The New Starbucks Era of the Office

When I go to Starbucks to work it is jammed. And not with the artists of old but the business people of new. People are obviously are working more and more from home and they don't want to work at home. I get that. Home is where the stress is. Home is where the quiet is. Home is where people aren't. The biggest thing people face working at home is there is no work buzz. There is no camaraderie. Starbucks solves these problems.

There is music. There are people. There is a buzz. And American business should think about this because offices have become morgues. The Internet killed the noise of the office. There used to be the ringing phones and people conversing, , meeting, talking. Not anymore. There is on the soft click of keyboards. People send emails to other people one cube over. This silence is not good for people who have to work.

I worked in an office once with a manager who could not stand noise. The office was a morgue. People hated coming in. People need noise. They need to feel like they are part of the whole or they feel like it is them against the world. Starbucks provides the buzz of old. People talk laugh cry yell work spill things. There is the sound of commerce. Corporate America should wake up and take a page out of Starbucks atmospherics.

Maybe they could even serve coffee. What a concept.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

All The Sad Lonely Men of Starbucks

Market is up. Recession over. So who are all these men in Starbucks? I have been coming to coffee houses for many years to get a little release from writing. I usually shuffle in the afternoon to a Starbucks and flop down in an old wing chair and get lost in some Fitzgerald, Yates, Whitman...just anything to cool the brain cells. But lately, all the chairs are taken. And they aren't taking by women, they are taken by older men. Middle age dudes of the forty something fifty something variety. They sit in their comfort jeans trying to look inconspicuous. These men do not read fiction. They stare at newspapers or some jabber away at a laptop and some have the thirty yard death stare. They all have a deep look of shock and disbelief. When I first saw these men I thought maybe it was a fluke, but everyday they increased until yesterday the place was overrun. We might as well be sitting in a union hall. They look like they should all be in offices. You see the hands reaching for something to do, expressions trying to navigate the strange duplicity of sitting in a Starbucks in the middle of the afternoon when the rest of the world is working. They go to the bathrooms, order more coffee, sit with legs crossed staring intently at nothing. They just don't know what to do. In Britain they call them being made redundant. And there is that feeling that for a lot of these guys they are now redundant. They are of the middle management variety and that is something the new economy will not carry. The day passes and one by one they look at their watches and finally rise to put on their coats. The fact they have nowhere to go yells at you. I have lived a life of uncertainty as a writer, but you can tell these guys did not bargain for this. They are now redundant men, put out to pasture too early in a Starbucks in a small town: the sad lonely men of our time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

A Grande Venti Double Shot Extra Dry Skim Whipped

So Starbucks is laying off people. The sky is truly falling. Maybe all our trouble began when we couldn't' even order a cup of coffee without tuning up our windpipes and speaking French. I have to admit I have been a holdout. Oh, I go to Starbucks, but I still use words like small or large. Women pucker their brows and men mutter heathen when they hear me go, "yeah I'll take a small cup of coffee." Cretin. And of course then I paid my ten bucks like everyone else for my coffee and roll and went happily on my way. Americans have always prided ourselves on cutting through the BS and getting down to the grit of things. Let the Europeans take on aires, we are a people who speak plainly without pretension. Then came Starbucks. Shuffling into Dunkin Donuts or 7/11 for a cup of coffee became strutting into Starbucks and declaring, "Yes, I want a grandee skim white chocolate peppermint mocha whipped with a double shot and a slice of your nonfat coffee cake..." Phew. That'll be fifty bucks. Probably about here we should have sniffed a sea change. When ordering a cup of coffee becomes a novel that costs as much as a novel then something has gone weird on the good ship middle class. We had a coffee bubble going and now it has burst and the men in the green smocks are going to be joining us on the other side of the counter. Will the ubiquitous image of well shod people walking down the street holding white cups with curved lids leave the diorama of our cultural landscape? Probably not. Lets face it that has become the image of people who are doing well. People who can afford to pay that kind of money for a cup of coffee and illiterate their way thorough the nomenclature of coffeeology surely have their &^%$ together. But maybe in these harder times, there might be another image, some guy walking down the street with a big 7/11 on his cup and a cold donut, sloshing along, muttering the patois of the boom years like a deranged caffeinated moron...ah, grandee...no....latteee, no venti...uh cappacino espresso extra shot blastoh. Somehow that seems more real.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com