Starbucks burnishes its bobo credentials
In this week’s What We’re Reading, FP‘s Christine Chen flagged a poignant narrative by Ishmael Beah about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The New York Times Magazine article was a gripping sneak preview of Beah’s new book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. As it happens, Starbucks is ...
In this week's What We're Reading, FP's Christine Chen flagged a poignant narrative by Ishmael Beah about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The New York Times Magazine article was a gripping sneak preview of Beah's new book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.
In this week’s What We’re Reading, FP‘s Christine Chen flagged a poignant narrative by Ishmael Beah about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The New York Times Magazine article was a gripping sneak preview of Beah’s new book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.
As it happens, Starbucks is planning to carry the book in its stores, a departure from its pleasant but bland choices in the past. What’s behind this move? It all goes back to New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Allow me to explain. Before he became a favorite whipping boy for liberal bloggers, Brooks was best known for Bobos in Paradise, his brilliant and witty analysis of how former 60s bohemians took some of their cultural tastes and causes with them when the grew up and became the new bourgeois in America.
What does this have to do with Starbucks? For starters, the coffee shop phenomenon itself is one of the best examples of a counterculture trend going upscale. Starbucks succeeds as a chain in part because it has fostered an image of a kinder, gentler coffee company that is concerned about its workers and its global impact. So, the decision to publish Beah’s memoirs is not really the “very courageous choice” that his publisher says it is. Starbucks should certainly be applauded, but let’s remember that it’s all part of the show.
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