Entertaining and fun read plus you will learn a lot

books:


	• Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture Taylor Clark Little, Brown and Company, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Is Starbucks really the bad guy?

New York salesman Howard Schultz turned an anti-capitalist enterprise into the ever-expanding corporate behemoth that it is today. Where is there not a Starbucks today? The challenge to find out where you can get the farthest from the nearest Starbucks was the impetus for this book by author Taylor Clark.

In Starbucked, Clark explores the history of coffee and its culture. Before specialty coffee came along, American coffee consumption had been declining. This caused the Big Four coffee conglomerates to cut costs by buying the cheapest beans possible. Bad beans being bitter, the Big Four sucked that nastiness right out of them and injected the beans with synthetic flavorings. Supermarket brands like MJB, Hills Brothers, and Folgers used a large amount of low-quality "filler" beans called robusta (as opposed to arabica), rendering themselves completely indistinguishable from each other. It was coffee-flavored water. They continued to increase the robusta to arabica ratio because it's cheaper and consumers never seemed to protest - until they had a really good cup of coffee at their local gourmet coffeehouse. Add to that a time when the disposable income of America was on the rise, along with a general addiction to caffeine, and you've got demand for higher quality coffee.

Howard Schultz's hunger to create the utopian Coffee Experience led to an unparalleled growth of a company whose annual stockholders' meetings are Standing Room Only, resembling a rock concert more than a droll PowerPoint presentation of facts and figures.

The coffee company with the mermaid siren logo has a real estate department who are experts at pinpointing the best locations, when they aren't opening up next door to competitors, or to each other. They analyze cities and neighborhoods, going as far as studying oil spots in parking lots to determine where people shop and how often. Their aggressive growth tactics concern their opponents who question the company's ethical behavior and accuse them of squeezing out mom-and-pop stores, not realizing that, in fact, the mom-and-pop stores have thrived and ridden the wave of the gourmet bean's popularity precisely because of Starbucks.

Clark's thorough investigative research and witty but objective prose not only questions the validity of critics and accusers, but armed with statistics, he debunks many myths surrounding the mega coffee chain. Like Oprah, perhaps some people, or companies, can only be praised up to a certain level of success, at which point they are deemed too successful and must therefore be lambasted at every opportunity.

After Clark investigates the ethics of Starbucks compared with those of the big coffee conglomerates, it becomes apparent that we may be blaming the wrong corporation for the plight of coffee growers in Latin America (and the rise of the drug trade in Colombia). This book raises questions like: Does Fair Trade mean higher quality coffee?

It's hard to imagine that 271 pages about coffee, commerce and culture could be engaging, but Clark's Starbucked is entertaining, compelling, and educational. He delivers a wealth of information without overwhelming the reader. While it's a little confusing to understand whether Peet's or Starbucks came first, and who bought whom, and how they switched names, and which one is the original, that's probably not the point. Clark set out to discover the relevancy of what good coffee means to Americans and how much we're willing to pay for the forced utopian Coffee Experience. And what will the rest of the world think of it? And with many thousands of coffeehouses around the globe, when will Starbucks open one in Italy, the country where Howard Schultz had his first euphoric latte, spawning a revolution?

This book is best read with a Grande No-Whip Caramel Frappucino.

Reviewed by Margaret Andrews for Curled Up With A Good Book

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Entertaining and fun read plus you will learn a lot

Portland, Oregon journalist Taylor Clark has done a magnificent job with his first book. Starbucked is a very educational book about (as the subtitle accurately states) coffee, commerce and culture and hence it can appeal to a wide variety of people. As a bonus, it is also a very fun read. Clark gives you a nice history of coffee and Starbucks in a funny and entertaining way.

I was also very impressed with his fairness and analysis of the good and the bad of Starbucks. By the end of the book the reader will feel a lot more educated. Clark's mission was not to sway the reader to the anti or pro Starbucks crowd. I wish there were more even-handed authors like him. He is a very bright and I hope he continues writing books like this one.

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Highly Recommended!

This is a very thought-provoking, informative, and enjoyable book: full of information, witty, packed with ideas and beautifully written. It touches on a lot of very important topics in a not-too-heavy way. Well worth reading, and I look forward to more books by this young author!

Unveiling the Magic for all Starbuckers Around

Taylor Clark provides us with a very pleasant tale about how Starbucks came to be what it is today: a marketing phenomena, a culture changer and a concept creator. The most amazing thing is to realize that all of that was based on a very ordinary product: a cup of coffee.

This book covers Starbucks path to success through examples of aggressive entrepreneurship, real estate tactics and heavy psychological influence over people that no other business on Earth has managed to do so convincingly. Answers to our sometimes unreasonable habits and addictions in relation to this brand are presented here, and it should be said that they all make sense if we think once or twice about it. We've been ripped off for a while, most of us always knew about it, but we keep giving them our money, just because it's cool being and drinking there. If you never thought of it, then read the book and draw your own conclusions.

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Even-handed, well-researched, a great read!

Easy and fun, this book asks all the questions, then arrives at the answers with research, not hyperbole. Neither love nor hate shows through, and the author uses humor in perfect amounts to illustrate points and clear up the clouds surrounding the coffee Goliath. A must-read for every reason.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

STARBUCKED will be the first book to explore the incredible rise of the Starbucks Corporation and the caffeine-crazy culture that fueled its success. Part Fast Food Nation, part Bobos in Paradise, STARBUCKED combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate.

In STARBUCKED, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, STARBUCKED explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.

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