What the Mermaid Taught Me

By Kim Fellner

Once upon a time in America, coffee was just coffee. Pretty much the same for everyone. With the exception of Italian neighborhoods and counterculture hang-outs—mostly in college communities and artsy urban enclaves—you couldn’t divine much about coffee drinkers by the brand they favored, or the take-out cup they carried.

Then came Starbucks, dispensing designer coffee for the masses. It reduced our tolerance for weak bilge and burned sludge, and seduced us with a taste for the good stuff, while being a relatively decent corporate citizen within the constraints of a free-market economy. But as it grew and replicated over the land, insinuating itself onto our street corners and into our culture, many organizers began to view the sassy green mermaid as the epitome not of gratification, but of gentrification.

When it comes to Starbucks though, there seem to be as many narratives as there are coffee drinkers—as I quickly discovered during my research for Wrestling With Starbucks, a book that uses the coffee company as a lens to explore how we define and practice our values in the global economy. My own interest had been piqued in 1999 when I joined fellow activists in Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization and found myself only yards away from an anarchist attack on a Starbucks store window. How, I wondered, had a chain of coffee shops with a relatively benevolent reputation come to engender the evils of capitalism run amok? Several years later, spurred by a writing assignment from ColorLines magazine, I endeavored to find out.

Although I’ve spent most of my life in the labor movement fighting for the redistribution of wealth and power, I decided to begin with what I soon discovered was a radical assumption: that the Starbucks Coffee Company, the labor movement, and the global justice movement all wanted to make the world a better place. In other words, I began by taking all of them at their word, and then dug deeper.

Like most parts of the Starbucks landscape, the intersection where race, class, and real estate meet to form gentrification is rife with contradictions and often eludes prevailing assumptions. English sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term “gentrification” in 1964. She had been studying various London districts as they began to get richer, as abandoned changed to desirable and cheap lodging became more or less expensive. “Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district,” she wrote, “it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed.” Activists tend to see Starbucks as a harbinger of such change, which has become synonymous with displacement of poor residents by more affluent ones and, most often, the displacement of people of color by whites.

There seems to be a set and inexorable pattern to the whole thing. Take, for instance, the formerly black-majority Central District of Seattle. According to the Associated Press, November 2001, “The good economy of the ‘90s and the deliberate efforts of residents like [DeCharlene] Williams, who founded the Central Area Chamber of Commerce, helped eradicate crime. Businesses like Starbucks moved in, and many blacks—once corralled into the Central District by racist red-lining policies of banks, insurance companies and real-estate firms—found themselves moving out.”

Some communities organize to protest the effects of Starbucks—and other chains. In 2005, San Francisco’s redevelopment authority approved a Starbucks for Japantown over strong community objections. “Many people in the neighborhood voiced the concern that Starbucks’ presence would have diminished the revenues of local small businesses, such as Café Hana, May’s Coffee Shop, Benkyodo Diner and Café Tan Tan,” reported the local Nichi Bei Times. In that case, Starbucks acceded to neighborhood wishes and decided not to sign the lease.

However, that scenario is not the most common. Generally, when Starbucks moves into economically or culturally upscale locations, everyone is happy except a few cranky bohos. In white middle-class and striving neighborhoods, there are seldom problems or protests. Then lower-income neighborhoods of color, desperate for amenities, demand inclusion as well. And just about at that point, white political activists and artists began to see the chain as predatory and worthy of opposition. Although there are a few wealthy villages (think Martha’s Vineyard) and historic districts that eschew chain stores on principle, the blowback against Starbucks has generally been the purview of übercool politicos and culturalists. Consider the notices plastered onto some San Francisco Starbucks windows in 2003: “The global economy requires a relentless substitution of quantity over quality and shareholder value over human values,” read the announcement, which culture jammers (the name ascribed to inventive practitioners of satirical brand desecration) had printed on fake company letterhead. “At our current market level, Starbucks cannot in good conscience guarantee all of our beans meet both our rigorous quality standards as well as our commitment to social responsibility. We are moving over and making room for local coffee bars.”

At the same time, however, many struggling communities were more than eager to have a Starbucks. As one of the advisory neighborhood commissioners from D.C.’s largely African-American Anacostia neighborhood told the Washington Post several years ago, “We’re wondering what is it about our neighborhood, that everywhere else people are whining that they have too many Starbucks, why can’t we get even one?”

It looks like economically marginal neighborhoods striving for a Starbucks will have to wait. This summer, with Starbucks’ stock price hovering in the mid-teens (down from a high of $40 a share in late 2004), the company announced the closure of 616 “underperforming” stores, representing nearly 9 percent of its 7,200 U.S. company-operated venues. While media commentators took smug satisfaction in humbling the once-unstoppable coffee giant—and most of us are not likely to miss a handful of mermaids in over-saturated cities—the news dismayed some affected communities, who saw the chain’s departure as a marker of their own failure to thrive and an economic landscape that was getting bleaker. After reporting on a Starbucks store closing in downtown Newark, N.J., The New York Times went so far as to editorially lament the company’s decision, suggesting that the closing belied Starbucks’ avowed commitment to diversity and communities.

As I perused the list of doomed stores, one popped out at me. It was located on Wilkinson Boulevard in Charlotte, N.C. I had written about that very store in my book. Like my local Eastern Market Starbucks in Washington, D.C., the Charlotte store was part of Urban Coffee Opportunities (UCO), a joint venture between Starbucks and Magic Johnson Enterprises, owned by the former Los Angeles Lakers basketball star, to bring upscale coffee to lower-income neighborhoods.

I had interviewed Johnson at the grand opening of that store in July 2006, on a tired strip of Wilkinson Boulevard, next to a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Before Interstate 85 was built, Wilkinson Boulevard was the main thoroughfare between the airport and the city. But that was decades ago, and the street had become a dispiriting mix of boarded-up factories interspersed with a few fast-food restaurants, pawn shops, and the like. It was no wonder that most of the residents saw the advent of Starbucks as an improvement.

Looming over everyone else in the room, Johnson had chatted up local politicians, answered questions from the press, signed memorabilia, and posed with neighborhood kids. “Everyone thought minorities would not commonly invest three or four dollars in a cup of coffee,” Johnson told me. “But it’s not just a great cup of coffee; it’s a meeting place. We don’t have meeting places in our communities, and we don’t have job opportunities. Starbucks provides both. And it attracts other retailers. People come in behind you because they know we attract foot traffic.”

I talked with two older women from the neighborhood. “The coffee’s not what I expected,” one of them confided. “I can make this good at home, and I’m glad I got to taste it before I spent my money.” But the women were glad that both the Starbucks and the Wal-Mart were there. And no one was worrying about gentrification. “This is an area that needs economic development,” a county commissioner told me. “It will be many years before gentrification happens here.”

Reading about the closing of the store, I recalled the conversations. I remembered the all-African-American staff, aspiring and optimistic, from the baristas through the district manager, and wondered how they had fared. Apparently, Johnson had been wrong; even a nice meeting place couldn’t boost the popularity of a three-dollar cup of coffee, at least not at that venue, or in this economy. And the commissioner was right: Successful economic development, let alone gentrification, was a long way away.

The line between positive and predatory economic development is sometimes hard to draw, and a lot depends on who draws it. It’s also sometimes hard to say on which side of the line Starbucks will fall. There are indeed situations, as in San Francisco’s Japantown, where a neighborhood whose real estate has become extremely desirable wants to retain its own vibrant culture, support its businesses, and resist displacement. These are the fights worth fighting. And Starbucks has been known to back down. But to hold the company accountable for our excesses of consumption, the mixed consequences of gentrification, or the evils of capitalism is a waste of time. Resolving these issues is not in Starbucks’ power. To fight those fights, we need another venue. Perhaps even a revolution in global economic policy and how we define our values.

Kim Fellner is former director of the National Organizers Alliance. She works in the labor movement and lives in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Wrestling With Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

Published by the National Housing Institute