West Coast Caffeination

LOS ANGELES—Last Thursday my movie producer boss handed me a thick pile of scripts to read and evaluate over the long weekend. “Excuse me,” I said, “but do I give thumbs up for quality or for scripts that will make money?” My boss looked puzzled. Then we both smiled—you find out quickly in Los Angeles that giving consumers what they want is the same as giving them quality. And I’m rapidly learning that it cuts the other way, too. People out here won’t settle for second best. As a result, they don’t have to.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in L.A.’s competitive coffee market. Throughout the rest of America, Starbucks pretty much has the coffee-to-go scene sewn up. If you want a good double tall skim latte in Cambridge or Columbus, Ohio, you’ll soon head for those familiar green-and-white signs. And to my mind there is absolutely nothing shameful about that. Those pseudo-socialists who rail against Starbucks for being “corporatist”—in other words, clean—are deeply tedious, as University President Lawrence H. Summers would say, in effect if not in intent.

In Los Angeles, though, going to Starbucks is decidedly pedestrian. Although plenty of tourists stop there en route from Hollywood Boulevard to Universal Studios, it is not for Angelenos. Instead, L.A.’s coffee cognoscenti head to the Mecca of Mocha: the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. There are 104 branches of the Coffee Bean in Southern California, and, apart from a handful in Arizona and Nevada, not a single branch exists elsewhere in the country.

Their signature drink is called an Ice Blended. It is not terribly different in conception than a Frappuccino, actually. An Ice Blended consists of sweetened coffee syrup, vanilla or chocolate powder and ice, mixed together in a blender with more horse power than most Japanese cars on the market. There are a number of variations—you can get maraschino cherries thrown in, put whipped cream on top or hold the coffee syrup altogether.

In many ways, the branches scattered throughout L.A. are microcosms of society out here. Reflecting the diversity of the city as a whole, the crowds lining up are incredibly mixed, both ethnically and economically. I get to my local Coffee Bean in Westwood at 9:00 every weekday morning. Next to me are always the same group of regulars—a movie mogul type complete with Oakleys and a leathery tan, a young Asian girl sporting the world’s largest variety of UCLA shirts, a woman in her 80s after “a passion fruit iced tea and a bagel, extra cream cheese” and two Mexican construction workers on their mid-morning break.

My Coffee Bean is not especially glamorous as they go. The one on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood is legendary. That branch is filled with MAWs—“Models, Actresses, Whatever”—ostentatiously reading scripts and waiting to get discovered. Of course, there are plenty of entertainment executives out there who are very willing to discover these starlets. (And even more men who are happy to pretend they wield the necessary power.) Still, I’m consoled by the fact that a bona fide MAW works at my local branch. A while back she had told me of her desire to act, so I asked if she’d heard that Katharine Hepburn had died. “Oh my God, that’s awful,” she said. “I loved her in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.”

Regardless of which Coffee Bean you visit, though, the atmosphere is inclusive, the people are friendly and everybody knows your name (because the staff asks for it and then announces it when your order is ready). In fact, in many ways I feel like I have been inducted into a cult. True enough, Herbert B. Hyman, the founder and owner of the Coffee Bean, is, like any good cult leader, slowly taking all of my money. Or, more to the point, I am giving him my money, convinced that it is in my best interests. And, boy, am I giving him a lot of money. At $3.50 per Ice Blended, this is quickly becoming an expensive hobby.

To my mind, though, that is the essence of Los Angeles. If you give the consumers what they want—in my case it’s a regular sized Vanilla Iced Blended, light on the vanilla powder, with whipped cream after lunch, but not in the morning—then you will be very richly rewarded. That’s entertainment.

Anthony S.A. Freinberg ’04, staff director of The Crimson, is a history concentrator in Lowell House. You’ll find him caffeinating at the Starbucks in the Garage prior to his (late) morning classes in the fall.