{"id":430,"date":"2010-09-21T08:57:45","date_gmt":"2010-09-21T13:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/?p=430"},"modified":"2010-09-21T08:58:33","modified_gmt":"2010-09-21T13:58:33","slug":"how-starbucks-saved-my-life-a-son-of-privilege-learns-to-live-like-everyone-else-by-michael-gill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/2010\/09\/how-starbucks-saved-my-life-a-son-of-privilege-learns-to-live-like-everyone-else-by-michael-gill.html","title":{"rendered":"How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ultimately, How Starbucks Saved My Life<\/a> isn’t believable.\u00a0 I was interested in the concept, and the book started well.\u00a0 Gill has come down in life from being an advertising executive to being a long-time unemployed.\u00a0 He’s also made a mess of his marriage and fathered an illigitimate child.\u00a0 Now he needs health benefits and a paycheck.\u00a0 So he goes to work at Starbucks as a barista where he finds that their corporate culture of respect for individuals coupled with manual labor inspires him to become a better person.<\/p>\n

You can see how that might happen.\u00a0 Trouble is, it seems to happen almost without a struggle.\u00a0 From day one he’s proud to scrub the toilets well and afraid he won’t know how to make change.\u00a0 He doesn’t try to get into a management role, nor is anyone interested in taking advantage of the skills he actually has.\u00a0 He’s all welled up with pride in himself and respect for his co-workers despite claiming to have been a prejudiced, condenscending asshole up until this point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And this turnaround comes without him ever hitting any visible bottom.\u00a0 He has moved into an attic apartment.\u00a0 That’s about as pathetic as his life gets.\u00a0 He’s not on the street; he has a\u00a0tax accountant and a multitude of doctors;\u00a0and he’s somehow keeping four children in college while paying child support to another woman.\u00a0 He’s not doing any of that on a Starbucks salary, I’ll wager.\u00a0 So there’s clearly another source of income there and the Starbucks job is either primarily for the health insurance, as he claims (although I question whether this insurance would really pay for an operation on a\u00a0pre-existing tumor.\u00a0 The Starbucks benefits may be good but I doubt they’re so good as to ignore industry best practices), or it’s for a book deal.<\/p>\n

So I’m sorry to say that that’s my takeaway.\u00a0 He came up with a concept–bigwig asshole works humble small-time job–and he sold it to a publisher and then he went and executed it.\u00a0 Although he’s supposedly still working as a barista, the book is so pro-Starbucks in an unrealistically fawning way, that some kind of viral marketing kickback plan seems likely.\u00a0 He works to be a tourist attraction is my guess.<\/p>\n

Call me cynical.\u00a0 Yeah,we can all change.\u00a0 (I’ve changed considerably in the last nine months, but I’m still cynical.)\u00a0 Honest labor certainly has redeeming value.\u00a0 Starbucks might treat it’s minimum wage workers way better than Wal-Mart.\u00a0 Gill may really have gotten a lot out of the experience.\u00a0 But redemption isn’t an overnight miracle.\u00a0 Hand someone a mop and hey, presto!\u00a0 a lifetime of privilege fades away as he discovers the true meaning of life in balancing a cash register.\u00a0 If only it were so easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ultimately, How Starbucks Saved My Life isn’t believable.\u00a0 I was interested in the concept, and the book started well.\u00a0 Gill has come down in life from being an advertising executive to being a long-time unemployed.\u00a0 He’s also made a mess of his marriage and fathered an illigitimate child.\u00a0 Now he needs health benefits and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biosauto-biosmemoirs","category-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/reading\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}