Slaves To A Coffee Cup

It has become part of my Sunday morning routine to check the Post-Secret site for new secrets. I love the compilation of the deep, the dark and the frivolous. I love the way it makes me think about my own secrets, deep and dark and frivolous. Its amazing the way all of our idiosyncracies, common or not, become secrets. There are so many things we choose not to share with one another.

There was one this week that particularly struck me as it could easily have been written by me. It said, "because I am a Hippie I pretend to hate Walmart, but I secretly spend hours there wandering the aisles, and I love the low prices." I guess this could have been written by a lot of people, and probably about a lot of corporations similar to Walmart in there abduction of independence. My biggest vice is Starbucks.

There is no stronger love-hate relationship in my life than Starbucks. I cant seem to escape it. Last year, after an introduction to Infusion, a small hippie inspired coffee shop on Germantown Avenue, I vowed never to step foot inside a Starbucks again. Somehow buying my coffee at Infusion gave me a sense of superiority. I was above the draw of all the corporate nonsense. I was supporting an independent store, helping to save the small businesses of the world one cup of coffee at a time. I was fighting for freedom from an ever increasing homogeneous society.

I hate when people get all indignantly self righteous like that. I hate that I for a second believed that my quiet protest against corporate coffee would somehow make some kind of difference, that the CEOs of Starbucks were sitting in some conference room somewhere worrying about my lack of attendance. Boy were they missing my weekly four dollars. They'd probably have to close any day now.

Alright, so I didn't really think that far ahead, but a part of me truly and shamefully felt superior being able to tell people that I was against Starbucks and all that it stood for. I was my own person, not a sheep like the rest of the mindless consumers in this country. I had principles. That's what good hippies have after all. Peace, love and principles.

I was thinking about this standing in line at Starbucks yesterday afternoon, ordering the exact same Iced-Grande-Nonfat-Latte that the four (yes, FOUR) people in front of me had just ordered. Who have I become? Part of it is working in an office I think, where its harder to say no when meetings are held there and invitations to coffee-runs are being made, but the larger part of it is just growing up as an upper-middle class American. I think about this kind of thing all the time, about how my choices as a consumer completely contradict everything that I want to believe. I would love to sincerely call myself a hippie, but Im also just a typical twenty year old college student who likes to sit in Starbucks and write and pretentiously pretend Im smart.

I wish I was above all that, but Im not. I wish that I could limit myself to organic food, but it costs more and Id have to go out of my way to find it and make sure it was organic and really, who has time for all that? I wish that I only bought clothes at independent stores, but who wants to spend fifty bucks on a skirt by some struggling store owner/designer when you can get an entire outfit at Target or Walmart for that price? I wish that Starbucks wasnt on my way to work, but it is and its easy and I know what I like there. My principles become slighted against the concept of convenience.

I would like to believe that corporate America somehow tricked me into participating, but it's just my own lack of motivation. Sure, we are all brainwashed, but more than that, we're apathetic and lazy. So, we're losing our independence and principles. So what? We can always buy more at Walmart, and with the money we've saved from their low-low prices, we can treat ourselves to those five dollar Starbucks lattes that we all love so well.