Below is a lengthy-yet-fantastic article written by a New York Times reporter in late September. Simply put, the reporter recorded an entire day spent inside a New York City Starbucks. What she records is pure humanity.
It’s a long article, I know, but worth the time. Enjoy.
Latte on the Hudson
By Patricia Volk
New York Times
It’s 6:05 in the morning at my local Starbucks. I’m there before the sun comes up. I’m there as the barista slides the till into the register. I’m the first customer of the day, and I want my cappuccino.
“What is this?” The barista doesn’t trust my silver dollar.
She walks it to her partner (all Starbucks employees are called partners), who points to where the coin says “ONE DOLLAR.” And so a new day dawns on the southwest corner of 96th Street and Madison Avenue, where Carnegie Hill cusps Spanish Harlem.
Judy Garland belts “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the current Starbucks playlist track. Throughout the day, strategic changes are made in the music, the personnel (women open, mostly men close), what food is available, even the lighting. Starbucks is a masterpiece of precision targeting and socially engineered mood.
This Starbucks opened in March 2001. It’s three blocks south of Mount Sinai Hospital, and the highest concentration of New York independent schools falls within a 10-block radius.
It’s a family neighborhood. The question is, will Starbucks last? This particular corner is the storefront of broken dreams: a shoe store, a discount clothing store, a video store all went belly up. For long stretches it stayed empty.
Since the city’s first Starbucks, the one at 87th Street and Broadway, closed in August, New York is down to 162 Starbucks. Could Starbucks go the way of Bickford’s? The automat? Schrafft’s? Not as long as New York rents stay astronomic. Not as long as 200 square feet is called “an apartment.” Starbucks is living room and dining room to the barely solvent. It’s a study hall, village green, waiting room, library, clubhouse and office. It’s neutral turf. It’s real estate for the price of a cup of coffee. And God forbid you should have to go seven blocks without a latte. New York is Starbuckized.
I wait for my cappuccino. For $3.25, I want a cappuccino that will change my life. I want it at least as powerful as my home-brewed Chock Full o’Nuts. I know taste is particular. Just this summer, four generations of family rented a house in Maine. There were 17 of us, and in the morning we had to brew three different pots.
My niece likes decaf. My sister has to have Brown Gold or her large intestine goes into shock. I’d drink her Brown Gold, but you can’t get Brown Gold in Kennebunk and her imported Florida stash got dangerously low. Eventually, my sister got up early, made her pot of Brown Gold. I got up next and made Chock Full o’Nuts. Then the niece brewed decaf.
Coffe’s not about the money, although money’s part of it. When I buy a can of Chock Full o’Nuts for $2.79, I get 32 rounded scoops. That’s 64 cups of coffee, or a week and a half supply. It’s like the people who give up smoking and figure they can buy a car. Sixty-four cups of Chock Full o’Nuts for $2.79 vs. 64 Starbucks cups at $1.55 a cup. If I’m not going to Starbucks, I’m saving $96.41 a can. Hey, I owe myself a present.
Unlike the Starbucks at 102nd Street and Broadway, where my daughter’s ex-boyfriend studied for his LSAT’s, this one doesn’t have plump upholstered furniture. It has 7 tables and 16 no-frills wooden chairs, and there’s only one plug for a laptop. The walls are decorated with cute baby photos taken by a woman from the neighborhood.
The place is clean but frowzy. Plaster is chipped. Wooden joints don’t mesh. But the pastry display case by the counter is gorgeous. Scones, bagels, cinnamon crisps and croissants in military alignment, like a Wayne Thiebaud painting.
At 6:18, Starbucks gets its second customer. A man ties his albino bulldog to a parking meter and orders a venti skim latte. The espresso machine hisses, the steamer gargles, and by 6:23 there’s a line. A woman in a white lab coat orders a grande latte. A man in a navy suit slaps his thermo mug on the counter, and without a word it gets filled. Outside, a jogger in parachute cloth walks a leashless poodle. Sit, she motions. Stay!
“The dog will just wait there?” I ask when she comes in.
“He’s my smarter one.” She smiles and walks up to the counter. The dog looks both ways and bolts.
Outside, a bundle of newspapers nests beside the door. Frank Sinatra sings “One More for the Road.”
At 7:50, 13 yawning people are in line and none of them look happy. Women with strollers, moms escorting boys wearing khaki shorts, blue blazers and ties, the St. David’s uniform. More joggers. Mount Sinai employees. “A grande and a raspberry scone,” says a woman carrying a Vuitton bag. Some customers ask for two cups. A lady files her nails. I add this to my list of Horrible Things People Now Do in Public, the worst being flossing in restaurants.
The line shuffles along the gray gum-pocked carpet. Eight minutes later, the woman who was at the end of the line reaches the front. There are three other places to buy coffee less than a block away. I wouldn’t wait eight minutes for a cup of coffee, even at my favorite cafe near the Spanish Steps in Rome.
At least no one is ordering the way my friend Susan does. She likes “a decaf skim latte extra hot no whip with foam mocha grande in a venti cup.” (She figures she gets more because the cup is bigger.) Maybe these people wait because Starbucks has built its franchise on the idea of customization. They’ll start their day with a cup of coffee exactly the way they want it. The day may be all downhill from there. But for a moment, they have precisely what they want.
Tony Bennett croons “My Favorite Things.” No dent has been made in the pastry. Most customers look as if they’re on their way to work. Some spread out and read the paper. It’s like Vienna. In Vienna, nobody says, “Get up; we need the table.” No snarly waiter paces or glares. It’s not like the old Chock Full o’Nuts, where the stools were rumored to be designed at M.I.T. to make you feel uncomfortable after 15 minutes. No. A cup of Starbucks comes with bottomless time.
BY 10:20, the place is exploding with people. Now three baristas work the counter. They’re in their early 20’s and unflaggingly polite. Salads, sandwiches and yogurt have joined the pastries. Customers know one another. Starbucks feels lively, like a community.
My friend the poet Siri von Reis reads The New Yorker at the sunny table by the south window. She comes to Starbucks twice a day, at 10 and around 4. The baristas know her so well, they’ve named her coffee “the Siri.” She has lost weight drinking her venti skim, one shot of decaf, one pump chocolate, no whip.
Starbucks is so packed, you can’t hear what’s on the playlist. An 8-year-old (why isn’t she in school?) badgers her mother about getting another ear pierce. “Just one more here, Mom?” She points to a place above her existing pierce. “Molly has one.” A man laughs into his cellphone. An anxious mother interviews a nanny over grandes.
The croissants are gone. So are the scones. The bagels haven’t budged.
Three customers in low-rise jeans hang by the condiments. They look like models until they flash their braces.
A kid in a stroller is screaming. “I wannahachocolate! WAAAAAAAAAH!” He could break your heart. But hot chocolate isn’t on the menu today. There’s nothing listed on the board next to Children’s Special. Last winter I ordered the children-size hot chocolate for $1.45. When the barista pushed it across the counter, he said, “Two eighty-five.”
“But I ordered the child’s cup,” I said.
“Are you a child?” he asked.
Never mind that it was the worst hot chocolate I ever had, worse than what comes out of coin machines. Nannies, children of privilege, chic moms, Starbucks midmorning feels like an Upper East Side birthday party.
At 12:26, a woman is sitting in Siri’s seat eating takeout Chinese. It’s lunchtime at Starbucks, even for those who buy lunch elsewhere. Three ladies in business suits chat. Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes from Nightingale-Bamford wear gray pleated cheerleader skirts and fitted Lacostes. New Balance sneakers, no socks, complete the look. All three have cellphones. A girl with Day-Glo red hair comes in alone, wearing cargo knickers over ripped fishnets, a thermal camouflage T, a Hulk book bag, and high tops covered in peace signs. She’s five concurrent fads.
Suddenly a man in a red and white striped shirt bursts in from Sal Pizza across the street. He asks a barista what she’s doing tonight. He follows her around while she spritzes tables. He gives up and orders three coffees. Morning pastries are replaced by afternoon goodies: cookies, Rice Krispies Squares, s’mores, a lemon Bundt cake with a glaze.
At 3:05, Starbucks rocks. Four partners pump coffee. School’s out, and the Nightingale girls are back, this time with boys. They take over the north side of the store. It’s standing room only. There’s a lot of squealing and ponytail twitching. A young Hasidic woman waits in line. I know she’s Hasidic because she’s wearing seamed stockings. The stockings are opaque and the seams so straight, her legs look prosthetic. Is Starbucks kosher?
A woman at one table works on two boxes of thank-you notes. A man sips a mochaccino and studies The Journal of the American Medical Association. Three women with museum stickers on their lapels analyze the cakes. A man works on a laptop. Grandmas retrieve grandchildren from school. The kids head knowingly for the Seasonal Lollipop and Muppet Candy Sticks that surface at 3. Carrot cake and Summer Bliss Blueberry Bars replace muffins and scones. There’s been a run on brownies. Marvin Gaye wails “Got to Give It Up.”
A New York generation has come to know the Starbucks cup better than the blue Greek coffee shop Parthenon. I first saw the Starbucks logo in Seattle. It was the 80’s, and people walked around carrying mugs. Coffee places were everywhere.
Customers stopped in and held out their mugs, and those mugs were filled. I especially admired the trademark of one place, Starbucks. The woman in the logo had pre-Raphaelite hair that perfectly covered her breasts the same as Ann Blyth’s in “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid,” the first movie I ever saw.
Ms. Starbucks was a mermaid, too. What could be seen of her body formed, what? An hourglass? A drip coffee maker? A keyhole? She was smiling, despite needing both hands to support her bifurcated fishtail. But why the name Starbucks? Why name a coffee after Captain Ahab’s first mate? Or was it Bill Starbuck, Burt Lancaster’s sexy rainmaker, who convinces Katharine Hepburn that she’s not an old prune?
It’s starting to get dark out. At 7:08, Starbucks is in a wind-down mode. Five customers read at separate tables. Although there’s no line, the counter people keep moving. Always there’s something to clean or polish. A guitar solo plays in the background. Before closing, I ask for a cup of organic decaf.
“I could put a French press together in five minutes,” the barista offers. The Serena Certified Organic Blend is available only by the bag, but he’s willing to grind some. The Fair Trade Blend, the coffee picked by workers who get a decent salary, is by the bag, too.
I ask the partner if leftovers go on sale at the end of day, the way they do at a takeout place four blocks south.
“No,” he says with concern. “We can’t do that. I’m sorry.”
The display case is half-filled.
“So what happens to this stuff?” I ask.
“Random Harvest comes three times a week for the cake,” he says. “The sandwiches and salads don’t keep, so we throw them out.”
“Do homeless people wait outside?”
He stiffens. “If homeless people want food, they should go to a homeless shelter.”
“And the coffee grinds? I read once that you donate them and they get rebrewed?”
“You want the grinds?” he asks. “We give them to people for their gardens.”
Three customers are still reading at tables. They’ve been here for hours.
“Excuse me,” the barista says. “We’re going to be closing in 10 minutes.”
They look up. They blink as if they’ve been in a bubble.
Two ladies in sequins come in laughing and order chocolate mocha grandes. A partner retires her broom and makes herself an iced tea. It’s 9:05. Just as she’s taking out the cash drawer, a woman rushes in with a coffee emergency. She needs a filter.
Starbucks coffee filters look like paper buckets. They’re huge. “I’ll cut it down with my Swiss Army knife,” the woman pleads. “It’s got a scissor.”
At no time during the day have any Latinos stopped in. Spanish Harlem is right across the street. But so is the K&D deli, the Corner Bagel Market and Three Guys. Maybe it’s the coffee. That could be it. Café con leche served with a little pot of steamy foamy milk is a far cry from a Starbucks latte.
What’s in the future for Starbucks? This year it was iced tea lemonade and shaken iced coffee. I’d go every summer day if they had a granita di caffe con panna. I’d be there like clockwork if their hot chocolate tasted like Laduree’s. I will, however, never go for my morning cup. I love brewing my own coffee. I go to sleep at night smiling at the thought of my first cup.
At 9:10, the barista says, “Good evening,” and holds the door for me.
Stevie Wonder and I waft out into the night.