this book?

Bryant Simon (BS): Your readers can expect a warm and sometimes funny (check out my story about nabbing bags of trash from a Starbucks), yet still critical and hard-edged account of Starbucks' rise and recent stumbles. But the book isn't just about Starbucks; it is about us, about changes in day-to-day life in America over the last twenty-five years and about how we have let buying ooze into just about every corner and crevice of our lives - our social lives, our emotional lives, and our political lives. 

RF: You've said on your site, "This is not, however, just a study of Starbucks, but rather an exploration of American life both in the states and abroad in the 21st Century." With that, what has been one of the most surprising things you've discovered from your research regarding American life in general?

BS: The thing that sticks out to me is not so much surprising as it is disturbing. Hefty doses of buying, advertising, and marketing were not new to America in 1995 or 2005. Neither was the branding of everything from fun-runs to urinal covers to rock concerts. Nor was the commodification of consumers' deepest anxieties, desires, and aspirations all that new. It wasn't even that Americans suffered, in the words of business writer Lucas Conley, from "obsessive branding disorder."

What is new--and what makes our world more susceptible to the seductions of buying--is the withering of non-market relationships and the public institutions that in the past had pushed back against the market and brands to challenge them for people's allegiances and identities. The pullback of community, neighborhood associations, and other binding agents allowed brands like Starbucks to sell more goods and garner greater profits by reaching deeper into our lives and consciousness and claiming spaces that civic institutions, including government, occupied in the past.

But while Starbucks occasionally talked and acted like an NGO or a political party, it never existed for the larger good; it worked for Wall Street and for shareholders. From the posters about health care for workers to the brown java jackets that promise to save the planet to the oversized drinks that invoke notions of extravagance, everything is there to get us to buy more.

By making claims to serve the larger good while lining their own pockets, companies like Starbucks made it even harder for our already hampered civic institutions to reclaim legitimacy as vital actors in domestic reform and foreign policy. This corporate takeover of daily life carried with it costs well beyond the Starbucks premium. We might consume Starbucks, but as we do, Starbucks consumes part of us--part of our environment, our culture, and even our politics.

RF: What made you decide to write this book? Why now and why focus on Starbucks?

BS: Well, I like coffee shops. I like hanging there, so I decided why not turn his into a vocation. Really though I started with a simple proposition: What we buy has meaning. What we decide to spend our money on can tell us something about what we care about and desire at a given moment.

When I began the book, we were buying a lot of Starbucks. In the early part of this century, Starbucks was going gangbusters. It was serving 44 million people a week and opening a new store somewhere around the world every six hours. Shock rocker and now high-end golf club huckster Alice Cooper said it best, when he commented, "It used to said, 'As GM goes, so goes America.' Now it's: 'As Starbucks goes, so goes America.'" So I wanted to use, in sense Starbucks' popularity, as a window into the nation and the national mood.

Obviously, this isn't the first book about Starbucks. But it is the first to see Starbucks not just as a good story or as an enviable business model, but as emblematic of broader and more disturbing cultural and political trends in the United States. And it is also the first book to really explore what Starbucks offers its customers and how it frequently promises way more than it delivers--from the building of meaningful neighborhood places to offering retail therapy to ethically sourcing its beans.

RF: With visiting so many different Starbucks, which do you find to be the best and worst?

BS: The thing about Starbucks is that they are really pretty similar. Despite a unique exterior or interior detail here or there, they aren't all that different. Sometimes, it was hard to remember while sitting in a Starbucks in Singapore that I was 10,000 miles from home or 12,000 miles from the Starbucks in Franklin, Indiana.

A few of my favorites -- Architecturally, I think my favorite was a Starbucks in Xian, China. Set below the street level, this store had the feel of a modernist cabin. It really did seem like a retreat from the city into another world.

Favorite scene: I was at a Starbucks in Guadalajara Mexico. It was a Sunday afternoon following church. It was hot. But there wasn't a single person sitting inside. Everyone was outside. They wanted to see and be seen. In fact, people were paying - two times the average daily wage in Mexico - to valet park their cars.

Most prosaic scene - or perhaps revealing: One of the stories I tell in my book is how Starbucks went from being something special - both for a community and for individual consumers - to being special quite ordinary. There is a Starbucks in Austin, Texas that seems to capture this transition. It has a drive thru and it right next to a Jiffy Lube. 

RF: What is your favorite drink and food at Starbucks?

BS: I don't go to Starbucks very much any more. But the answer about to give got me in trouble with the very popular Starbucks blogger, Starbucks Melody. I don't really have a favorite Starbucks drink. When I went a lot, I typically ordered a small - tall in Starbucks speak - coffee for here. I didn't pay much attention to the roast, though I liked Sumatra. Melody couldn't believe that I didn't care more about the drinks. But really it was how others used and thought about the drinks that I was interested in. What did they say about the brand and how did they use the places - again these were the things I was concerned with in my research. Plus, I think coffee is a hard thing to really taste. (Evidence - in several recent taste tests customers seem to prefer McDonalds to Starbucks.) 

RF: What was one of the stranger interactions you had with people at Starbucks? Did anyone know that you were there for research on your book?

BS: I never got thrown out of a Starbucks, though occasionally I got some suspicious looks. Corporate Starbucks held me at arm's length. They didn't really give me much access while I was doing the research. 

RF: What's one big misconception (be it good or bad) that people have about Starbucks?

BS: Misconception one: Starbucks doesn't for the most part put some mom and pops out of business. While Starbucks bought up a number of regional chains in the 1990s, it doesn't go after the independents. Actually, it has created the market and the taste for espresso-based drinks that have allowed the specialty market to grow and create space for smaller coffee shops, offering different (less corporate) ambience and a less predictable experience. That said, Starbucks' real estate practices have consigned these smaller players to side streets and lower volume spots. (For more on this point, see, http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2009/06/24/starbucks-and-small-b...)

Misconception two: On every Starbucks cup, it says, "help us help the planet." While Starbucks has taken a number of key positive steps to reduce its carbon imprint, it hasn't taken the biggest step. It doesn't encourage its customers - not nearly enough - to use their own take-away containers or in-house ceramic cups. This is key. Every time someone walks out of a Starbucks with a paper cup, even a paper cup made from post-consumer use materials, that person adds to the cycle of waste and cycle of oil dependence. If Starbucks really wanted to help us help the planet it would challenge the take-away culture that everyday makes the planet less sustainable. They won't, it seems, because those cups are the company's number one source of advertising. (For a great, related web-site, see http://savethecups.com/).

RF: What is it that you have found that makes Starbucks the #1 coffee brand in the world?

BS: Starbucks took natural, authentic seeming products - whole bean coffee and espresso based drinks - that appealed to a niche market and brought them, diluting and industrializing (or McDonaldization) them in the process, to a mainstream market. Just think Frappuccino here.

RF: What is next for you? What do you plan to write about or focus on for the future?

BS: What's next? Well, I'm not going to write a book about Peet's, another coffee company. I'm working on two other projects. One is the biography of a fiction character. John Steinbeck's Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath has lived a long life. Seventy-five years after his birth, he still brought up as a symbol of the Great Depression, of courage, of love and critique of America, and of the hope for better days through cooperation and community. I'm also working on another biography - the biography of the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia. First a movie theater for white working immigrant, it became by the 1950s the city's version of the Apollo Theater, the place where soul greats from Sam Cooke to Stevie Wonder to the Isley Brothers played. Now it stands in shambles, but community activists are trying to reopen the building a music venue and neighborhood center.

For more information on Bryant Simon and his book, check out: EverythingButTheCoffee.net