Coffee Shops

The coffee shop is the latest format to have evolved for the service of coffee beverages outside the home, following innovations such as the Turkish coffeehouse [Page 186]and Mediterranean coffee bar. Each format developed to respond to specific customer demands at a particular time and setting, which reflect the nature of consumer society. All combine the sale of two basic commodities consumed in very different ways: coffee and the surroundings in which it is served.

Coffee is native to the Ethiopian highlands, where its preparation formed the center of a complex social ritual involving the roasting, preparation, and serving of the beverage. From the fourteenth century, coffee was imported into Arabia, gaining a following among Sufis as an aid to staying awake during their lengthy devotions. During the 1500s, coffeehouses became established across much of the Ottoman Empire and began appearing in Europe from the mid-1600s. In the twentieth century, the coffee bar became popular among Mediterranean societies, reflecting the spread of urbanization and mass consumption; while Anglo-American youth cultures adopted coffee bars as generational meeting places during the 1950s. The contemporary coffee shop formula, initially developed in North America during the 1980s, has been successfully exported to large swaths of the developed and developing world; most notably by the Starbucks coffee chain, which by July 2008 was operating around 4,500 outlets in 45 countries, in addition to over 11,000 locations within the United States.

Coffee's success as a publicly consumed social beverage must be considered in relation to its rival beverages. For the Ottomans, coffee was the “wine of Islam”—endorsed by the religion, unlike alcohol. Elsewhere, the success of the coffeehouse has been linked to its popularity among those who were excluded, or chose to exclude themselves, from drinking establishments. Nineteenth-century temperance movements promoted coffeehouses as an alternative to pubs, while 1950s coffee bars welcomed teenagers who were below legal drinking age in the United Kingdom and the United States. The popularity of the contemporary coffee shop owes much to the patronage of women who often report finding the atmosphere less intimidating than that of drinking establishments.

The current success of coffee must also be explained by other factors in relation to its nonalcoholic competitors. Here the emphasis on espresso-based beverages has been crucial: these are difficult to prepare, requiring expensive equipment and trained operators, whereas tea is largely brewed in the same way in and out of the home, leading to customer reluctance to pay the kind of mark-up readily accepted on coffee. By presenting cappuccinos and lattes as premium, hand-crafted products, individually prepared according to the customer's instruction (tall, half-fat, double-shot, with caramel, etc.), coffee shops succeeded in establishing espresso-based beverages as aspirational lifestyle products that are relatively price insensitive.

Howard Schultz, the longtime Starbucks CEO, argues coffee shops offer a luxury good at an easily accessible price. This notion of the coffeehouse as a democratically inclusive establishment is nothing new. Turkish coffee shops were notable for seating guests in the order that they arrived, rather than by rank, while the European cafés of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often served as centers for political discussion and organization, captured in Jurgen Habermas's designation of the coffeehouse as a key arena for the formation of public opinion. Yet these were almost exclusively bourgeois and male in character, with seated patrons being served by waiters. It was only with the emergence of the American style bar in which drinks were passed over the counter by the server (barista) to the standing customers that a more classless coffee bar developed in the Mediterranean. However the Anglo-American coffee shop continues to attract a disproportionately white, middle-class clientele, attracted as much to the ambience as the coffee itself.

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