‘Think seattle, act globally’

Abstract

This essay uses the contemporary urban consumption practice of speciality coffee as a means to explore the complex ways in which global brands seek to enhance the promotional currency of their products through the mobilizing of local ‘commodity biographies’. It begins by outlining the place-specific strategies of promotion employed by speciality coffee retailers such as Starbucks and the Seattle Coffee Company, examining the range of ways in which Seattle as centre of US ‘coffee culture’ was deployed as the locus of ‘origin’ in order to create lucrative distinctions between speciality coffee and homogenized, mass-market coffee products. It then places this symbolic geography of coffee within the long history of coffee as a global commodity, tracing the recent emergence of speciality coffee as a ‘niche’ product, and situating it in the context of restructuring urban economies geared towards service-sector, consumption-oriented activities. The essay then moves on to consider the difficulties encountered by Starbucks, the market leader in speciality coffee, in monitoring and manipulating the symbolic geographies of its coffee commodities as they migrated from the coffee shop and into other realms of representation. In particular it explores the issue of Starbucks’ product placement in the a number of motion pictures in the 1990s, arguing that such placements were embraced by the company as an opportunity to defuse criticism of the company's activities that amplified as the decade evolved. Finally, the essay looks at the high profile targeting of Starbucks coffee shops by protestors at the anti-globalization protests that accompanied the hosting of the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference Meeting in Seattle, arguing that this moment can be seen to capture much of the complexity of mobilizing circumscribed place-specific ‘commodity biographies’ for a global product in an era characterized by increased scrutiny of the international division of labour.