The Starbucks Mermaid Knows the Way Back to True Home

THE SELKIE
Starbucks chose the motif of the mermaid, a beautiful and ancient motif about which there are many stories. In one of my books I tell the story about how just such a mermaid sickens and dries out when lured to land by a man who says he loves her. But, she cannot abide his way of living, nor what he requires of her… she cannot become as the man wishes just because he wishes it so.

She is harmed by being forced to live endlessly according to land-locked rules. The mermaid– often in the oldest stories, called ‘the selkie,’– has to return to the water in order to live. During her time on land, she gradually loses the sparkle to her flesh, loses her moistness. Her body is dried, weakened and her eyes gone near blind, …but one night, she hears the call of the old grandfather selkie calling her home. Somehow, she finds her way to the water again, and diving under the waves, is restored.

But not without sadness, to leave the man. And not without the man’s sadness to have lost his dream.

Here in the west where I live, there once were mom and pop coffee shops everywhere. They had magazine bars and great live music, and small delis, and armchairs and outdoor seating under umbrellas, and many kinds of tea and coffee. Some had short order. Some had bakeries attached out back. Mom and pop and whoever worked there knew not only everyone by name, but by ailment, by achievement, by current challenge each customer was happily or sadly facing. You know, asked after every soul who walked in.

The mom and pop joints were more like Cheers than like American Idol. There were regulars; the core group that was friendly and funny. Strangers were included, invited into the conversations with a, Hey buddy what do you think? There was much, much laughter.

Starbucks’ surveyors from r and d came

and literally photographed the interiors of the mom and pop joints, seriously studied what worked for mom and pop return customers, copied many aspects overall. Bought real estate right on top of the mom and pop shop, in the same shopping center, on the same block, gave away everything for practically free at first. Coupons and discounts galore. True, Starbucks had mucho money. Mom and pop were living not high, but decently as working class folks. The people who worked for mom and pop worked as much for the sense of community, small town inside the coffee shop, as they did for salary. It showed. You knew it.

So it came about at the three mom and pop joints I used to frequent: If mom and pop had mags, Starbucks at that locale had mags. If mom and pop had apple pastry, that Starbucks had apple pastry. If mom and pop had a cappuccino machine, Starbucks had one that looked like it could also land on the moon. If the local coffee shop played fine Howlin’ Wolf and Gatemouth Brown get down blues, as one across from my office did, suddenly the Starbucks closest to that locale had some B.B. going.

While it is true that eventually Starbucks grew into a place where there was piped in music, and they teamed with big music companies to sell their wares at checkout… laptops were not ‘your other purse’ when Starbucks came to town long ago. Starbucks gradually grew up themselves, catered to a moneyed crowd, and the old guys who used to come by for the 1.00 coffee disappeared. And so did their wry humor. And the sense of being invited in. No matter who you were.

The coffee shops held poetry readings. I was one of the Bowery Poets where I live, most of us who comprised this group, having spent time, either hard time, or street time, ’so far down it looked like up to me.’ Every week, faithfully, we went to open mike at three different coffee shops, and drank tire-iron coffee or else Arabian slim (a cup of mud in a demitasse) and had an audience of transients, professors, college students, artists, ne’er do wells, creative people… passionate, smart, funny, hugely alive people. And we all ate some kind of falafel or humus or whatever the mom and pop had as ‘the special’ of the moment that always revolved around grain and grub. And the coffee shops thrived… until one day

I heard the fellow who’s the head of Starbucks on TV a little while back, saying they were going to change direction and wasn’t it wonderful, that they weren’t going to offer 59 blue-jillion coffees any more; they were going to have a super-stupendous ‘house blend.’ And it would be called the magnificent name of: House Blend.

It reminded me of a lying-in-her-teeth mother with silver spoon dripping with green beans, saying to her baby who has pulled a moue the size of Texas, Oooooo, look darling, yummy yummy green pudding. You like pudding don’t you? Of course you do.

Baby replies: Splat.

I like Starbucks, after all, for years and years it’s been the only game in town to get just a plain cup of coffee… even though the counter person, who never knows my name, always asks if I want a triple-stippled-fippled latte hot-ay. I don’t dare go into Dunkin Donuts, except that one time I was teaching in NOLA and it was the only coffee one could get HOT. Donuts jump up when they see me coming and want me to wear them around my hips like a belt made of doughy O’s. So, no, not DD. And not 7-11 where the cream for coffee literally has an expiration date of 2020. Although come to think of it, maybe if you drink things heavy in preservatives, it will preserve us too? Nah.

SO, I tried the NEW SUPERDUPER FANTABULOUS House Blend that the Starbuck’s CEO said was so Yum.

It was more like Um. Well. You know that song about ‘the logger I love because he stirs his coffee with his thumb?’ There was nothing to stir in this House Blend. It was thin like it was on Coumadin (blood thinning medicine), and that pale yellow color instead of rich amber brown. I tried House Blend at three different locales; next to an Apple store, in the local B and N, and at Target. Nada. Anemic. Needed tire-iron.

So, next I heard the powers that be will close down 600 stores nationwide; that they expanded too fast; that they tried too hard to make good on their mad promises to shareholders. And last week, at the Tar-jay counter, customers were asking the barely 16 year old behind the counter if this Starbucks was closing and she, poor soul, looked like a deer caught in a rig’s headlights.

I see my co-blogger Damozel has also enjoyed Starbucks, and that she is noticing the return of coffee shops OTHER than Starbucks.

That may be a real win for ‘the people’ who might still again laugh together with strangers, might draw back some of the old people who gave such texture to the place…

Only thing is, you know how my mind works, I’d like to save Starbucks in part because it is a meeting place for a certain layer of our country’s population, and though I don’t think of Starbucks as the place where laughter is rampant, the sound I hear more often is quiet talk in small-group clumps (they never did have a community table) and the tapping away sound…on laptops, people studying… and that seems like a good thing too…

My livelihood is consulting, but here’s my advice to Starbuck’s for free: get rid of the vapid coffee, and… go save The Mermaid.

Though CEOs and COOs and CFOs and all the rest often reel and sometimes faint during such upheaval, making decisions out of fear rather than vision..

But… and… even though a company can lose its bearings for a time, if they could just stop, just pause… and think more deeply… not dollar-counting so hard as the only answer to everything… not assigning their faltering to overland issues of gas, mortgages, et al only… Despite all that, people would be standing in line if there were compelling reason.

Corporate would gain greatly—about what went awry and what needs to be brought to bear… by thinking seriously about the mythic being–the mermaid– they chose to lead this company, an intense force with ability to adapt, but only to a point …then she HAS TO return to her roots… or else die

I am amazed always at the huge imagination in corporate ‘higher ups,’ if they are given a meaningful and ancient story to focus on. At Starbucks, it would behoove greatly to look under the surface to what went wrong in this strong and ancient myth… then find those coordinates in corporate… in order to shape the trajectories to correct course…

It’s for certain, in the ancient story, as in modern times, The Mermaid is often the only one who knows the way back to true home…

and the old selkie, wise and strong, who rises from the sea to remind her.

————-
CODA
The selkie story here, adapted from “Sealskin Soulskin,” in Women Who Run With the Wolves ©1992, 1996, C.P. Estés, Ballantine/ Random House

The mermaid with the divided tail, is actually reminiscent of a glyph from alchemical texts. The recent uproar when Starbucks revised their mermaid logo to include a representation of breasts with nipples –against which came an outcry from some quarters that children ought be shielded from such obscenity– all that may be a small tempest in the teapot compared to the alchemical symbol which was representative of the transmutation of male and female into a hermaphroditic whole. At heart, the creature with two tails is related to the ouro bouris, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, a less gendered representation of wholeness, also found in ancient texts. The glyphs were not imagined literally, but contemplatively; meant to call forth reasoning about how to develop into fullness of vision and ideation, inventiveness, creativity, clear thought… to unite opposites all in one; the symbolic heaven and earth, land and water, the feminine and the masculine, as well as the literally rational and the non-rational… all of these ‘materials’ to be freed from one-sided duality… so as to create one’s life, community, family with the best of the tested, but also to innovate a progression ‘outside the lines.’