Howard Schulz, should he decide to run for president, will face any manner of electoral obstacles. The former Starbucks honcho, who has never held elective office, espouses a form of technocratic centrism that voters are increasingly spurning, and is responsible for the scourge of overly roasted coffee.
But there’s another theory out there for why Schulz can’t win: It’s his association with Starbucks, people say, that will doom him. Satish Narayan, a Democratic consultant, made a version of the argument to the Financial Times on Thursday. “I think it’s definitely seen as an elitist liberal brand,” he told reporter Courtney Weaver. “I don’t think people in Kansas are sitting there talking about how Starbucks is to their employees. I think their image is $5 lattes.”
Starbucks may have once been an “elitist, liberal” brand. But the truth is, that hasn’t been the case since probably the late 1990s, when it was still found only in big cities and college towns. Today, Starbucks is pure middle America, as familiar an emblem across the fruited plain as Walmart or McDonald’s.
Narayan should look around a little. There are hundreds of drive-thru Starbucks dotting suburban shopping centers. There are Starbucks locations in Target, Barnes and Noble, Safeway, Giant, and Kroger, among other stores. There are Starbucks location in airports, stadiums, shopping malls, casinos, highway rest stops, and hotel lobbies. For all I know, they have them in prisons at this point. You can find canned Starbucks products at CVS and 7-Eleven. So cheapened is the Starbucks brand that the company now operates special “Starbucks Reserve” locations that seek to recapture the lost “liberal, elitist” vibe. In truth, that’s likely to fail: Coffee snobs spurned Starbucks years ago.
Nationwide, there are about 15,000 Starbucks locations, out of 27,000 worldwide. (There are 14,000 McDonald’s locations in the U.S., by the way.) In Narayan’s aforementioned Kansas, there were 94 locations as of last fall, or one per about every 31,000 residents. That’s a higher per capita Starbucks rate than is found in such “liberal” bastions as Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Jersey. It’s about on par with New York’s Starbucks penetration rate, in fact.
In other words, Starbucks is in no way a niche business, as the national hysteria over pumpkin spice lattes each fall indicates. Howard Schultz may not win the presidency, let alone run for it. But he’s certainly proved that he knows the taste of Hillary Clinton’s “everyday Americans” quite well.
