the tindog coffeehouse

Peggy Sue Gerron, the namesake of Buddy Holly’s classic hit “Peggy Sue”, has written her memoirs just in time for the 50th anniversary of the release of the song, and Holly’s widow ain’t happy about it, threatening to sue her to keep the book from being sold. According to Maria Elena Holly, who owns the rights to her late husband’s name, image, and intellectual property, Gerron’s book is unauthorized and threatens to tarnish his reputation.

I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, where Buddy Holly is almost a god, so I can’t say I’m fully impartial here. But seriously, just take one look at Gerron’s website, where you can find “Peggy Sue”-themed ’57 Chevy die-cast models starting at $299.00, and it’s hard to believe that this isn’t just some opportunistic publicity stunt.

Maybe to promote her book, she could go on the next season of The Celebrity Apprentice. Or at least The Surreal Life.

With McDonald’s moving in on Starbucks’ territory by outfitting their McRestaurants with espresso machines, Time took a look at the demographic differences between the two companies’ customers.

Visitors to Starbucks.com skew female: Starbucks’ website has 8.3% more female visitors than does the McDonald’s site. While McDonalds.com visitors cluster in the 18-to-34 age range, Starbucks owns the 35-to-44-year-old group. There’s also a clear income gap between the two: McDonald’s visitors tend to live in households earning less than $60,000 per year; Starbucks customers lean toward households earning over $60,000.

The author concluded that he couldn’t “envision the collision between these two worlds.” Personally, I think it’s more complicated than that. There are people out there that are frequent Starbucks patrons, many of whom stop by on the way to work for their daily jolt of caffeine. Of these, many of course are working adults who don’t mind paying $4-5 for their Venti non-fat vanilla latte. Starbucks is also popular with high school and college students as well, not only for its coffee but also for the social aspect of its restaurants. But high school and college students aren’t necessarily going to frequent Starbucks as often as working professionals because of more limited disposable income. Yes, I’m generalizing here, but you can see how you would end up with the older age range mentioned in the statistics above.

Then there are the frequent McDonald’s visitors, which tend to be families with young kids, which in part explains the younger demographic numbers as well as the difference in income levels.

But I really don’t think you can make direct comparisons between McDonald’s and Starbucks because while they are both fast food restaurants, they serve very different purposes. McDonald’s core product is fast, cheap, greasy burgers and fries. Starbucks core product is premium coffee. McDonald’s, home of the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Filet-O-Fish, will never replace Starbucks, even with an espresso machine next to the McFlurry dispenser. And even serving hot sandwiches, Starbucks probably won’t be confused with a McDonald’s (unless perhaps it adds a playground to each of its stores).

So while there are stereotypical Starbucks customers and stereotypical McDonald’s customers, the two groups aren’t mutually exclusive. There are plenty of people that frequent both, which leads me to think that each company will probably have moderate success with their expanded menus while remaining limited threats to each other’s business.

Starbucks has begun offering “skinny” drinks that are served with skim milk, sugar-free syrup, and no whipped cream. As The Consumerist pointed out, this seems like sort of a non-news story since you can already order anything you want at Starbucks, no matter how wacky or expensive.

But at least one Starbucks coffee jockey has written a fiery (read: hilarious) manifesto saying she refuses to use the new “skinny” moniker, citing among other reasons her concern that people will get offended by this politically incorrect label and will sue.

So if I order my coffee black, does that mean an African-American customer could get offended and sue? Has that what what this society has come to? Imagine the horror if there’s a mixed African-American/Caucasian in the store when someone orders a White Chocolate Mocha!

(My favorite comment from the Consumerist post: “Is she gonna complain about ‘WARNING: HOT’ written on coffee cups because not everyone is hot?”)

No, the sad part is, people won’t get offended but for the wrong reasons. We’ve been trained quite effectively to speak “Starbucksese”, gladly ordering a “Venti” instead of a “Large”, so that we somehow don’t feel ripped off by paying $4 for a cup of coffee. Every time I order my black coffee “with room” (to reduce the chances of spillage), I die inside just a little, knowing that I purposefully asked for less product for the same amount of money. But we’ve come to accept our fate in exchange for our caffeine fix to the point where they could call it a “Super Deluxe Hairy Mole Rat Latte with Half-Calf” and we would order it proudly.

(The Consumerist is also reporting of at least once instance where a locally-owned coffee shop’s business went through the roof when a Starbucks opened next door. Starbucks, they reasoned, did the marketing for them to attract the customers, but then the customers went next door for their coffee when the Starbucks lines were too long. No word on whether the locally-owned coffeehouse offended their customers with politically-incorrect coffee lingo.)

Former Dateline reporter John Hockenberry has written a lengthy article for Technology Review about what he learned about network television news in the 9 years he worked for NBC. In the article he complains about the decline of TV news from a fact-reporting organization daring enough to embrace new technology to a technology-averse info-tainment machine constantly worried about its viewers’ “emotional center.”

While the article is interesting, it’s hard to take Hockenberry seriously as he doesn’t understand that he’s contradicting himself. He waxes poetic about the good ol’ days of Edward R. Murrow and how the technology of television “would take Americans ever deeper into the battlefield, and even onto the surface of the moon. Communication technologies,” he says, “transformed America’s view of itself, its politics, and its culture.”

He then goes on to explain how modern-day networks shy away from emerging technology in favor of less controversial “emotional narratives”:

Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone’s lost kitty.

Yet Hockenberry doesn’t understand that it’s mostly because of technology that traditional media outlets (TV news, newspapers, and magazines) aren’t the universally trusted organizations they once were. Yes, we want to know what is happening in the world, but we no longer have to depend solely on NBC or the New York Times to tell us. We can change the channel to CNN or Fox News or go online to any of hundreds of news sites around the world. We can get our news from traditional news outlets, from comedy programs like The Tonight Show or The Daily Show, from countless blogs, or even from user-generated sites like Digg or Newsvine or even YouTube. Because of the Internet anyone can be a journalist and can provide a legitimate voice that can compete directly with the traditional media.

Depending only on the traditional media for news and opinions would give the public only a selective glimpse into the world around us, even if the media were able to measure up to Hockenberry’s ideals. Having access to other voices, other opinions, someone other than Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, allows the public to view the world in a more complete way than the TV networks could ever dream of. Not that we have to agree with everything we read on the Internet or that the Internet is infallible. But the real value of the Internet is in its expanse. We might throw out some blogs we don’t agree with, but there are others we can find value in. The aggregate result is more democratic than being handed “the news” by Dateline or 20/20.

Hockenberry cries that he “knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC’s news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries.” Yet, TV news wasn’t killed off by TiVo, it was killed off by competition, first by cable and then by the Internet, and that’s what Hockenberry is ultimately upset about. In the minds of traditional journalists such as Hockenberry, they are the still the Fourth Estate, the gatekeepers of ultimate truth. And they can’t see the world any different.