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a “weirdly affluent, theatric space.”
    “How can purple velour chairs mean so much?” I asked.
    She chuckled as if to say, Oh, there is so much you need to learn. “Velour,” she explained, usually covers chairs in that “special room in the house—one of those rooms you don’t sit in very often.” But at Starbucks you do get to sit there. “It’s like a gift, a luxury gift,” she said, adding that “purple is an opulent and regal color. Historically, you see it in theaters or hotel dining rooms—places of affluent experience.”
    From what I learned by talking to designers and architects, the varied and careful staging at Starbucks turned the stores into a kind of multiple self-gifting venue, perfect for repeat customers looking for different emotional boosts on different days. Need a quick coffee to go? Then the place is uncluttered enough to keep the line moving (plus you could always hit the drive-through). Need quiet or relaxation or alone time? Sit in one of the soft beige chairs set off in a corner in the back. Want a little luxury and indulgence? Then settle down in a purple velour chair by the front window. Different colors for different moods and different rewards. This strategy worked quite well.
    CALCULATING COSTS
    Oprah Winfrey, as her fans will tell you, does not believe only in every-day pampering and indulgence. She regularly delivers strong sermons to her flock about personal responsibility. 24 Over the years, she has coupled her calls for self-gifting with stern warnings against overspending. Like most of us (except perhaps for Wall Street bankers), she has heard too many stories of people buying without thinking, running up credit card debt, and pushing themselves toward the brink of financial disaster. To help her fans out, she regularly invites guests onto her show to talk about financial planning, budgeting, and fiscal belt tightening. Long before the mortgage crisis of 2008, she produced a multiple-episode “debt diet” clinic to guide her audience toward a “clear path to financial freedom.”
    As a focal point for the debt relief series, Oprah and her team of experts developed a nine-step plan. Step 1 instructed participants todetermine “how much debt . . . do you really have?” Once you figure this out, down to the very last penny, you are ready for step 2: “finding out where your money is going!” Oprah recommended starting with David Bach’s Latte Factor®—a trademarked term. According to Bach, a Steve Wynn lookalike and author of the best-selling
Finish Rich
books, this is a “simple concept that can help you get out of debt.” “If you put just $10 a day toward your debt,” he explains, “rather than spending it on fancy cups of coffee, cigarettes, bottled water or fast food, in one year you could put $3600 toward your debt!” 25
    Other financial experts offered similar advice. A group at bankrate .com pointed to possible “java jolt savings,” advising people to “make coffee at home.” 26 Scott Burns got even more specific with his “Starbucks Solution.” “Giving up that daily latte,” he argued, “can make you a millionaire.” It works this way, said Burns: A Starbucks grande latte costs about $3.50. If you drink one every day, that would add up to $24.50 a week, $105 a month, and $1,260 per year spent on milky caffeinated drinks. According to Burns, if you put this money instead into a 401(k) for ten years and it grew at a rate of 10 percent per year, you would have $23,959 in your account. Fifteen years later, the latte fund would mushroom to $167,564. By the forty-second year, the account— by Burns’s pre–New Depression calculations—would be just shy of the target: one million dollars. 27
    Some Oprah fans followed the debt doctors’ advice to the letter. In 2004, Jacque was in trouble. Mired in debt, she told Oprah she walked around all day in a fog of anger and resentment. At night, she couldn’t sleep. During the afternoons, she