Once in a while I run into a “study” being done by someone under odd pretense that begs the question “who approved this for funding?” Here is a perfect example:

Simon, who teaches at Philadelphia’s Temple University, thinks that by spending time at Starbucks — observing the teenage couples and solitary laptop-users, the hurried office workers and busy baristas — he can learn what it means to live and consume in the age of globalization.

“What are we drinking, and what does it say about who we are?” Simon asked during a recent research trip to London.

His research has taken him to 300 Starbucks in six countries for a caffeine-fueled opus titled “Consuming Starbucks” that’s due for publication in 2008.

Observing teenage behavior in public places? This appears to me to have nothing to do with the study of history (more like sociology, psychology, or anthropology, if not culinary arts). He then goes on to postulate about the “comfort” patrons feel when they isolate themselves in familiar and unchallenging surroundings…

Simon believes Starbucks succeeds by “selling comfort” in an anonymous, often dislocating world. He says he has lost track of the number of times people have told him that when they traveled to a strange country, “the first thing I did when I got off the plane was go to Starbucks.”

Brilliant. He’s lost track? This man has discovered that the franchise concept works by selling comfort to people afraid of the unfamiliar and thus unwilling to take any chances. What a breakthrough in history. The only thing more preposterous would be if his book was funded by the company he is studying, since it so eloquently has the same namesake. And 2008? I’ve never heard of a “current event” study taking so long to reach publication. This is why historians should stay out of fashion design too, incidentally. Where’s the blog? By the time he writes this thing his observation of “teenage” behavior is very likely to be irrelevant.

IMHO, here’s a more notable topic worth reviewing, relative to the past versus the explosion of bland coffee-houses in London — it’s called the history and decline of the community and their gathering places (e.g. the local pub) in England. In the early 90s you could not find a decent cup of coffee in downtown London to save your life, but there were a hundred opinions for every ten pints of domestically produced beer usually in some relation to current events. Brand loyalty meant something deep and mysterious, somehow tied together with hundreds of years of publican tradition. Today, you can’t take a step without running into someone sloshing a smelly black imported brew in styrofoam containers as they race along the street, and I somehow doubt that these global-franchise loyalists could give a crap about history or even local issues. Good or bad? Who knows, but I’m certainly not going to ask for money as a historian to sit in Starbucks around the world for two years to “prove” that strangers like comfort.