Starbucks Customers - Ethnography of Subculture

Roxanne is a G7 student with John Dietrich's Anthropology & Geography.

This is an assignment from the 'Cultural Anthropology' section. Students learned about various aspects of culture and read a number of different examples of ethnography. Then they were asked to conduct fieldwork and write their own ethnography of a subculture of their choosing.

PREFACE

There is a Starbucks near my house, which I believe would be wonderful to observe.

Starbucks is a representative brand for café culture. Everyday there are different kinds of people visiting the café, so observing people there would be feasible. The interesting assessment is to observe this subculture because Starbucks is a chain store opened all around the world and widely known. People visiting Starbucks will have different backgrounds although there won’t be too many differences. For example, their personal income won’t be too low or else they can’t afford Starbucks coffee’s price. Other characteristics will likely be common across the subculture as well.

Culture is basically how people act and understand a situation. There are three fundamental aspects in culture each stands for what people do, what they know and what they make and use. This subculture could certainly be analyzed from these perspectives.

BACKGROUND 

As a world famous café, Starbucks was first opened in Pike Place Market, Seattle. The first store was opened in 1971 and it was just one of the small coffee brands in the market. Then, things started to change with the new director Howard Schultz. He started to enlarge Starbucks’s market. Opening branches in Italy, their popularity began to increase there. Step by step, Starbucks began to stand out from other coffee shops and opened around 20 branches by the year 1987.

Japan and Singapore were the first two steps Starbucks took out of North America. They were opened at the same time in 1996. Getting to know the Asian market, the first Starbucks in China was opened in January 1999. It was opened in the China World Trade Center in Beijing. By that time, Starbucks already had 2,498 branches globally. According to Starbucks’s company, China is now the second largest market to them. The first one is America. Shanghai, as an international city, has 256 branches according to 2014’s data. Starbucks enjoys a large popularity in Shanghai and branches are almost everywhere. Although branches are everywhere in the world, the subculture in every store must still have similarities.

The Starbucks next to my house is just one of the hundreds Starbucks in Shanghai. It was opened about two years ago on No.200 Wending Road. Just like other Starbucks, this Starbucks is always popular because it’s near the office block and residential area. It is a good place for studying and working, and workers often visit it at noon. It is not a very big store and can hold about 40 people maximum. The main color of the room is brown and green and the background music is smooth and slow. There is a long table for 6-7 people by the entrance, a long table facing the counter, two tables at the corner, about ten tables against the wall, and a table for four people in the center.

METHODS 

My fieldwork was conducted in the Starbucks near my house, on Wending Road. I observed from 8:30pm to 9:10 on Thursday evening. Considering it was a weekday evening, there would be various kinds of custumers, not only workers from the building at noon. It would be interesting to see different people in the same place with almost the same culture. The issue is that the much difference by time might affect the representativeness of culture of Starbucks. For example, in the morning and at noon, customers are usually workers. But during evening, there could be other people and the number of workers will decrease. By sitting in a good-view seat of Starbucks, the researcher can observe custumers both sitting for a long time and also ones who just came in from the entrance. I chose a seat in the center of the store. The view was perfect for observing people all around. Every customer in Starbucks is there to do their own work so my observation will not affect others that much. Analysis of the research involved looking for patterns and trends within the observation notes.

ANALYSIS

While doing the observation, there are of several things worth considering and analyzing. One of them is culture. Culture can also be divided into three parts to talk about. They are called: cultural behavior, cultural knowledge and cultural artifacts. They are respectively defined as what people do, what they know and what they make and use (Spradley, McCurdy, 2011). According to Starbucks, the purpose of different people visiting Starbucks might be different but they all have some things in common.

The cultural artifact is the Starbucks drink, clearly. Everyone in the café has a drink with them and that’s probably why they came to Starbucks.  I also observed that most of the customers are with electronic devices. For instance, people who weren’t chatting were all using either their phones or their computers. Some of them are using phones and computers for learning or working, but others just play games or chat on Wechat.

For some customers, they came to Starbucks especially to try the drinks. I saw two French men walking in, buy two cups of hot drinks then leave. Their purpose of visiting is only for the drinks, and then they left very quickly. The customers who sat down for quite a time might not come here only for a drink. Most of them are working or writing. Meanwhile, people also came here to have a conversation. Maybe because the environment here is good for talking, but the conversations are not usually serious according to their facial and body expressions. So most of them are just chatting. For instance, the two men chatting loudly in the corner are obviously not talking about business. They sometimes laugh loudly and I could hear a few words about video games.

The cultural knowledge, especially focal vocabulary, is important according to this situation. Every custumer there must know something about coffee, or drinks. They know what kind of coffee means what proportion of milk, coffee or syrup. For example, they will know that Cappuccino has double espresso and hot milk, with the surface topped with foamed milk. So, they can analyze whether they want this taste of cappuccino and order. If they don’t know the coffee knowledge, they might not know what to order.

As mentioned about cultural knowledge, custumers need to know coffee information. Basic knowledge of coffee is the names of the coffee. The history of coffee starts back in centuries to the ancient coffee forests on the Ethiopian plateau. When it came to Europe, it was highly praised and liked. Most of the coffee words are spoken in Italian, as for example “cappuccino”, “latte”, “espresso”, “Americano”. Italians made coffee well known by using espresso to create all kinds of tastes. So people use their names in Italian to call them, even till now. In Starbucks, an American café, inventors created “Frappuccino”, which sounds like an Italian word but created by an American. In the Starbucks that I observed, even if people order drinks in Chinese, the word is usually transliterated from the original Italian word. Another notion is when custumers have special needs. The amount of elements has special words. For example, when one of the French men walked in to order, he ordered “half sugar cappuccino”. And when my mom buys coffee, I usually hear her ordering “sugar-free+something”. When it comes to the size of drinks, there are also special words. In Starbucks, the size is not expressed as “small”, “medium”, and “large”. Instead, people use “venti”, “grande” and “tall”. All of these special words need to be remembered when custumers go buy coffee.

Relating the market principal to Starbucks, customers always wanted to maximize their benefit. When they are buying drinks, some of them would prefer to buy a set. They think they would get a discount from these sets. Another group of people gain benefit from more than just the food or drinks. They would order only little drinks or food and sit there and study or work for a long time. Reciprocity or exchange between social groups was clearly present. There are three degrees of reciprocity: generalized, balanced, and negative. Generalized means the exchange between related people, for example family members. Balanced is when exchangers expect something from each other but not immediately. Negative means mistrust exchange. I think in the progress of trading in Starbucks, the reciprocity is most often a balanced form. Custumers order the drink and they give money to the teller first. They expect their drinks to be ready, but the Baristas need time to make the drink. Custumers need to wait for a couple minutes to get their drink. Customers and workers there are in a relationship of balanced reciprocity, where custumers expect the payback, drinks, from the workers after they gave their money to the teller. 

CONCLUSION

During my observation, I found out that Starbucks’s customers are not always varied as my assumptions. Custumers have things in common and their background won’t be so different. Since Starbucks is an international chain store, by observing the situation in one shows some of its characteristics in all. The culture includes Starbucks drinks as cultural artifacts. People drinking drinks, working and chatting as cultural behavior, and people’s knowledge on coffee and specialized coffee names as cultural knowledge. By observing this subculture, I found out that people who came to this kind of global chain store café are all with some kind of knowledge and money. They afford the drinks, they know the coffee knowledge and they own electronic products. I think Starbucks is more like a place for social communications, where people use their knowledge and language to communicate and enjoy themselves. Over time, I think Starbucks will have more and more popularity and more diversity of populations in the future.

Bibliography

Bratskeir, Kate. “38 Types Of Coffee Drinks, Explained”. The Huffington Post. 9 October 2014.            

17 April 2017.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/02/coffee-order-types-        finally_n_5904428.html

Starbucks. “Starbucks Company Timeline”. Starbucks company. N.d.

Web. 17 April 2017.                       

https://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/starbucks-company-timeline

Starbucks. “Starbucks in China”. Starbucks company. N.d.

Web. 17 April 2017                          

https://www.starbucks.com.cn/cn/about/inchina

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