Faux Factory
By Tara Emelye Needham

What does evil look like? An old factory.

“… myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made.”
Roland Barthes, Myth Today

Out of the Factory—Into the Daylight

Looking up from coffee and conversation in the Starbucks café at Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, New York, I see a cavernous, raised ceiling, lined with conveyor belts, shafts and assorted pipes. The top half of the interior space looks like an industrial loft space, unfinished and raw. Apparently, this Starbucks café was once a place of production—of noise, exhaust, engines, and motion—a factory.

However, when I walk outside with my paper cup of coffee, I step into the busy parking lot of an upscale shopping center. I was not in a former factory after all—I am in suburbia, at an elaborate strip mall. Still, it is possible that the industrial interior I just exited is “real,” meaning that the architectural structures are those of unembellished shopping center construction, the framework that is usually hidden when drop ceilings and track lighting descend. But then I enter a Starbucks in the town over, and another in Penn Station, New York City, and I see the same exact pipes, belts, and shafts—an identical interior. This factory-like interior is in fact designed, constructed, and duplicated in hundreds of stores. Ironically, we can presume that in some actual factory—somewhere—these fake factories are manufactured!

Starbucks is certainly not the first restaurant to feign the authenticity of its interior. Dozens of French bistros in New York City alone concoct interiors that connote age and hence authenticity. Cracked plaster walls, tin ceilings, and distressed wood furniture are deployed as “signs” which call out to me, which I recognize as signaling the concept Frenchness. I know this is a French restaurant, even though I also know that this bistro opened only six months ago and the space was formerly a laundromat.

What origin does Starbucks strive to indicate or, alternately, to obscure by purposely designing interiors which resemble old factories and industrial loft spaces? Or, following the idea of myth developed by literary theorist Roland Barthes, what historical reality is referenced yet obscured, what concepts are signaled in the simulation of a factory, and to whom do they call out? What might it mean that one of the wealthiest and fastest growing corporations in the world is designing interiors that look cheap, old, and unembellished?

Step into the Debate

In the arena of the politics of lifestyle, there is perhaps no more vexing question today than “To drink (at) Starbucks or not to drink (at) Starbucks.” Indeed, the question can induce a paralysis of Hamlet-esque dimensions, as caffeine headaches set in while one grapples with the political pros and cons of entering a Starbucks café. And with the square footage of the world designated as a Starbucks increasing daily—almost exponentially—it is nearly impossible to sidestep the dilemma. I have recently witnessed many a once-resistant friend succumb to the ubiquitous brew and its attendant comfy couches, while I sip day-old burnt deli coffee by the curb.

According to its website, Seattle-based Starbucks was officially incorporated in 1984, and has expanded from 17 locations in the United States in 1987 to 7,569 café/stores worldwide in 2004. At this pace, it is easy to understand how Starbucks is perceived by many as an evil, greedy, ever-expanding capitalist empire. (Just visit www.ihatestarbucks.com for a sampling of grievances.)

Yet, it is equally well-known that Starbucks pays a decent starting wage, has a diverse upper management team (nearly 35% of the top officers are women and/or people of color), offers health-care benefits to part-time employees (actually, everyone who works for Starbucks is called a “partner”—p.s. Starbucks discourages and disrupts attempts by its “partners” to unionize), stock options, and a career path in coffee shop management. People consider them a “good” company, and defend their daily intake of Sumatra blend accordingly.

Still, resentment of and resistance to the chain flourishes. In June of 2003, San Francisco and the small town of Excelsior, MN, organized to discourage Starbucks from establishing new stores in their cities. “Secede from Starbucks Nation” was the chosen slogan, developed by a Minneapolis-based ad agency, whose president, Bill Andrews, commented that “the phrase ‘Starbucks Nation’ in recent years has come to symbolize uniformity and commercialization.” Often attached to these sentiments of secession are complaints that Starbucks puts local independent coffee houses out of business, destroying regional flavor and culture, resulting in widely distributed bumper stickers that read: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks.”

Perhaps most insidious and controversial are Starbucks’ attempts to promote itself as ecologically, environmentally, and economically responsible—both domestically and in the regions from which it purchases coffee, largely in South American countries. In fact, Starbucks’ goodwill efforts—gathered under the umbrella term of “corporate social responsibility”—seem to proliferate at the same rate, if not faster, than its number of stores. Starbucks proudly advertises that it sells “Fair Trade” Coffee which through the organization Global Exchange pays farmers a competitive wage. But, Starbucks was apparently resistant to selling the coffee and committed to carrying less than one percent of it —much less than was expected. Is the “Fair Trade” blend just a marketing nod to the progressive politics of many of Starbucks customers?

In addition to the controversy surrounding the corporation, the cup of Starbucks coffee itself presents a real conundrum for the politics and ethics of consumption. Starbucks—the corporation, the cup of coffee, the café—is in many ways the contemporary embodiment of the postmodern implosion of high and low. The implosion happens because Starbucks markets a “fine” or elite commodity which, rather than being rare and inaccessible, can be made available for mass consumption daily on a global scale. Starbucks can assert that this coffee is not some bastardized version of the idea iof coffee—a cheaper version of the real thing, repackaged and sold to the masses (like Old Navy at the bottom of the Gap and Banana Republic food chain)—but that it is the “real’ thing, of the highest quality in its category. It follows then that the most common and perhaps convincing defense of Starbucks is that the coffee is really, really good.

Today, theorists, activists, and artists often celebrate sites of popular culture in an anti-elitist stance that tries to locate resistance and individual agency in acts of mass consumption. In Mythologies, Barthes sought to demystify mass culture, to unveil its role as a vehicle for dominant bourgeois ideology. The enemy for Barthes was the “bourgeois norm” as accomplished invisibly, anonymously through popular culture. For postmodern cultural studies, the “enemy” is often in fact high art, canonical works, leftover modernist elitism, while popular culture is re-interpreted for its resistant strategies. Is Starbucks high or low? Elitist or populist?

I read the meaning of the myth of the Starbucks factory interior as located in these very debates. With the corporation under attack, and the cup of coffee itself loved and hated, the cafés are the final frontier for stabilizing the company, at least in so far as Starbucks remains precariously, and advantageously, pitched between so many binaries—good/evil, high/low, local/global. Myths are marked by their intentions—they signal to a certain audience, readers or even coffee drinkers. In short: the fake pipes, conveyor belts, and simulated exposed bricks are talking to us. This “us” includes those who are financially well-off and those who have accumulated a breadth of cultural capital, but may not be wealthy. In addition, the myth calls out to those well-versed in the very debates of good versus evil surrounding Starbucks.

Exit History

“ The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which…is undoubtedly determined by history.” Roland Barthes, Preface to the 1957 edition of Mythologies

I was tricked momentarily by the interior of Starbucks, believing it was actually a raw, unfinished space, and found myself thinking “better” of the company that I typically denounce and only visit when accompanying traitor friends. A barrage of associations and allusions were triggered by the suggestion of a factory/loft space, which I put forth as “concepts” —like Frenchness—generated by the interior. The semblance of images and objects which conveyed to me “this was once a factory” accessed and fed off of historical moments and realities which were simultaneously erased in their specificity. In effect, a myth was produced. According to Barthes, to read a myth is to receive the web of allusions invoked by objects and images, to reside in the constant fluctuation, and to decipher unstable and shifting associations.

At its most basic, the space appears raw. Unfinished. The structure of the space is exposed—the very being of the building is visible. Elements of construction which are normally hidden, in fact what some may perceive as ugly, are left in full view. What Starbucks communicates here is “we have nothing to hide” or the concept which might be termed nothing-to-hideness. The company is transparent, in no way seeking to deceive or dupe its customers; it is open for inspection.

Following this, we understand that Starbucks does not seek to transform the condition of the space—only its function. A second concept is thus achieved through the use of the industrial interior—that of conversion. As I sip my coffee, I think that this once unique space of abandoned—and perhaps failed— production has been given a new purpose—it has been revitalized, put to use, saved from ruin. Starbucks—and by extension its customers—has improved the space, taken leftover, discarded materials, and in what could be considered a resourceful act, a little rebellious even, Starbucks has installed a coffee shop.

This resourcefulness extends further to yield the concept of thriftiness. Starbucks does not construct new buildings—besides for the product and the prices, Starbucks is not extravagant. There are similar readings available here as to Roland Barthes’s treatment of myth in “The Writer on Holiday” and “The Blue Blood Cruise” in Mythologies. In each essay, the writer or the royalty are portrayed in their “everydayness”– the king shaves, the writer wears pajamas! But as Barthes reasons, this does less to puncture the myth of the genius of the writer or the divine-right of kings than to reinforce it: the mythical quality of writers and kings is even more intact when put in relief against these forays into humanity. One can graft this reading from kings to customers at Starbucks. As an elite clientele, the fact that Starbucks patrons sit among the ruins of our industrial world, in the raw spaces of production, only sets them off more as sophisticated, classy, and special in the end.

By apparently leaving the space “as-is”—implying that it is a “found space”—Starbucks manages to convey the concept of respect: respect for the building, for the space as it was, the history that made it, its meaning for those who knew it and know it—it is an attempt at respecting an invented local character. Yet respect functions on another level. The faux factory interior conjures up the entire history of industrial capitalism—capitalism’s heyday, a relic now that manufacturing has been replaced by a service economy, and a global, corporate one at that. Starbucks respects its capitalist predecessors. In fact, Starbucks respects the work ethic of its industrial ancestors—a single-minded attention to delivering the product. Its baristas are the contemporary equivalents of the factory workers of yesteryear. See how far capitalism has come!

Therefore, the interior serves as a perverse tribute to the bygone days of production and the proletariat. Of course, many American warehouses are vacant because vast corporations are exploiting cheap labor abroad, leaving former factory towns ravished and impoverished. Nonetheless, Starbucks is not implicated in this; they treat their employees so well that unions become obsolete, a thing of the past, like the pipes and rafters overhead. And of course, if Starbucks respects the legacy of America’s own “producers” of the past, it must extend this respect to the producers of the coffee beans that they buy and sell worldwide.

In recent years, and in particular in the Hudson Valley and Berkshires, the remains of factory towns and communities—the skeletons, the building themselves—have been renovated as major modern art museums: The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA; DIA Center in Beacon, NY, and MoMA Queens, NY, are just three examples. These museums try to maintain or restore the integrity, the character of the buildings, thus juxtaposing the labor of production with the labor of art making, while recovering, restoring and respecting the architectural uniqueness of the spaces. The museums install art in the former factories; Starbucks installs representations of factories as art in its stores. Ironically, the Starbucks faux-loft interior coincides precisely with the contemporary proliferation of actual warehouse shopping centers: true, new cinderblock constructions, such as Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc. Indeed, the once enormous spaces of production have become enormous spaces of consumption.

The faux-factory interior also conjures ideas of the artists’ loft space, typically located in urban settings. Through this association, the concept of bohemianism emerges, alluding to cafés as spaces of creativity, sites of intellectual discussion and political debate. The artists’ loft also evokes the gritty glamour of the art world, the cache of urbanity in a suburban strip mall. Reinforcing this idea of the artists’ space is wallpaper made to look murals, with sketches of—what else—coffee cups. Bohemianism serves another concept, apparently its opposite in some ways, that of civilization. Artists often function as pioneers into what are considered unsafe and undesirable neighborhoods. A recent example is the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY. These migrations in search of abundant, cheap space for the production of art result in a chain of civilization of sorts, blazing the path for further gentrification, rises in real estate values—hence the civilization of once rough, uninhabitable spaces. With Starbucks, however, the order can be reversed. They come, they conquer, and they install the artists’ lofts.

Conclusion: No-decoration

Perhaps the ultimate gesture of the faux-factory interior is the concept no-decoration. By decorating with an industrial interior, Starbucks wants its customers to determine that they have in fact not decorated at all. This is an attempt at neutrality. To lose all origin, in a sense to signify nothing. Despite the fact that distinct histories may be pointed to with the factory-like décor—that of the industrial era, of workers, of artists, of present day museums—ultimately Starbucks wants to resist meaning, identification with anything, to elude interpretation. The industrial interior allows for Starbucks to be unlocatable, yet everywhere at the same time.

About Tara Needham

Tara Needham is a poet, essayist and songwriter pursuing a Ph. D in English at the State University of New York at Albany. A non-profit development consultant, she was also editor of the grrrl fanzine, Cupsize in the mid-1990's. She is currently recording with her band The Reverse.