CONSUMING THE CAFE : A CASE STUDY OF STARBUCKS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Interest in the phenomena of consumption has been gathering force in the last two decades, culminating in a large number of works within different spheres of human geography. However, many of these works have a bias in focusing on the production aspects of consumption sites and products. This thesis aims to refocus the perspective taken in the study of consumption (in this case: the cafe as a site of consumption), and show that the processes of consumption reverberates both backwards along the production chain and forward, bringing about changes in the lives of the consumers themselves. In short, consumption is a highly dynamic process, whereby changes in any point along the process will bring about changes along the entire chain. The disputed transition from modern to postmodern consumption will be discussed for it forms the backdrop of the two other aims of this paper. The first of these is the discourse known to most as globalization. Globalists contend that cultures across the world are increasingly being homogenized (overwhelmingly westernized). Thus, Starbucks Coffee being a transnational corporation, presents a suitable organization for our study here, as it is spearheading the translocation of a Western cafe culture to Singapore and the rest of Asia. The localization discourse on the other hand, reveals the latent power that local consumers possess in reshaping the foreign cultures introduced into a particular locality. Secondly, this paper also aims to show that people consume more than coffee m cafes. These consumers not only consume the coffee; they too consume the lifestyles, images and signs associated with coffee consumption in a cafe setting. These are then actively utilized by the consumers for the purpose of creating coherent, but highly ephemeral identities for themselves.