The convergence of two discourses in Starbucks

Starbucks is a place for more than coffee. It has made it very clear at its entrance that “we want your dining experience to be an enjoyable one. If for any reason we fail to live up to your expectations please let us know so we can make it right.” The success of Starbucks worldwide lies in the association of drinking coffee with immersing in the social and culture. Consumerism is always promoted by disguising itself under a sweet and cozy ambiance of museums. On the sleeves is printed “crafted by hand and heart.” Snacks are displayed as in museums. “The snack COLLECTION/ our favorites CURATED just for you.”

The intertextuality between the two discourses--consumerism in a popular American designer coffee shop and the high-brow connoisseurship in a museum, is not accidental. I see a good opportunity for the application of Scollon’s (Mediated Discourse Analysis) Principle Three here: The Principle of history: “social” means “historical” in the sense that shared meaning derives from common history or common past.

Based on collections, museums are nevertheless rather less about collections than about people and collections are merely manifestations of human desires. The attempts of people to shape museums and the effects of a constantly changing museum context ensure that the museum remains in flux. Now modern museums are facing a challenge from technological determinism--an idea that museum may simply be swept aside by the tide of new technology: there is no point in looking at a pile of old bones if you can study them just as well, if not better, on the internet, so that museums may be at the point of disappearing along with the high-street bank. But being able to get access to new technology is far from assuming that new technology is going to sweep the need for museum aside. This is because the experience of physical, three-dimensional objects is different from the experience of images on a screen. Works of art have been freely available in good-quality reproduction for at least a century. But the availability of works of art in reproduction has not obviated the human need and desire to experience them at first hand. On the contrary, replicas sometimes serve the purpose of accentuating the value of the original works of art.

Just as museums offer their audiences a first-hand experience with valuable historical artifacts, Starbucks offers its customers an experience of the assumed authenticity of coffee when almost all varieties/collections of coffee available at the store could actually be made/replicated at home. It is also good to know that the marketing department can come up with the idea of “collected snacks” “curated” to the attraction of the customers because museum discourse is historically entrenched in western culture. Therefore, (according to Jakob von Uexkull’s Umwelt theory) it is expected that customers (sign receivers) of the same tradition and perception would pick those expressions as signs of effect. I haven’t seen anything like this in Starbucks in China.