Or are they doing such a good job at it that you can't wait to see what they think up next?
Twenty-two million people visit the mammoth coffee purveyor every week for their caffeine addictions. But the Seattle multinational is moving to peg your taste in all kinds of fields.
The chain's new Hear Music CD compilations know you better than you know yourself. Stop in for a latte, start tapping a foot to the unfamiliar yet captivating roots beat on the overhead speaker, and suddenly you're shelling out $14.95 for the Rolling Stones Artist's Choice album with the embedded Muddy Waters Song. Under Starbucks' tutelage, the undiscovered don't stay that way long. The Yo-Yo Ma Artist's Choice CD, with an Astor Piazzolla tango, has sold 70,000 copies.
For those waiting in line to genuflect before the all-powerful barista, Starbucks displays the magazines that might fit your lifestyle. Or will fit your lifestyle in the future, if you begin to measure up: Architectural Digest, Food & Wine, and when there's time for frivolity, Rolling Stone and US Weekly.
Feeling guilty about corporate hegemony around the world? In the basket next to your left knee is "Fair Trade" coffee, for which Starbucks agrees to pay better prices to Third World growers.
And in an effort to further cement itself as the "third place" between work and home, Starbucks is rapidly installing wireless Internet devices that allow coffee-sippers to hang out for hours cruising the Internet on their laptops or palm devices. Soon, instead of buying a CD of the music you hear while lounging, Starbucks will zap it to you on the wireless and charge your Starbucks prepaid card later on.
Add roll-away cots in tall, grande and venti sizes, and there will be no reason to ever leave.
For many customers, giving in to the Starbucks pan-cultural dominion is sweet surrender.
"I come to grade papers every two or three days," said John Kellogg, a lawyer and assistant professor of music business at the University of Colorado at Denver. A three-hour sit in the Starbucks biosphere at Cherry Creek is not unusual for Kellogg. Last Friday, he found himself swaying to a Sam Cooke song he hadn't heard in a while.
"They're playing some great old stuff," said Kellogg. "Maybe I should try to get them to place my books here."
Is resistance futile? Certainly caffeine is available elsewhere.
Reactionary critics argue Starbucks and its ideas to improve the populace must be resisted simply because fighting the power is always a good thing. Multinationals from Wal-Mart to The Gap push out locally owned small businesses and dumb down the world with mass marketing, they argue. The Rev. Billy, a New York street artist who tries to empty out Starbucks with haranguing or shocking performances, claims that Starbucks' "earth-tone touchy-feeliness masks corporate ruthlessness."
More constructive critics say consumers should at least question the reality behind the Starbucks image. California activists, for example, want the company to expand "Fair Trade" coffee from a tiny percentage of its bean business to a 100 percent effort using all of the corporation's worldwide influence.
Starbucks is so big "it can pull the whole industry forward," said Melissa Schweisguth, the Fair Trade campaign coordinator for Global Exchange in San Francisco. Consumers may see one Fair Trade label and assume Starbucks always acts as a good corporate parent, Schweisguth said, when in fact the eye-catching displays disguise that consumers "are buying into exploitation."
That's the devil's bargain of the mass-market influence. Even disgruntled employees give Starbucks credit for better health benefits than most fast-food businesses, as well as employee stock options. But consumers buying into the whole Starbucks lifestyle must stay alert, Schweisguth said. "What we're saying is, Close but no cigar."
For its part, Starbucks executives say their unique position gives them the power to champion the little guy a million times a day.
The Starbucks "Hear Music" brand, for example, is not just a Pottery Barn creating a CD to get customers to buy more hand-painted ceramics or tropical pillow covers. Starbucks is instead trying to give great music back to the people after decades of music industry consolidation and standardization.
Isn't buying music from multibillion-dollar Starbucks just another way of buying from "the man?"
"If you try to figure out who 'the man' is, music has been so homogenized and collapsed," responded Don MacKinnon, Starbucks vice president of music and entertainment and a founder of Hear Music before Starbucks acquired it. "In Pottery Barn, you're shopping for products. In Starbucks, there's an environment where you sit down and music is an integral part of that environment."
When Keith Richards picked Andre Williams for the Stones' recommended collection, the early blues-rapper's records were out of print. "A ton of people will now go look for those early recordings," MacKinnon said.
Contrary to being the fearsome machine, MacKinnon said, the entertainment aspirations of Starbucks are to be "that friend in college down the hall who played great music and made great mixes, and turned you on to something. A lot of us feel we don't have that friend anymore."
We do now. On nearly every street corner. Will it be a friend for life?
Reach Michael Booth at mbooth@denverpost.com or 303-820-1686.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the numbers
22 million: Number of people who pass through a Starbucks each week
70,000: Number of Yo Yo Ma's Artist Choice CDs sold so far at Starbucks
350,000: Number of overall Artist's Choice picks sold so far at Starbucks
13: Average number of CDs sold at one Cherry Creek store each week ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hear here
The Hear Music concept of spotlighting niche music is rapidly, and paradoxically, becoming a force in the CD industry.
Founded as a small chain of listening stores where music enthusiasts could sample the Lucinda Williams or Pepe and the Bottle Blondes track they couldn't hear on radio, Hear Music was acquired by Starbucks after the Seattle coffee giant found itself selling thousands of the Hear Music CD compilations in its stores.
Artist's Choice is the latest popular concept by Hear Music execs, who went around the country interviewing the Rolling Stones, Yo Yo Ma, Ray Charles and others about their biggest musical influences. The Stones' CD, for example, explores the eclectic blues and pop playlists of the aging British rockers, from The Itals to Robert Johnson to Sade. Sheryl Crow's picks are flying off the shelf, said Hear Music president Don MacKinnon; Overall the company has sold 350,000 Artist's Choice discs.
"We just interviewed Johnny Cash, that will come out at the end of the summer," he said. They are working on nailing Bob Dylan, Neil Young and other icons.
Other titles Starbucks championed included Buena Vista Social Club and Norah Jones. More obscure compilations include "Cafe Cubana," "Mambo Mio," and "Night on the Delta."
With wireless Internet coming to every Starbucks, a drinker with a portable computer or palm could download three of Sheryl Crow's picks for free. To get more than that, Starbucks will be happy to charge you.
-