"Isn’t there something creepy about Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz having... 'asked his Washington-area employees to write "Come Together" on each customer cup today, tomorrow and Friday, as a gesture to urge leaders to resolve the fiscal cliff'?"

Asks Mickey Kaus.

Did Schultz take a poll of his employees–sorry, “partners,” he calls them–before ordering pressuring asking them to join in this lobbying effort? What if he were, say, the CEO of Chick-fil-A and he “asked” his “partners” to write “Preserve the Family” on the outside of cups and containers?

I’m not saying what Schultz did is or should be illegal, certainly not in a Citizen’s United world. If he wants to run a hybrid coffee-shop-political-organization, that’s fine with me. But maybe he should have made that clear to his workers when they signed up.

What troubles me about the slogan "Come Together" is that it's a pretty obvious reference to the Beatles song that begins with Lennon saying "shoot me" over and over. Given the recent massacre — and the fact that Lennon himself was shot to death — it's not good resonance.

As for an employer telling employees what to say to customers, I've got no legalistic problem with that. The first job I ever had was as a waitress, and I was required to greet the customers with the lengthy "Hello, my name is Ann, and I will be your waitress tonight." How do you give that wooden line a good reading?

I'd much rather say "Come Together," especially if I was serving muddy water, brewed with a mojo filter.

"China is known for its fake Apple stores, fake Starbucks, and fake practically everything else."

"In this instance, it would seem that Mayor Wang is determined to make his English castle town a consummate fake."

Beijing's suburban Miyun County is going to build a large European-style town within five years and no one will be allowed to speak Chinese there, said the county mayor.

Wang Haichen said a local village would be turned into a 67-hectare English castle with 16 courtyards of unique houses. It will offer visitors souvenir passports and ban Chinese speaking to create the illusion of being abroad....

Is this absurd fakery or the wave of the future? Why do we subject ourselves to the rigors of travel to faraway places? Perhaps the real question is: Why even build the fake village? It's nearly possible...



There's also the idea of not having the experience at all, just getting a false memory of a vacation injected into your brain. That was Philip K. Dick's idea in "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale":

I will go, he said to himself. Before I die I’ll see Mars.

It was, of course, impossible, and he knew this even as he dreamed. But the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now brushing her hair before the bedroom mirror – everything conspired to remind him of what he was. A miserable little salaried employee, he said to himself with bitterness.

The story is only 17-pages long — read it in this book — so it's a lot faster than that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but perhaps, in the future, we'll have Arnold Schwarzenegger movies injected directly into our brains....

We can't let him run around. He knows too much.

Starbucks, beyond words.

Image alone.

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel. I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.'"

"When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want. Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English... I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!'"

Meet this week's mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore character, Lynne Rosenthal.

Deskscape.

"Sleeping at Starbucks. That takes some will power, huh?"

Says Crackskull Bob, thinking about all that caffeine, drawing furiously.

In fact, every time I go to Starbucks -- almost never in Madison, but frequently in less well café'd cities -- there's a guy sleeping in one of the chairs. I've seen men sleeping in those upholstered chairs for hours -- undisturbed. Seriously, it's as if that Starbucks logo is a hobo symbol for "nice place to sleep."


≈

"Do you think Palin has ruined Alaska as a symbol of the untrammeled frontier for future filmmakers and novelists?"

"No. Hopefully, she fades from memory quickly."

Hope won the election, it's true, but that is one hope that will not be fulfilled.

IN THE COMMENTS: Dust Bunny Queen:

I don't get the connection between Sarah Palin, Alaska as an "untrammeled frontier" (whatever that means?) and making a film about a woman and her dog.

Seriously, these people -- the interviewer and interviewee -- are deranged and irrelevant. They wouldn't recognize an untrammeled frontier since I doubt they are ever more than 15 minutes from a Starbucks.

Don't understand what "untrammeled frontier" means? What is a "trammel," anyway?

1. A shackle used to teach a horse to amble.

2. Something that restricts activity, expression, or progress; a restraint.

3. A vertically set fishing net of three layers, consisting of a finely meshed net between two nets of coarse mesh. 4. An instrument for describing ellipses.

5. An instrument for gauging and adjusting parts of a machine; a tram.

6. An arrangement of links and a hook in a fireplace for raising and lowering a kettle.

Now, what are we supposed to picture being done to a frontier?

3 dogs in a baby carriage.

At Starbucks on Montague Street.

AND: Knows he's cutest:

So I get this email with the name "Wright" in the subject line.

And — the life of a weary blogger being what it is — I think first that it's some anti-Obama thing railing about Jeremiah Wright. And then I think of Bob Wright — is it something from Bloggingheads.tv? It starts off:

I trust you all made it through the grueling winter and are enjoying the daffodils!

That seems far afield from either Bob or Jeremiah.

With Spring comes the annual Wright & Like tour, and I hope you had such a great time last year in Delavan that you might want to try another stint?

Oh, yes, Delavan... Remember "Was I a decent docent?" It's Frank Lloyd Wright!

This year's Wright & Like is subtitled "On the Road Again", as it is a reprise of a similar tour we did six years ago, featuring four Frank Lloyd Wright houses off the I-94 corridor between Milwaukee and Madison: the Greenberg House in Dousman, the Smith House in Jefferson, the Arnold House in Columbus, and the Jackson House in Beaver Dam. We've added four more great venues to make a very full day: two John Randal McDonald houses (Oconomowoc and Beaver Dam) and one Russell Barr Williamson, in Beaver Dam, and the exquisite Farmers and Merchants Bank by Louis Sullivan, in Columbus.

I guess somehow I was a decent docent — decent enough to be asked back.

Funny, I was just sitting in Starbucks this morning — working on my notes for the last class of the semester, my last class here at Brooklyn Law School — and they played this old tune:



I can't believe your song is gone so soon.
I barely learned the tune
So soon
So soon.

The internet's not working!

So here I am in Madison, and, dammit, I'm at Starbucks. How the hell did I end up here? In New York, I'm stuck going to Starbucks, because there are no indie cafés with WiFi in my neighborhood or in the places I go around Manhattan. But when I come back to Madison, like this weekend, I shun Starbucks. But this morning (and last night), Charter Communications had a regional outage — I tried calling — so I left the house first thing in search of a café.

It was like in this "South Park." You get up, you try to get on line, you freak out — the internet's not working! — and you head right out to a café to get your morning internet. In the "South Park," they actually go to a Starbucks. (Why does their Starbucks have free WiFi? I've never encountered free WiFi at a Starbucks.) So I run downtown, heading for one of my favorite Madison cafés, but it's Saturday and it's not 8 yet, so, that's the one niche that Starbucks fills in Madison: It's open all the time.

But now it's after 8, and I can café hop. I can't find an electrical outlet here anyway, and I'm down to the last 11% of my charge.

Am I addicted to the internet? Let's just say that "South Park" — which you should watch — hits close to home.

IN THE COMMENTS: George said...

It's worse than you think, Professor—You're an addict, and you're dealing the stuff.

Ah! You're right! Bloggers are the dealers in the world of internet addiction.

Greg in Madtown said:

It's even easier on the near-east side of town. Three independent coffee shops within four blocks of my house, and Escape Java Joint (with free wireless, of course), is only closed 6 hours/day (midnight-6am). I'm not advertising -- I don't work there -- it's just great to live in a city where I can pay for internet by the cup, even on Christmas. (Again with those atheists!)

Thanks for the tip! And, look, my favorite Madison food blog has reviewed it:

Rooms lead on to rooms all painted mellow colors. Our original guess was it used to be a dentist's office, but according to the barista, before Escape was a coffee shop, it was an arcade and a thrift store in the recent past (which we vaguely remembered), and in the more distant past a machine shop and wagon maker.

Wagon maker. Layers of history.

Why so much talk about Silda standing by her man Eliot? It is really about Hillary and Bill?

Surely, you've noticed all the articles about Silda Wall Spitzer standing there next to her whoring husband, the New York governor, Eliot Spitzer.

The L.A. Times:

That moment of public humiliation stayed with people -- men and women, Democrats and Republicans. At a beauty salon in Brooklyn Heights, at the Mellow Mushroom pizzeria in midtown Atlanta, at a Denver office building, at a bar in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the same questions came up:

How could she?

Why did she?

Haven't we seen this play one too many times?

Why do we go through this ritual of public shame and repentance, with the political wife standing mutely before the TV cameras as her husband admits his sexual indiscretion?

"I find it nauseating . . . phony and awful," said Leah Schanzer, 38, a doctoral student who stopped for coffee at a Starbucks in New York City. She gave an exaggerated shudder.

"It makes it seem like she's Susie Homemaker," said her friend Leslie Heller, 47. "She shouldn't be standing there, next to him."

The New York Times:

Silda Wall Spitzer gave up a high-powered career as a corporate lawyer to raise three daughters and support her husband as he sought elective office, yet has always had deep reservations about his political career. Time and again, she has found herself in the particular bind of encouraging him during critical junctures in his public life while still holding on to some regret that he had chosen to put himself — and their family — there in the first place....

According to friends, the governor’s time in Albany exacted a psychic cost from Ms. Wall Spitzer, 50, who has not been able to fully embrace her role as first lady. “I think the whole period of his governorship hasn’t fit her,” one friend of both Spitzers said. “It strained the marriage.

The Washington Post:

When Silda Wall Spitzer stood beside her husband in ashen-faced misery the other day as the governor made his brief apology in the prostitution scandal, she uttered not a word. Yet she launched a thousand conversations.

"Why is she standing there?" many women wondered. "Should she be? Would I be?"

And for many, who've seen a long line of wronged political spouses do the same, from Hillary Rodham Clinton to Dina Matos McGreevey to Suzanne Craig, the immediate answer was a resounding, "Hell, no."

"I watched her and I thought, 'Again, the wife is standing there,'" said Jessica Thorpe, a 38-year-old mother of three in Larchmont, N.Y. "And I had a visceral reaction. I just don't get it. Why does it always have to be that way in politics? What will she get out of standing there?"

The blogosphere was buzzing, too, with the same questions. "Why do they show up?" asked blogger Amy Ephron on huffingtonpost.com. She proposed her own fantasy: "I just want one of them —Hillary, Silda — to stand on the steps of the White House, the governor's mansion, and stamp their foot and say, 'And another thing, I'm keeping the house.'"

Well, the Washington Post is most overt about it: To think about Silda is to think Hillary — to think about Hillary in a negative, damaging way.

Publishing an article that is designed to involve readers in the private decisionmaking and presumed suffering of this individual we've never paid attention to before is a way to drag us back into a slew of old questions about Hillary that we've thought about for years and probably dealt with one way or another by now. Here, let me pick that scab for you.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage writes:

Silda Wall Spitzer is highly intelligent, personable and ambitious.

She is also a master strategist.

This “stand by her man” moment is just one of many well thought-out steps she’s taken as she makes her way to her ultimate goal.

Soon enough . . . she’ll run for Governor.

After all, she has experience.

Staring out the window at a Starbucks....

On Broadway, in SoHo.



I'm sure no reader can guess what element of this picture caused me to get out my camera and take a shot. You'll need to look at the enlargement.

If you find this bloggish pop quiz too taxing, here's a little doggy to make you happy:

Imagine being robbed at gunpoint when you're sitting in a midtown Starbucks in the daytime...

... right after you took $149,000 in cash out of the bank.

It's the coffee!

What's wrong with Starbucks? Certainly not that it's pushing out independent coffeeshops. They are prevailing. The big trick: Make better coffee! Meanwhile, Starbucks has been switching to push-button espresso machines. In New York City, I'm stuck patronizing Starbucks, and I was shocked when I saw that they had automated the machines. Starbucks used to seem like a luxury brand, and now it feels like a fallback when you can't get to the real thing.

The man who built the chain, Howard D. Schultz, has retaken the reins in an effort to revive it. He is scheduled to roll out a plan on Wednesday that will almost certainly involve shutting down more stores in the United States while accelerating expansion overseas.

Mr. Schultz has said he wants to refocus on the “customer experience,” recapturing some of the magic of the chain’s early years...

As the company grew and customer traffic increased, Starbucks expanded its food offerings while introducing efficiencies like those automated espresso machines. Gradually, complaints surfaced that Starbucks felt more like a fast-food restaurant than a coffeehouse....

Mr. Schultz had already outlined many of the problems in a Feb. 14, 2007, memo that is now famous. Entitled “The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience,” the memo acknowledged that rapid growth had diluted the Starbucks magic.

Part of the fast-food feel is the people who work there. You can call them "baristas," but you can tell that the job for them feels like a fast-food job.

ADDED: Starbucks also pre-steams big pitchers of milk. Even when the place isn't busy, those pitchers of hot milk are sitting around simplifying the barista's job. You go over to wait for your coffee and instead of seeing your cup made to order, you see a button pushed and old milk dumped in.

UPDATE: Schultz announces his plan:

Starbucks will close about 100 U.S. stores this year, scale back its U.S. expansion and begin focusing on faster growth overseas as it seeks to revive its cachet and rekindle sales growth that by one measure sagged to an all-time low last quarter.

The Seattle coffee-shop chain also will stop selling warmed sandwiches, which don't contribute much to profits but take employees' time and interfere with the smell of coffee in stores.

We don't need no stinking sandwiches.

"A 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel."

In search of the most expensive Starbucks drink. "And me, wincing at the first sip."

(Via Metafilter.)

6 a.m.

There's something special at 6 o'clock in the morning...



... when it's still to early to go to Starbucks...



... because it's Sunday, and they don't open until 6:30 on Sundays, and the door's unlocked, but when you go in, they say "We're not open." It's 6:11, and you're a woman alone. Outside, it's snowing and there's not yet a hint of dawn. It seemed beautiful when I stepped outside my building a few moments earlier, saw the first snow of the season and took those pictures, but now, it seems really sad and lonely. The barista can't say, "Please, take a seat, and I can serve you when it's 6:30," and she doesn't think to say, "I know we're usually open at 6, but not on Sunday... I'm really sorry." She just glares at me, and I see I'm a trespasser. I must retreat into the night. I could walk back to my apartment, and I would if only the WiFi weren't malfunctioning again. I could go walk on the Promenade, take some more pictures, but does a woman walk alone in the dark on the Promenade?

My exile in New York continues....

Eventually, I get a wisp of happiness from a doggywog....





I think about home...

What does it take to get a real cup around here?

If I go to a café and sit down with a cup of coffee, I want a real cup, a ceramic cup, not a paper cup. I'm paying $4 for an aesthetic experience and part of it is the feel of the cup, in my hand and on my lips. When I say "for here," I mean in a real cup. It's not hard to understand. Yet time and again, it turns out that they're out of cups. Why is that? They're running a café — invariably a Starbucks — yet they either failed to lay in an adequate supply of cups or they can't — or won't — keep up with the dishwashing.

Today, I ordered a "venti" latte at Starbucks, said "for here," handed over my money and received my change, only to be told that they're out of venti cups. Then size it down to a grande, I say.

I want the real cup more than I want the extra coffee. And I want to teach them a lesson: If you don't have a cup for it, I don't want it.

This led to minutes of confusion as they tried to figure out how to refund the price difference. The line backed up behind me, and I finally got what turned out to be only 33¢. They didn't hide their irritation, but I hid mine.

Until now.

I remember one time some kids had a lemonade stand, and they ran out of cups. They didn't want to lose the sale, so they said "Cup your hands!" That was at least funny. And they were just kids.

Hey, Starbucks! Have some damned cups for the product you charge so much for!

And if you don't have a cup for a customer who says "for here," you can say: I'm sorry, we ran out of cups. How embarrassing. We'd like to apologize by giving it to you in a paper cup for free. And here's a coupon for a free coffee in a real cup next time.

"You know what he wants... you don't show any response."

I know I've been spending too much time at Starbucks. Here's something Melvin Jules Bukiet says in that anti-Brooklyn thing I just linked to:

Brooklyn’s always been the overlooked sibling among the boroughs. Founded several years before New York, it was swiftly relegated to a role as Manhattan’s unglamorous adjunct. First farms and then factories provided its economic basis. Now back-office space does the same. Until recently, Brooklyn was strictly second choice for residence. Beatniks who couldn’t afford Greenwich Village crossed the river in the ’60s, and yuppies who couldn’t afford Soho moved to Park Slope in the ’80s. Now hipsters who can’t afford the East Village have filled every cranny between soon-to-be evicted bodegas and auto-repair shops with cafés sporting lava lamps on the tables and old record albums tacked to the walls. Inside, a horde of latte-swilling sensitives sit in mismatched chairs and tap at laptops and can’t imagine why they’d ever want to cross the river again. They interpret their migration born of economic necessity as a hegira of moral virtue. Self-righteous sour grapes define their attitude to Gotham.

In short, they’re young.

I'm not young, but I was one of those yuppies who couldn’t afford Soho and moved to Park Slope in the ’80s. I'm back in Brooklyn, now, unyoung yet in need of coffee and WiFi. This Bukiet character has apparently never been to Madison. I'm starved here in Brooklyn for the indie cafés I live at back home. I'm forced to patronize Starbucks and I had to shell out for the T-Mobile connection. It's irksome.

These days, I mark my time at Starbucks by the inevitable reappearance in the music rotation of the Bob Dylan song "Jokerman." Why "Jokerman"? I've never much thought about "Jokerman," but really, look at the lyrics: "Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune. Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman." Is it possible to sing that line a few more times? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it's getting painful.

New York noise/Madison noise.

There's some infernal machine grinding away at street level beneath my office. Is that always there, and am I just noticing it? Because, now that I'm noticing, it's a constant, distracting presence.

I'm telling myself it's no worse than when they crank up the lawnmowers on Bascom Hill under my UW office window....



Oh, no! Don't get homesick!

The thing is you know the lawn will get mowed and the lawnmowers will go away. But what is this noise?

I climb up up on my desk to try to get a look down to where the noise is coming from. I picture myself falling out the window, and I realize that if I did, everyone would check what I'd just been writing. Two suicide posts in the last 24 hours -- here and here -- not to mention the white hair, the diamond-encrusted skull, and the "concentration camps and skeletons." You'd all conclude I'd jumped. Damn it! Death and that on top of it.

I scramble off the desk and think about relocating to a café... a Starbucks... not an indie café like back home. I'm trying to adapt. I've accepted that it is necessary to pay for a T-Mobile WiFi subscription so a Starbucks can approximate one of my beloved free-WiFi indie coffeeshops.

But please, Brooklyn: approximate finishing mowing the lawn!

Should we force restaurants to show calorie counts?

Would you like to see the calorie count displayed on the menu? Consider this:

If you were watching calories, would you go for the chicken Caesar salad at Chili’s or the classic sirloin steak? Subway’s tuna or roast beef sandwich? A Starbucks chai or a cappuccino?...

The chicken Caesar salad at Chili’s is one of those items that might appear to be a healthier choice, but brace yourself: it contains 1,010 calories and 76 grams of fat, while the sirloin has 540 calories and 42 grams of fat (not counting side dishes).

Nor is a tuna sandwich the low-calorie choice at Subway: it has 530 calories, significantly more than the roast beef sandwich, which has 290. And a chai latte almost always has 100 more calories than a cappuccino of the same size prepared with the same kind of milk....

Some entrees and appetizers provide a staggering amount of calories in a single dish, sometimes more than the 2,000 recommended daily for the average adult. Notorious among nutritionists is the Bloomin’ Onion at Outback Steakhouse, a battered, deep-fried onion resembling a flower that is served with a dipping sauce. The damage, nutritionists say, is about 2,200 calories and more than 100 grams of fat, most of it trans fat.

The sheer difficulty of estimating the calories in restaurant food suggests why it would be good to see the numbers, but a law requiring restaurants to show the numbers has some problems. For one thing only some restaurants are covered -- chain restaurants.

Why pick on chain restaurants? Is their food any more fattening or mystifying than the food served in nonchain restaurants? What is a nonchain but a local restaurant that hasn't branched out yet? Is there some idea that a chain restaurant has standardized the product, so it's easier for it to come up with calorie counts? But small differences in preparation can affect the calorie count -- like using 6 tablespoons of dressing instead of 4-- and that can make the displayed counts wrong. Are you going to punish these restaurants if they don't get their cooks to calibrate the ingredients precisely?

Wouldn't it be better to let businesses decide whether they want to respond to customer demand for calorie counts? To facilitate this market process, a more helpful law would be one that excluded any punishment or action for fraud if a restaurant got the calorie count wrong, so that a restaurant that wanted to try to provide this information wouldn't take too much risk. (Remember the low-fat frozen yogurt episode of "Seinfeld"?)

The law could require some additional notice before the restaurant could take advantage of the exclusion from liability, something like: This calorie count is only an estimate and may be incorrect. Please use your own judgment. Then, let anyone who cares about overeating learn a little about portion size and the density of calories in various foods. We may end up just as fat, but we have a chance of getting a little smarter.