A little over 10 years ago it seemed Starbucks took over the world. Stores popped up on every corner, and it was not uncommon to wonder what made the company so expansive and what kept customers coming back.

Bryant Simon was curious too. In his book, Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, Simon explored the deeper implications behind Starbucks’s success. In not just another business article about high rates of return and stock prices, Simon investigated what the company promises and what the company delivers. The book’s strength is his insightful look at what Starbucks tells us about American culture.

Everything But The Coffee

Simon delves into the roots of the international coffeehouse, starting at its beginnings in Seattle, though his writing style sometimes teeters on reading too much like a textbook (which might stem from his profession as a history professor at Temple University). To break up these segments, he touches on rare anecdotes, such as when the company gave away coffee in the hopes customers would revisit willing to pay. Nonetheless, his mechanical writing is not an inappropriate approach given its academic purpose and the amount of detailed information.

To do his research, Simon hit the road, claiming Athens’ own Drive-By Truckers was the soundtrack that kept him sane.  He traveled the country and even visited international locations, spending 10 to 15 hours a week, if not more, at Starbucks. In one particularly humorous passage, he even goes through one store’s trash. “There they were – four bulging black bags sitting on the sidewalk. I drove around the block again and looked again. If someone had been watching they would have thought I was casing the joint. I grabbed a bag, threw it into the back of my Sienna, and dashed off.”

The result of his hours of investigation is a clear, comprehensive understanding of each aspect of the brand. He discusses the corporate motivations behind everything – even choosing a paint color for bathrooms. The pace of this can be a little slow (three paragraphs on picking out a velour chair) but for anyone seeking this amount of detail on Starbucks, this is a perfect source. His countless interviews allow us to get an honest look at the company’s more interesting day-to-day decisions; upon asking one store manager about the hiring process, she laughingly told him, “Who wants to buy coffee from some fat chick?”

This last portion of the book covers the reasons people support Starbucks and stands out as the most thought-provoking. This includes numerous interviews with a wide variety of customers, including two University students at the downtown Athens location. Like them, he reveals many people see Starbucks as an affordable luxury. He also discusses the perceptions those Mocha Frappuccinos carry – when he told a fellow coffee customer her drink had more calories than a McDonalds Big Mac, she replied, “Yeah, but it’s Starbucks.”

Simon achieves a thorough study of both the produced and realized brand image at Starbucks. At times, the points he makes feel repetitive, but it implies the breadth of information he covered – he manages to help us learn a little bit about ourselves.

Verdict: The nonfiction piece is more academic than expected, making its pace slow down significantly. Yet out of the many books and articles written about Starbucks, Simon distinguishes his by conveying the emotional and psychological meaning behind each quick visit to the international coffee shop.