Saturday at Starbucks

I somehow managed to make myself wake up relatively early on a Saturday morning and made my way to what I hoped would be a peaceful Starbucks experience. I chose to go to a Starbucks that was on the north side of Atlanta, more for the convenience of what I wanted to get done afterwards than anything else, but I figured any Starbucks would do for my first outing. I've been to Starbucks before, but previous trips have been to get a cup of coffee and go. I never really hung out to see what all of the people who stayed in were up to. The first thing that I noticed was that most people did what I typically do. They came in and got some coffee and left. Being in the more affluent neighborhoods of north Atlanta meant that most of the customers were dressed in either nice weekend clothes, or expensive exercise suits. I noticed that the "Baristas" had their own vocabulary when talking to each other about ordered drinks, but I didn't pick up on much more of it that drink sizes and what type of milk was in each drink. I'll certainly have to see if there's more to it than simply speaking fast. The shop had newspapers in it for people to read, they had a ratty old chess set that no one touched (how did it get ratty?), all of the tables were set up so if you wanted to accomidate a large group, you would have to do some moving around of furniture. Cafes of Europe? I once went to a restaurant in downtown Atlanta that only had one table that would seat more than four people. I got a bit mad and asked why they planned so poorly, and the manager insisted that it was designed to be like a European Cafe where they never had more than four to a table. This was somehow designed to encourage inter-table socialization. Could Starbucks have the socialization goal in mind, or just the aping of European lifestyle?
The Barista were kept pretty busy serving drinks, traffic wasn't heavy, but constant enough that they didn't do much more than serve people while I was there. That sounds kind of obvious, but the detail I was noticing wasn't them being busy, but rather there were no lulls for the half-hour that I drank my coffee. The other customers who were sitting in the store were very much self-absorbed. One guy read a book, another read a newspaper in jogging clothes, and two had laptops and they looked important. I spoke to none of them, and they spoke to no one else. No one really seemed to notice the presence of other people. I expected a bit more interaction, but all I saw was the typical southern social interaction where people smiled as you squeezed by, but no one was really looking to talk to anyone else. Cellphones. Need I say more? These are mundane details, I know, so I'm wondering if I missed out on some greater scheme. It seems like the customers in this Starbucks were using it as a place to get away from people while still being among people. The Starbucks seemed to be the place where they could be alone, but they had to go out into public to be left alone. I know I'm making a big assumption with that, and I need to make sure to ask someone directly about this later.
My only personal interaction was with the guy working the register. His name was James. I asked him brief questions that had to do with Starbucks. I asked him why Starbucks doesn't have regular sizes? I figured it was because they were being pretentious, but the answer was that once upon a time, Starbucks only had two sizes- short and tall. Customers wanted more, but they didn't want to leave out the old customers who were used to ordering by short and tall, so they added Grande. Even after they added Grande, they still had demands for more. So, they added a twenty ounce cup, Venti, which is butchered Italian for twenty. So, I learned that the size vernacular isn't about being above regular sizes, but rather about making changes to accomidate customers without disturbing the old ones.
Things I need to do later: Talk to customers, visit at night, visit on work days during work hours, different locations (I imagine the Starbucks in Little Five Points will be different than the one in North Atlanta).

Prison Performing Arts Program

The analysis of the prisoners performance of Hamlet was very insightful and something that I found very well presented to the listener. I think a lot of what the interviewer was able to uncover in his study of the Prison Performing Arts Program were things that I would almost certainly have overlooked if it weren't for his bringing them to light.
One of the reasons that the interviewer was able to provide such detailed and relevant information regarding prisoners was that the group of people included in the subculture he was studying were not many. If he were to study the prison population as a whole, there would have been points that he may have overlooked due to the vastness of that group. By studying such a focused group, he was able to cover their activities and personalities well. Another reason that I think that his fieldsite worked well was that it was not something that most people encounter or even know of in their lives. By choosing to look into such a unique group the interviewer was able to raise interest in the group just by highlighting the uncommon nature of what they did. Another reason for the effectiveness of the fieldsite was that the author was able to show how the program improved the lives of the prisoners. He never seemed to say whether or not they should be released, but he did point out that they seemed to be reformed to some degree by participating in the play. The greatest advantage of the fieldsite is that every prisoner who participated in the play seemed to have a deep connection with the characters they played because of the moral dilemmas that they had faced in their own experiences. If the interviewer had reviewed Hamlet as performed by normal stage actors, it would not have been near as intriguing as the one pieced together here.
The interviewer drew a lot of attention to the fact that the players all understood Hamlet at a level that most people never will. I think the interviewer was attempting in some way to create irony over the fact that most people consider criminals ignorant or less educated, but by showing their thoughts regarding the play, he was able to contradict these assumptions. One of the most important observations that the author made was his attention to the individual players characters. He did a good job of creating an image for the listener about how Big Hutch might appear, or how passionate Mr. Word might have been during his performances. The author didn't seem to waste too much time describing what the prison looked like, because most people already have a basic idea in their head of what they expect in a prison. The author did make a point over certain features of the prison, but he was able to save time and keep the listeners attention by not going into too much detail.
The interesting aspects of the topic that the interviewer chose is that it behaves in many ways that most would find far more sophisticated than their expectations. The set of standards that the players seemed to follow were not quite what one would expect when asking prisoners to put on a performance of a play such as Hamlet. The respect that they had for each other was comparable to what one would expect in a typical theater, maybe even more. Even more striking was their acceptance of each others faults. Whenever one of the actors was unable to pronounce a word, or made a mistake with their lines, none of the other prisoners mocked their mistakes. Instead, they did what they could to help each other. The only thing that approached mockery was when a player would flub a line and they would all laugh, more an example of shared emotion than belittling. The other interesting thing is that through it all, the players did manage to keep the tough images that they found so important in prison. They even admittedly avoiding being too public about their roles in the regular prison population, so that they wouldn't tarnish their image, but as time passed, they seemed to throw caution to the wind and were noted as reading openly from cell to cell practicing lines. The other important observation regarding the social norms of the players is that they still stuck to the prison hierarchy that was so important to them. In fact, the author noted that they even applied the system to the play.
The authors style of interviewing was critical to how he was able to present the piece to listeners. He had to be careful in his questioning and not do too much to upset his interviewees so that he might get useful information from them without upsetting them and driving them away, especially since he noted the rigors that they had to go through just to be interviewed by him. He stayed away from touchy subjects, such as their crimes, until he was almost done interviewing them. This seems to be a very beneficial tactic because not only was he able to build their trust enough to get them to answer the difficult questions when he asked them, but if they had decided to shut him out, he would have gathered ample material to present his case.
I really enjoyed this piece and thought that the interviewer presented a subject that I had many incorrect assumptions about. In this, I think he accomplished his goal by presenting the material in a manner that was able to spark interest in the listener. I'm sure that I have overlooked some aspect of what the interviewer did to make his piece effective, but using simple interviews and observations he was able to compile a story that may influence many peoples' concept regard the humanity of convicts.

Topic: Coffeehouse culture. Specifically employees and patrons who remain in the store for extended periods of time. If I have to get more specific, I'll choose between big corporate coffeehouses or smaller, non-franchised shops.


Sources:
Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1989.

Roseberry, William. “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States.” The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating. Ed. James L. Watson, Melissa L. Caldwell. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 122-143.

Schultz, Howard, Dori Jones Yang. Pour Your Heart Into it: How Starbucks built a Company One Cup at a Time. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

Simmons, John. My Sister's a Barista: How They Made Starbucks a Home From Home. London: Cyan, 2004.

Clark, Taylor. Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.

Reflection: I read the preface to The Great Good Place and was pleased at what I found. The preface to the book seemed to be like a preface on my diving into the subject of coffeehouse culture. The author, Ray Oldenburg, is a sociologist and wrote this book at the end of the 1980s. The greatest advantage to this book is that right away the author indicates that coffeehouses are a place of culture. To be more specific, he proposes that coffeehouses in the U.S. are the only outlet for sharing culture with others in an informal setting. I think that his prospective is going to help me a lot because his study of coffeehouses is academic, and almost completely in line with the type of study that I will end up conducting, in that he is focusing on what exactly the culture is inside of a coffeehouse, what types of people can be found there, and what impact the culture inside of a coffeehouse has on the greater culture in America. One aspect that is both an advantage of the timing of this book is that it was written almost twenty years ago. One the one hand, the ideas might be a bit dated and not pertain to the corporate culture that has arisen in the form of Starbucks-like coffee franchises; on the other hand, his ideas might actually be a great prediction of what coffeehouses were to become. So, it will help me if I can find more current evidence that proves him correct, because this will help me to conclude that any of his predictions that haven't occurred yet, might still be possible. Even if I decide to narrow my focus to corporate coffeehouses, I still think that this book would be useful because it would provide an example of what franchise coffeehouses are attempting to create. The difficult part of this project is going to be reading through all the material I have found, or at least segregating the relevant chapters from multiple texts.