How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else | Michael Gates Gill | Serving the coffee while drinking the Kool-Aid

books:

How Starbucks Save...

	How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else Michael Gates Gill Gotham, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 103 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects.

One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxury?a latté?brooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority--the only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties he?d ever faced, were running circles around him.

The other baristas treated Gill with respect and kindness despite his differences, and he began to feel a new emotion: gratitude. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a dramatic transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler, happier and gentler man remained. One that everyone, especially Michael?s kids, liked a lot better.

The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's best-known companies and discover how it all really works, who the baristas are and what they love (and hate) about their jobs. Inside Starbucks, as Crystal and Mike?s friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being.

for more information click here

The Proof is in the Outcome

The only place to read HOW STARBUCKS SAVED MY LIFE is on location--INSIDE Starbucks--where you can sample a steady supply of coffee and pastries, and mingle with the partners. Regardless of why Michael Gates Gill wrote this book (and if he has a speck of sense and an ounce of American blood he wrote it not only to champion Starbucks and the new friends he made there, but also to pay a few bills) there's a worthwhile idea at the heart of it--dignity and respect for everyone--service providers and guests alike...and yes, even sons of privilege. We could all do with a few more books that celebrate a good 'ol American work ethic at ground level. Unfortunately, there are plenty of "self-help" books on how to claw your way to the top of the corporate ladder--not so many on how to retrace your steps gracefully on the descent (the only one that comes immediately to mind is the lovely little book HOPE FOR THE FLOWERS). After reading Gill's book I have a new interest in Starbucks, its workers, its coffee, its pastries--yes, even its benefits. I hope they call me. In the meantime, BRAVO for Michael! He did what many people wish they could do--he got out of the rat race and he wrote a best seller that will soon become a movie. How many of us can claim similar success in the stretch of a year?

for more information click here

Serving the coffee while drinking the Kool-Aid

This is the story of Mike, a sixty-something who lost his big corporate job and had to make ends meet at Starbucks. During which he discovered slinging caffeine behind a counter is really the best job he ever had, because the Partners, whom he treats with a reverence usually reserved for religious icons or at least basketball players, are really swell.

At times I thought of the Stockholm Syndrome as I read this: Gatsey was really identifying with, flattering and loving his captors as he contemplated his fate. While I think it's great that he didn't find it beneath him to get a minimum wage job when his network collapsed, I feel like there is a lot of untold story here, as well as story that's told over and over till it's threadbare. This guy had no social network to help him when he landed on his ear in his 50s? I know it's tough in advertising, a classic "young man's" profession, but he could have moved into related fields--PR perhaps. He could have become communications director for one of the many corporations he worked with. Did he even try consider these options? It's hard to believe a job at Starbucks was his best/only option. Maybe it was--but I was wondering throughout the first third of the book, did he piss some serious people off in his former life? He hints at being a tough boss and being resented by both employees and family members, without really going into what happened. In that way his look at himself is not "unsparing" but actually rather skin-deep. I feel like he left a lot of himself out of this memoir.

But even given that, he spends 200 pages trying to make major dramas out of things like a cash drawer that was short, or being a couple of minutes late. He also paints glorified pictures of perfect management and uber-happy employees that I just cannot imagine. He might have asked his coworkers how they felt about their job, or him--a square "white guy"--but instead he sugar-coats every moment where there could be a little introspection with "Starbucks people are the GREATEST people in the world, kissy-kissy." His boss Crystal in particular has great potential for drama. She had a tough early life, the opposite of his, and was raised by a guardian who hated white folks and thought they were "the enemy." But Crystal rose up to make good for herself. He mentions early and often how she was always wearing expensive jewelry and clothing, and disappearing into a different high-end sports car after closing every night, and I found myself wondering how a Starbucks employee could afford such niceties. I was expecting some surprise payoff for these questions raised, but never got one. Similarly I never learned how the other employees, many of whom were street toughs, ended up at Starbucks, or how they liked it there. Other story arcs, too, just stopped cold. Every time Gill could have offered some reflection he instead returned to, "Starbucks is such a great place to work, and everyone is so happy!" No matter what you think of the coffee chain, this was unenlightening reading. As someone below me notes, it reads like an employment training manual.

I understand this book was optioned for a movie (to star Tom Hanks) even before the book was put out. If so I pity whomever spent the money. When tension hinges around things like grinding beans properly and making sure your cash register drawer balances, you have a dull story. And so much of this is dull--and more sugary than one of the company's sweet summer drinks. There could have been a good story here, but Gill has to get more distance from the company.

I bought this book on a whim, only because I am a great admirer of Brendan Gill, the author's father, for many years a New Yorker columnist. Daddy was definitely a better writer than the son, at least judging by this book.

for more information click here