Coffee: It's Personal
Over the years, coffee drinking seems to have moved farther away from the social activity that it initially appears to be. While people still frequent coffee houses for leisure activities, it's far more likely to see a variety of folks working on laptops or reading, or doing some other form of productive work at coffee houses. The number who are there solely for social purposes seems very small. I'm not advocating you give up your morning cup of coffee—as with all my other posts here, my goal is really to make you think about the things that we accept as a part of our daily lives and consider our relationship to them.
We're identified by the brand that we drink, by the coffee houses we frequent, and by the process by which the beans are grown and harvested. We tout words such as "Free-Trade" and organic. Roman was right—it is all about 'me.' But as Roseberry concludes, these connections have been carefully structured by the market:
That is to say, my newfound freedom to choose and the taste and discrimination I cultivate, have been shaped by traders and marketers responding to a long-term decline in sales with a move toward market segmentation along class and generational lines ... This is not, of course, to say we enter the market as mere automatons; clearly, we have and exercise choices, and we (apparently) have more things to choose from than we once did. But we exercise those choices in a world of structured relationships, and part of what those relationships structure (or shape) is both the arena and the process of choice itself (1996: 771).
Coffees offer us a way to look at our relationship to the larger world and see that sometimes our choices are not really our own, to think about how brands and larger market forces can help create what appear to be stable icons in our lives. The 'me' that we have come to emphasize may be less personal than we realize.