Book Review: How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

You must read this book, at least the jacket and the first chapter. Why? To fully appreciate the laugh out loud parodies that will inevitably follow. The book is nicely wrapped in a Starbucks Green and White trimmed dust jacket over a solid Starbucks green hardcover with white spine(has Dutch Boy officially named the color combo yet?). It has been promoted by the possibility that Tom Hanks will play the protagonist son of privilege brought face-to-face with desperate poverty (Prince and the Pauper, Trading Places). It is a riches to rags saga that goes down smooth and pre-packaged like a light latte. It reads like one of those fast paced first person stories that Readers' Digest kindly condensed for its mass market readership in the 50's and 60's.

Each chapter begins with an inspiring quote lifted, with full credit, from various sizes of Starbucks coffee cups. "The irony of commitment is that it's deeply liberating -- in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hestiation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life. -- a quote from Anne Morriss, a Starbucks Guest from New York City, published on the side of a Grande Caramel Macchiato Thus begins chapter 7, "Turning Losers into Winners". This could also be Exhibit 1 in the case for smaller sized drinks or a return to one-line fortune cookies as the only acceptable medium for such sentiments. Is this the spawn of Ben and Jerry's?

Just imagine what Mad Magazine will do with this! And of course those mainstream types who channel Mad Magazine for the illiterate masses -- John Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

The jacket gives you all you need to know, and just about everything said in the reviews:

"In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house int he suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he had turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty year marriage. Then he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects."

Nice set-up, and it could be, with a few minor changes, the beginning of a tent revival meeting. But this former J. Walter Thompson advertising executive finds Starbucks, not God, on the road to salvation. Hmmm, he also seems to have found a lucrative book and movie rights deal even before he finished living, much less writing, the story. Is this the product of forty years of Madison Avenue marketing savvy? Seems more likely than satori emerging from one year cleaning grout under the beneficent guidance of an earth mother guru, the Karate Kid's Mr. Miyagi transformed into the very attractive African American Starbucks manager, Crystal, the only black woman Gill had ever had a relationship with of any kind after his beloved nanny was abruptly let go for being too old to go up and down the four flights of his parents' Manhattan brownstone. [Fade away dissolve from flashback during first day on the job with Crystal, work some allusion to Citizen Kane into the shot.]

Somewhere beneath all of the sap, self-actualization crap and PC frappe, a real human story may have taken place. Perhaps Hanks can find and channel it.

Don't get me wrong. I like my Fourbucks served up as much or more than Michael Gill; and I appreciate the service and courtesy that goes with it. But I like it extra hot and no foam, please. I can also do without the whip on a mocha frappicino, thank you. Twice blessed are we that Starbucks did not see fit to feature and promote this book in its stores. It might have been the end of a beautiful, though somewhat addictive, relationship.

I do not begrudge Gill his royalties or his movie deal. Nor, I hope, did I read of his fall from grace filled with schadenfreude.

Starbucks has a place in our world, nearly ubiquitous, because it delivers a service and a product excceptionally and consistently well. Starbucks has also assumed a role as a major entry level employer, exceptionally adept at training, motivating and elevating its employees. That is quite enough; the Salvation Army it is not, and should never aspire to be.