My Starbucks Obsession

I don't feel loyalty to too many corporations. I like driving my 2004 Lexus sedan with 164,000 miles on it.

Food is important. I buy healthy food at the Whole Foods Market. As far as beer and tortilla chips-- no preference really.

As far as fashion, I find most of the great brands get the job done-- Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger make quality clothes. I came across a French company that makes shirts-- Marithe and Francois Girbaud-- by finding fantastic used shirts at Thrift Shops. Just went to the girbaud.com website and see the new clothes cost 200 Euros and more!

I've had good luck with Rockport shoes. I worked as a waiter for many years and the Rockports provided good foot support. Never buy second hand shoes!

And, like almost everybody else, I'm a fan of Apple products. I'm typing on a MacBook laptop. My phone is a Samsung.

Guess I have more brand loyalty than I realized. Nobody  really functions in this world without turning to corporations for survival-- food, clothes and entertainment. That's the West anyway.

We have everything at our fingertips. Just admit it. Life is good even with Trump in office.

But Starbucks stands out for me-- my coffee shop of choice, even with all the excellent cafes in my neighborhood.

The reasons I like Starbucks:

1) Good coffee
2) Made precisely so almost always perfect on the espresso drinks
3) Comfortable setting-- high ceilings and naturally well-lit with big windows always part of the architecture.
4) Starbucks Gold Card. My adding cash to my gold card I somehow don't notice the cost of my coffee drinks. It's a poor man's Gold Card but you do earn some free coffee drinks along the way.
5) Like the mermaid logo-- not sure why this adds to the experience?
6) Like the lingo-- tall, grande, vente for small, medium and large drinks.
7) Rest, read, restore, recuperate-- Starbucks is a corporation that will provide you a comfortable place to sit and read or to converse with a friend.

The key to my Starbucks loyalty has to be #7--

Despite their large volume of business, Starbucks customers move in-and-out, and room exists for people to sit down, read the newspaper, study the contents of their cellphone, or share conversation and conviviality with a friend.

The Super Bowl ads will use all manner of cleverness to attract me to their product.  Maybe Starbucks will have an ad? I hear they cost $7 million dollars for a 30 second spot.

Sure I'm set in my ways. And Starbucks is at the top of my list.

Back from Europe: Trump Puts Us On Like a Suit of Clothes

Did I learn anything from foreign travel? I gained something, more like a feeling than a set of ideas. Just being in France and Spain where the living is slightly different has a beneficial effect. Not sure why…. Maybe the electrons in your brain and body get realigned. At times I felt my stomach twisted in knots of anxiety. Sometimes I got the feeling my cellphone and Google Maps was the only thing between my health and safety and oblivion. Lose the phone and your whole existence goes down the drain immediately. Such is life. As Descartes famously said… I own a Samsung, therefore I am.

Been looking at my travels for some insight to explain modern life. The G20 summit happened soon after we returned. I recognized that late hour of sunset in Europe—the same in Hamburg, Germany as in France and Spain, around 10 PM. I felt slightly more familiar with the protesters because I had been on their continent just a few days before. They were rioting—maybe against capitalism, maybe against the system’s inability to deal with global climate change. The younger generations must fight for their air, water, the temperature of their air—a whole new set of issues from the Vietnam War demonstrations I remember. The issues have changed—maybe moved to a new level of complexity. The same technology and complexity that has made the West so rich threatens the health of the planet. Can people actually choose less wealth? Maybe but it’s quite a struggle.

Where does the Donald Trump phenomenon fit into the global angst. Trump knows something that almost nobody else has figured out. I found some clues in Marshall McLuhan’s writing—where I always look to understand the new, digital environment. 

People complain about Trump’s tweets, not realizing the tweets are Trump’s genius, his grasp of the present moment.

Trump tweeted this out on 1 July 2017, as an answer to his critics:

My use of social media is not Presidential—it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again.

5:41 PM

I agree with this tweet—the media world has changed and nobody wants to believe it. They want to kill the messenger. Trump alerts us to the new media environment—and we mistakenly focus on what we dislike about the man. Trump has no great loyalty to any policy or party. He is all about the medium.

Remember Marshall McLuhan’s great aphorism… “The medium is the message.”

The content of Trump’s tweets is not the important thing. The fact that Trump uses twitter as his governing mechanism and image builder and that we read his tweets is what matters. 

And here is what McLuhan said in his Playboy interview of 1969:

“The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively puts on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image—like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media.”