Here’s the thing. When you’re the head of the largest and most recognizable coffee company in the whole entire world, any time you speak it’s news. And so when Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol opens his mouth it’s going to make waves. Which is what happened last week when Niccol was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and said some things people got mad about. This has forced me into the unfavorable position that frankly I never thought I’d be in, and that is to defend Starbucks CEO Brian fucking Niccol.
The statement in question revolves around whether or not $9 for a cup of coffee constitutes an “affordable premium experience.” An opinion piece in The Guardian called Niccol “out of touch” for the comment. “People are struggling to afford basic groceries, Brian!” the author states. “Now is not the time to wax lyrical about ‘affordable’ $9 coffee.” The Daily Beast said he was “tone-deaf.” So what is the actual quote that has social media mad enough for large news media corporations to report on it? Here it is:
People want to have a special experience, and regardless of what your income level is, in some cases, a $9 experience does feel like you’re splurging, and what that means is that we have to make it worthwhile. And in other cases, people believe, well, this is a really affordable premium experience, because they are saying, “Well, it’s less than $10, and I get a really premium experience.”
Niccol is responding to a question about the K-shaped economy, where for some folks $10 isn’t a lot of money—“it’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, ten dollars?”—and for others $10 is not spent lightly. It is the latter group that people are getting upset on behalf of.
And their outrage is justified. There’s a cost of living crisis that is only getting worse. The rich continue to accumulate more wealth while the poor are getting poorer, and there’s no real middle class to speak of. This is all 100% accurate, but does it make what Niccol said wrong or out of touch? Maybe if you’re not so hot at grammar. Thus a quick lesson on adjectives and adverbs is in order.
An “affordable premium experience” is not the same as an “affordable, premium experience.” The comma matters. In the first case, affordable describes “premium experience,” and in the second both affordable and premium describe “experience”. See the difference? Niccol used the first, describing $9 a reasonable price for a premium experience. But everyone seems to want him to have said the second, that $9 for coffee is both affordable and premium. Which is not what he said.
So the question remains: is $9 affordable for a premium experience? I’m inclined to think that yes, within the context of the type of experience being espoused, nine bucks would be considered affordable. And in fact, I can’t think of anything else I would categorize as a premium experience that is anywhere near $9, let alone cheaper.
There is of course a larger question about whether or not Starbucks is actually a premium experience [Editor’s note: it’s not] or if what you are actually getting is mid-grade coffee gussied up with lots of sugar. But that’s not what’s being argued here.
What’s actually being argued is the antiquated but still somehow firmly held belief that coffee should be cheap. The dream of the $1 coffee is alive and well. People are mad they have to pay $9 because their orange mocha frappuccinos should be, what, $3? $4?
They’re wrong though. Coffee should be more expensive, and specialty coffee has gone to great effort to prove why. Just because prices have been kept artificially low doesn’t mean they are right.
There’s a lot to be critical of Niccol and Starbucks over: his supercommute, the company’s petulant fight against unions (now five years without a single contract being ratified), the Columbusing of pretty much every specialty coffee trend over the last two decades, their relief-efforts-to-underpaid-farmers-as-marketing-fodder when they could just pay them more in the first place, you name it. But calling $9 affordable for a premium experience is not one of them.
Because that’s what it is. It’s a splurge. By its very definition it’s not something you do everyday. It’s a treat. And for a lot of people, particularly those who get coffee at Starbucks, $9 for a treat is not so unattainable. This doesn’t mean that everyone has an extra $9 to spend on coffee, which is certainly a cause for outrage, just not because of the price tag on the cup. It’s the mechanisms of injustice, the ones that put people in such dire situations to begin with, and the corroding safety nets (here in America at least) meant to help remedy them. That’s where the anger belongs.
But also, $9 is closer to what you should be paying for coffee. So when folks want to take the moral high ground about coffee being too expensive and CEOs being tone-deaf because they aren’t properly considering the plight of poor people, just know that the only reason your latte was ever $4 in the first place was because of immoral business practices exploiting cheap labor on both ends of the supply chain. And arguing for such makes you sound not only tone-deaf but hypocritical.
So please, just this once, leave Britney Brian Niccol alone. And let’s never speak of this again.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
