I just found this fabulous picture of Roland Schlager that i scanned some years ago – i love the absurdity of it – Starbucks has never looked this good.
Michele Roohani
“Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”
There you go; even the Viennese, with all their might and coffee connoisseurship can not help but fall for the magic paper cup with the stylish emblem that gives a new meaning to sucking coffee up from a tiny hole in a removable plastic cover! The coffee is OK but the plastic cover? Do we hate seeing what we drink so much? Must we be limited to the Starbucks coffee mixing with our taste buds and invariably burning them or can we also add the sense of smell and the visual experience of what we’re drinking to our coffee chucking experience? I mean, why drink coffee if you can pop a Vivarin (caffein pills!).
Of course, Starbucks is one modern solution to the overworked American experience… It is responsible for the coffee holder in your car and the slightly caffeinated Hudson Bay waters that has the local fish spinning like dolphins at Sea World!… I mean, this guy should be a poster boy for my point… Here’s a guy in 18th century Austrian costume selling Motzart and Strauss concert tickets to tourists looking for a real Vienna experience (whatever that means!)… So, he’s probably on a quick break from his tedious job of dealing with mostly musically clueless tourists only interested in telling a story about their trip… So, what does he do on this short break? He only has time to lean on a pole while smoking and drinking the most efficient hypercafeinated coffee he can (I bet he’s smoking unfiltered too!) It’s a surprise that he’s not shooting himself with Heroin concurrently while biting into a Big Mac! Time is money and he’s got to get back to work to make his commission… I mean, this is the modern work experience: looking like a clown all day long and filling yourself up with all the things that should hopefully numb you long enough that you don’t ask yourself how miserable the whole deal is…
I know, I know.. it’s highly judgmental but many people here in the US (and apparently now everywhere!) are now popping their dose of capitalistic democracy with a Zoloft chaser. Welcome to the modern human experience. Only if Mozart knew.
i remember whan i read the article in NY times (hence the picture), they were saying that starbucks is not doing that well; NPR reported:”Starbucks coffee shops have come to Vienna, Austria. The U.S. chain is not faring quite as well as hoped, and store managers are finding they must co-exist with traditional home-grown coffee shops in what some refer to as the coffee capital of the world.” Now they have many storesin vienna. the link bellow is interesting too:
http://www.mascotcoalition.org/initiatives/cia/starbucks.html