When Bryant Simon’s book, Every­thing but the Cof­fee: Learn­ing about Amer­i­ca from Star­bucks (Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 2009) arrived in my mail, I thought, great, just what we need: anoth­er book by an aca­d­e­m­ic that attempts to under­stand the world through a sim­plis­tic lens, like salt, sushi or cof­fee. That this genre sells well prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed Simon’s pub­lish­er. But Simon’s book is bet­ter and more hon­est than most of the genre in rec­og­niz­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of both author and sub­ject. He peeks into the inner life of Amer­i­can cul­ture, but thank­ful­ly refrains from offer­ing a uni­fied the­o­ry that explains all.

Part his­to­ry, part ethnog­ra­phy, part mar­ket­ing the­o­ry and part cof­fee mem­oir, Every­thing but the Cof­fee places Star­bucks at the cen­ter of the hypocrisy of the Amer­i­can mid­dle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the Amer­i­can mid­dle class saw Star­bucks is cen­tral to its identity.

Simon shows us how we real­ly live, and it ain’t pret­ty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us won­dered why peo­ple would pay so much mon­ey for a cup of cof­fee – even as we were edg­ing clos­er in line to place our own order. Star­bucks, writes Simon, ​“had lit­tle to do with cof­fee, and every­thing to do with style, sta­tus, iden­ti­ty and aspi­ra­tion. … Star­bucks deliv­ered more than a stiff shot of caf­feine. It pin­point­ed, pack­aged, and made eas­i­ly avail­able, if only through smoke and mir­rors, the things that the broad Amer­i­can mid­dle class want­ed and thought it need­ed to make its pub­lic and pri­vate lives bet­ter.” Star­bucks fed our emo­tion­al needs for sta­tus. It became our lit­tle ​“self-gift,” an emo­tion­al pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also pro­vid­ed a safe, clean ​“third space” between home and work, those big chairs and couch­es becom­ing our new pub­lic sphere. It brought us exot­ic places and sounds, exposed us to an under­ground in the safe­ty of a cushy seat: teach­ing us about places where our cof­fee came from, and new music and lit­er­ary voic­es. It tried to be our cul­tur­al guide and helped us feel good about our envi­ron­men­tal foot­print through its green cam­paigns and aid to farm­ers, even if Star­bucks did lit­tle and we did noth­ing but buy cof­fee. It did so con­scious­ly, pur­pose­ful­ly manip­u­lat­ing our desires, hopes and aspi­ra­tions, all the while mak­ing us feel good about order­ing up a ven­ti soy latte.

But, we also knew, on some lev­el, that it was all a delu­sion we active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in. ​“Star­bucks worked as a sim­u­lacrum,” Simon writes, ​“it stamped out the real essence of the orig­i­nal idea of the cof­fee house and, through pro­lif­er­a­tion and end­less insis­tence, became itself the real thing for many bobo and cre­ative types.” Even as we believed we were being indi­vid­u­als, demon­strat­ing our sense of style, we were just fol­low­ing the javaman’s mas­ter plan. In see­ing Star­bucks as a third space, as a solu­tion to the envi­ron­ment and glob­al­iza­tion, we played into the illu­sion and lost ground on these fronts.

Simon joins a recent spate of books on the mid­dle class whose authors seem unable to sep­a­rate them­selves from their sub­ject and there­fore are com­pelled to include them­selves in the nar­ra­tive. For instance, in Else­where, U.S.A., soci­ol­o­gist Dal­ton Con­ley explores the dis­rup­tion of space in the mod­ern Amer­i­can mid­dle-class fam­i­ly, com­bin­ing his research with auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal slices of his own fam­i­ly life. From Every­thing But the Cof­fee, we learn Simon’s cof­fee habits, haunts and unease with such.

Like much of this lit­er­a­ture, there is a con­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty. We know we should not feel good about our par­tic­i­pa­tion in this sys­tem, but it is just so much fun. It is as if we who study the top­ic are involved in a process of self-crit­i­cism. This trend makes these books read­able, per­haps, but it often dilutes their ana­lyt­i­cal force. Yet we still know too lit­tle about the mid­dle class; with a defined work­ing-class stud­ies and his­to­ry lit­er­a­ture, we know far more about those low­er on America’s eco­nom­ic lad­der. Is the mid­dle class too big and mys­ti­cal to ful­ly know? Or is it that most of the authors who write about the mid­dle class are mid­dle-class them­selves, and thus uncom­fort­able with the self-reflec­tion so nec­es­sary for thor­ough criticism?

What Simon and oth­ers demon­strate is that we are a cul­ture of hyp­ocrites. We want our cof­fee and we want to feel good about it: we live in the moment. We know deep inside that buy­ing Starbuck’s Pike Place does not make us a bet­ter per­son, but part of us feels bet­ter hear­ing that it is sus­tain­able. To more com­plete­ly under­stand the mid­dle class would require that we pierce the veil of this hypocrisy.