Here’s the thing. When you’re the head of the largest and most recognizable coffee company in the entire world, every time you speak, it’s news. So when Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol opens his mouth, it will make waves. The same thing happened last week when Niccol was interviewed by “The Wall Street Journal and I said people got mad. This forced me into a disadvantageous position that I honestly never thought I would find myself in, namely defending the CEO of Starbucks, fucking Niccol.
The statement in question concerns whether $9 for a cup of coffee constitutes a “premium experience at an affordable price.” Opinion v Guardian in return for the comment, he called Niccol “out of touch”. “People can barely afford basic groceries, Brian!” states the author. “This is not the time to wax lyrical about an affordable $9 coffee.” Everyday Beast he said he was “deaf”. So what is the quote that has become so raging on social media that major news media corporations have started writing about it? Here it is:
People want to have unique experiences and regardless of income level, in some cases a $9 experience feels like spending money, and that means we need to make it worthwhile. In other cases, people think it’s a really affordable premium experience because they say, “Well, it’s less than $10 and I’m getting a really premium experience.”
Niccol answers a question about the K-shaped economy, where for some people $10 is not much…that’s one banana, Michael, how much would it cost, ten dollars?”- and for others, $10 is not spent lightly. It is on behalf of this second group that people get upset.
And their outrage is justified. A cost of living crisis that is only getting worse. The wealthy continue to accumulate more and more wealth while the needy become poorer and there is no real middle class. This is all 100% exact, but does that mean what Niccol said is wrong or off-topic? Maybe if you’re not that good at grammar. So a miniature lesson on adjectives and adverbs is in order.
“Affordable premium experience” is not the same as “affordable premium experience.” The comma matters. In the first case, affordable describes a “premium experience,” and in the second, both affordable and premium describe an “experience.” See the difference? Niccol used the former, describing $9 as a reasonable price for a premium experience. But what everyone seems to want him to say is the second that $9 for a coffee is both affordable and premium. Which is not what he said.
So the question remains: is $9 affordable for a premium experience? I’m inclined to think that yes, for the type of experience it advocates for, nine bucks would be considered affordable. And I can’t really think of anything else that I would describe as a premium experience at around $9, let alone a cheaper price point.
There is, of course, a broader question about whether Starbucks is truly a premium experience [] or if what you really get is average quality coffee with a lot of sugar. But that’s not what’s being discussed here.
In fact, what is being discussed is the old-fashioned but still firmly established belief that coffee should be low-cost. The $1 coffee dream is alive and well. People are mad that they have to pay $9 because their orange mocha frappuccino should have cost, what, $3? $4?
However, they are wrong. Coffee should be more pricey, and specialty coffee has gone to great lengths to prove why. Just because prices are kept artificially low doesn’t mean they are correct.
There are many things to criticize about Niccol and Starbucks: his commute, the company’s dogged fight against labor unions (currently five years without a single contract ratified), Colombia’s embrace of almost every specialty coffee trend over the past twenty years, their efforts to assist underpaid farmers as marketing fodder when they could just pay them more, and you name it. But calling $9 affordable for a premium experience isn’t one of them.
Because that’s what it’s all about. This is an exaggeration. By definition, it’s not something you do every day. It’s a pleasure. And for many people, especially those who drink coffee at Starbucks, $9 for a treat is not out of reach. This doesn’t mean everyone has an extra $9 to spend on coffee, which is certainly cause for outrage, just not because of the price tag on the cup. It is the mechanisms of injustice that put people in such dire situations to begin with, and the corrosive safety nets (at least here in America) that are designed to assist remedy them. That’s where anger belongs.
But also $9 is closer to what you should be paying for a coffee. So when people want to morally raise the bar by saying that coffee is too pricey and CEOs are tone-deaf for not properly considering the plight of needy people, just know that the only reason your latte was priced at $4 at all was because of immoral business practices that exploited low-cost labor at both ends of the supply chain. And arguing for such views makes you look not only tone deaf, but also hypocritical.
So please, just this once To leave Britney Brian Niccol himself. And let’s never talk about it again.
