“Don’t Complain About Our Coffee; Some Day You May be Old and Weak Yourself ” was a familiar sign in old-style American diners. Overboiled and underpowered, American coffee of the old school made no claims to taste good. It needed only to be cheap, served at 50 cents a time from blue paper cups that said “We are Happy to Serve You”. The right to inexpensive acrid coffee was part of the American dream, ever since Americans threw off the wicked tea-drinking ways of the British at the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Nobody scrutinised the flavour so long as the price was right. Often coffee came free, poured from a percolator into endlessly refilled cups, all for the price of a slice of pie.

How times change. Taylor Clark, a journalist, although not a Starbucks customer himself, shows a justified awe at the way that Howard Schultz, the Starbucks supremo, has, over roughly the past decade and a half, converted Americans to paying through the nose for their daily jolt. Consumers now happily part with $4 (£2) for a single cup of what they used to get for free. Then again, what they are paying for bears scant relation to what used to be called “coffee”. Instead of old and weak, it is fresh and strong. The first visitors to the original Seattle Starbucks were blown away. “People’s heads would snap back and they’d say, ‘God, this is really strong’,” remembers Jerry Baldwin, one of the founders of Starbucks. Some of the workers drank so many ultra-dark espressos that they hallucinated.

The question of how this specialised little Seattle joint became one of the biggest brands in America – and the world – is one of the greatest business mysteries of modern times. Clark does a better job of answering it than anyone else to date, injecting his story with plenty of zip and humour along the way. He emphasises the crucial role of Schultz, a former Xerox salesman. Before him, Starbucks was just a small shop run by Seattle hippies with few ambitions to expand their business, which mainly sold bags of coffee to take home. It was Schultz who put the bucks in Starbucks, and he did so with relentless marketing, plus the “latte”.

It is palpable rubbish to claim, as Schultz does, that he was the first person in America to serve a latte (which Clark translates as “espresso-flavoured milk”). Schultz, who is big on epiphanies, likes to tell a story of how he personally discovered the latte in Verona. This was news to Italian-Americans who had been breakfasting on frothy coffee before Schultz (born 1952) was even alive. It is true, however, that Schultz took the caffe latte – a relatively short, dense mixture of espresso and foamy milk – and made it into something worse but infinitely more saleable to Americans. Like the free diner coffee of old, a 20oz Starbucks venti latte goes on and on. Starbucks has always sold “the romance” of espresso. “But Americans didn’t drink espresso; they drank lattes,” explains Clark. “In the land of Big Macs and supersizing, a dainty 1oz cup of espresso could never appeal.”

It was lattes (the huge volume of milk disguising the burntness of the coffee underneath) that fuelled the exponential rise of Starbucks, from 425 stores at the beginning of 1995 to 3,500 by the end of 2000, to 15,750 worldwide today. Schultz turned his customers into walking billboards, toting their lattes in those iconic mermaid cups. By 2004, Starbucks was named the fourth most effective brand in the world, behind Apple, Google and Ikea.

The profit from lattes was so enormous that Schultz could afford to make expensive mistakes – $60m, for example, was wasted on a hopeless attempt to turn Starbucks into an internet “lifestyle portal”. No matter. The company kept making “heaps of money”, writes Clark, then building more stores and making more heaps of money. Schultz broke every rule in the book by putting clusters of Starbucks close together, sometimes just across the road from each other. Anticorporate campaigners criticised the policy as an attack on local businesses. But Clark shows that the arrival of a Starbucks in a neighbourhood has often given a boost to independent coffee houses, rather than the reverse. Instead of drawing away trade from existing cafes, Starbucks created new converts to the coffeehouse lifestyle.

What Schultz was selling with his lattes was a new sense of entitlement. In place of the old right to dirt-cheap coffee, here was a right to treat oneself to expensive and pretentiously named “coffee beverages” while sitting on artsy sofas, something that played well in the affluent 1990s. As one expert is quoted remarking, “Starbucks has always been successful by saying, ‘You’re lucky if we allow you to buy our coffee.’ ” Clark argues that a large part of the chain’s success (in contrast to McDonald’s) was its feeling of luxury, which is why “you’ll never see Starbucks drinks discounted in any way”.

In fact, hit by the economic downturn, Starbucks is now doing just that (unlucky timing for Clark’s book). After a slump in sales with cut-price competition from the likes of Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks has announced a new $1 (50p) bottomless cup of drip coffee, to go on sale in some of its Seattle branches. Given that a consumer-affairs magazine recently rated this drip coffee as “bitter enough to make your eyes water instead of open”, this looks like a return to the harsh old days of cheap and acrid. With less money sloshing around, maybe coffee will go back to being just a brown caffeinated drink rather than what Schultz pompously calls “a very unique experience”.

Keeps you full of beans

Try asking in Starbucks about the precise caffeine content of your coffee. You won’t get much info. Howard Schultz, below, the brand’s creator, seldom lets the c-word pass his lips and is curt with journalists who ask about it. Not everyone is so discreet, however. A Starbucks roasting-plant supervisor named Tom Walters told National Geographic magazine: ‘I’ve been asked not to make the connection between coffee and caffeine. But we see a hell of a lot of caffeine around here. It forms a kind of fuzz on the roaster. So when we’re too busy to get a coffee break, some people just run a finger down the casing of the roaster and lick it and get their jolt that way.’ As Starbucked shows, the stakes are high: several former and current Starbucks executives tell the author they could imagine only one thing that might bring Starbucks down: conclusive scientific evidence that caffeine is unhealthy.

STARBUCKED: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture by Taylor Clark
Sceptre £12.99 pp304

Available at the Books First price of £11.69 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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