Starbucks Studies

Here's some trivial scholarship on why white girls like Starbucks:  See my bracketed comments:

The status symbol is not any over-the-top caloric, sweet drink, nor does it come from just any place. [A classic move in which the origin of something is supposed to be revelatory: not just any place, but...] Starbucks PSLs are products of coffee shop culture, with its gendered and racial codes [Everything has gendered and racial codes, right?]. European historians such as Ellis (2004Ellis, M. 2004. The coffee house: A cultural history. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [Google Scholar]Ellis, M. 2004. The coffee house: A cultural history. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [Google Scholar]) in Coffee House, find coffee shop culture’s roots in the British Empire of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. [who cares? does his really relate to contemporary situations?] Deeply masculine spaces, [ok, so what? That is trying to identify them with something bad in a ritualized denunciation, but pointless in this context because the point is to scorn white girls who order Starbucks.] coffee shops witnessed political debates, rebellion planning, and religious foment. [and people hanging out not engaged in anything related to this.] Not until the 1950s’ reemergence of coffee houses as Italian espresso bars did they “represent a place where people of all kinds could socialise together: richer with poorer, migrants with metropoles, women with men, creating a space that seemed to [did it seem to reject those values or really reject them?] reject the values of official discourse on class, gender and race” (245). [Pretentious.] Concurrent with women’s entrance were milky, sweet drinks; Ellis called them together the “lactification of the coffee-house.” His odd phrase nonetheless makes visible underlying feminizing and whitening of drinks, spaces, and practices of coffee shops. [This border on misogyny; it is easy to make fun of white women, apparently since they drink lattes] Ellis concluded, “The sociability of the chain coffee bar has cut its links with the vengeful, transgressive crowd, on the verge of insurrection. It is not simply that the mob has been excluded by the anodyne luxury of the corporate coffee shop, but that these places cultivate a sociability designed to reform the mob into a more tranquil, even docile, crowd of consumers” (258).66 Although Ellis focused mostly on European and U.S. coffee shop cultures, the demonstrations of whiteness encapsulated by Starbucks patronage might extend to other countries and continents as well. For instance, Spracklen (2013Spracklen, K. 2013. Whiteness and leisure. New York: Palgrave McMillan.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]), in his Whiteness and Leisure, argued, “In late modernity, drinking a latte has become a marker of whiteness, Westernization, and bourgeois sophistication. In developing countries such as South Africa and Kenya, local drinking practices have been swapped by the new elites in those countries for the taste of Americanized coffee. The new black economic elites in South Africa and Kenya have adopted white, Western, middle-class styles—through going to Starbucks they are becoming white in the same way the black political elites have adopted golf clubs in Kenya” (143).View all notes6 Although Ellis focused mostly on European and U.S. coffee shop cultures, the demonstrations of whiteness encapsulated by Starbucks patronage might extend to other countries and continents as well. For instance, Spracklen (2013Spracklen, K. 2013. Whiteness and leisure. New York: Palgrave McMillan.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]Spracklen, K. 2013. Whiteness and leisure. New York: Palgrave McMillan.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]), in his Whiteness and Leisure, argued, “In late modernity, drinking a latte has become a marker of whiteness, Westernization, and bourgeois sophistication. In developing countries such as South Africa and Kenya, local drinking practices have been swapped by the new elites in those countries for the taste of Americanized coffee. The new black economic elites in South Africa and Kenya have adopted white, Western, middle-class styles—through going to Starbucks they are becoming white in the same way the black political elites have adopted golf clubs in Kenya” (143).View all notes [pretentious. All this says is that a corporate Starbucks is not like some stereotype of a beatnik coffee shop.] Ellis’s prescience was demonstrated as 200 million lactified, docile consumers ordered their PSLs. [borderline racist misogyny: white girls are "lactified" {whatever that means} and "docile"] 

One of the authors is

ELIZABETH S. D. ENGELHARDT is the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599–3520. Her interdisciplinary research interests include Southern cultures, gender, food studies in the humanities, feminist theories, Appalachian studies, public humanities, oral history practices, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in American literature and society.