I Did Not Have Consumption With That Coffee, Special Roast

For years I was the poster child for anti-Yuppiedom. I was a reverse snob.

I drank coffee out of a vending machine and liked it. I drank Busch Light beer and liked it. At the grocery store, generic products were my friend. I strongly resisted the pride of label, the evil of equating good consumption habits with personal goodness and I suspected anyone with good taste as having been infected with classism.

But somehow I strayed from the straight and narrow and find myself now with slightly more expensive tastes. In this post I examine how I went from good Puritan frugality to becoming a Robin Leach flunky.

First a confession. I drink Starbucks coffee. I do so with the proper squeamishness, as if I'm wearing a Wehrmacht uniform only because I was conscripted. Since big spenders are to Starbucks what Jose Canseco is to steroids, there's no use denying my yuppification (although I could pull a Palmeiro - "I do not know how that Starbucks got in my hands" or a Clinton - "I did not swallow").

The cashier with whom I have bonded in the past while buying "regular" foods like tacos and pork loin looks at my purchase with a grimace.

"You drink Starbucks?" Her tone suggests she doesn't mean it in a "hey, so do I!" kind of way. And it caused me to look at myself and think, "she's right. I'm not a Starbucks kind of guy. How did this happen to me?"

The story is a sadly familiar one: it was a slippery slope paved with good intentions.

When I started working full time I drank coffee from the vending machine. It was only 25 cents (I show my age) and since I understood the time value of money I was trying to save early so that I wouldn't have to save later. The coffee was as bad as coffee could be. Acidic and watery, it tasted like a mix of carbolic acid and brake fluid. I drank it for years.

The thing is I don't recall how it was that I moved up to fifty cent cafteria coffee. The problem with slippery slopes is you don't remember historical markers that become hugely significant only in hindsight. Perhaps it was a one-time splurge. Perhaps it was because the vending machine coffee maker was removed (there are no coffee vending machines now, a low-cost option for the poor that has gone the way of the Geo Metro). Maybe I simply felt financially comfortable enough to "move up" to this coffee the way GM wants you to move from a Chevy to a Buick.

So I drank the cafeteria coffee and yes I liked it. Really liked it. Years went by it's now around 2000-ish and I got to work late and found they ran out of cafteria coffee. All they had was Starbucks. So rather than go without I tried it. And I don't recall liking it all that much. It was much stronger than I was used to and seemed a bit bitter. (How is it that we ever acquire "acquired" tastes?) I must've had it again though I don't recall why. And then again. Now it's a daily occurrence. I guess the only point of this momenumentally minutiae-ifying post is that slippery slopes often slope gradually.