One could probably see my smirk a mile away when I chanced upon the title of Michael Gates Gill’s book, “How Starbucks Saved My Life (A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else)”. If it were “How Coca Cola Saved My Life” or how “Vegemite Saved My Life”, I would have made an audible disparaging remark in the bookstore to no one in particular. It did not help that the author, a man over sixty years old, by-lines his book with a reference to his forebears. But because it had some relation to coffee, I held my peace (and picked up the book).
The book is part memoir, part hard-sell ad campaign for Starbucks, and part motivational spiel.
Mike, as he would be referred to in his Starbucks circle, is a son of affluent parents who lived a charmed life from birth until his employment was terminated with one of the largest advertising agencies in the US and around the world.
I have to tell you first the redeeming parts of this book before I tear it apart. The good points have nothing to do with the strength of the book and all because of the reason that I ingest a lot of this black beverage.
One, I like the idea of how each chapter starts with a quotation from a Starbucks cup. The first chapter, for example, starts with the following quotation:
“The humble improve”
- A quote from Wynton Marsalis, jazz musician, published on the side of a cup of a Starbucks Double Tall Skim Latte
Two, Mike, as a new hire, has to take on the entire range of job responsibilities in Starbucks. So we get an idea of how the cafe operates, its company ethos, and trivia like the reason why the person at the register shouts out the order of the customer (properly referred to as a Guest) and why the personnel in charge of making the coffee shouts back the same order to the cashier. We also get to know what makes for “legendary service” – do you (1) make eye contact? (2) greet the guests? (3) thank the guest? (4) initiate conversation? (5) recognize a guest by drink or name?
Now for the bad news.
It is difficult to find sympathy for this guy. He whines that at age 53, he was unceremoniously fired from his job after 25 years of loyal servitude and after putting this job always before his family. He emphasized that he has missed holidays with his family, had no second thoughts of uprooting them if his job required him moving to another place, and had no qualms about his unavailability to his four growing children.
He then goes on to complain some more that because he was in such a depressed state, he had gotten into a habit of regularly going to the gym where he met a “not-so-young woman in her forties” with whom he had a son. This led to him telling his wife that he has sired a fifth child, unfortunately not with her. His wife, who was “clear-headed” would not stand for it and so they got an “amicable” divorce.
Then this thing about a rare medical condition which he gets diagnosed. At a time when he just let go of his health insurance which he could no longer afford. Sniff. (The rare medical condition of course turns out to be not that urgent or that serious towards the end of the book.)
Finally, at 64 years old, he got hired at Starbucks which he now calls the best job he’s ever had. The comparisons, the epiphanies, and all the name-dropping start here. He cannot stop gushing at how different the life of the proletariat is; at how mundane yet how meaningful it can be (do you see me brushing a tear away?). In the same breath that he extols the admirable virtue of cleaning a loo with zeal, he reminisces at how he once had an exchange of pleasantries with Jacqueline Kennedy.
Nope, the former American First Lady is not the only person he namedrops. He namedrops his father, who used to write for the New Yorker, a string of colleagues, neighbors, former classmates, so-called friends, Muhammad Ali, Robert Frost, E.B. White, Ezra Pound… I was afraid at some point that he’d mention next that he’s actually met Michelangelo.
It does not stop there. He wrote an Afterword where he says that a 28-year old woman came to his store and told him that his book so inspired her that she quit a job that was boring her to death and is now doing something she really loves. The three Ls which have allegedly helped peopled live better lives (after reading his book)?
1. Leap with faith
2. Look with respect
3. Listen to your heart to find true happiness
My important lesson which I have drawn from the book? If you are instinctively repulsed by a book’s title, run! (and it does not matter even if it was written by that goatherd who discovered coffee on the hills of Ethiopia.)
No comments:
Post a Comment