Everything but the Coffee Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t stay awake. Falling fast toward rock bottom, she decided to go on Oprah’s debt diet right away. Eventually she dug herself out of her deep financial hole. She even started to save some money and enjoy life. “My biggest sacrifice,” she admitted, “is giving up my Starbucks Caramel Macchiato every morning.” 28
    Other Oprah fans wondered if all the penny pinching and self-denial was worth it. For a few of these people, the debt doctors’ advicebackfired and only reinforced the sense of Starbucks as a luxury product and valuable experience. Neuropsychologists who study buying have repeatedly found that consumers experience a surge of good feelings— pleasure—when they act against their narrow economic self-interest. This kind of buying, then, creates a counterintuitive logic and value— one that could fuel luxury consumption in the face of advice about austerity and limits. 29
    “Do you believe that Starbucks is a waste of money?” asked the organizers of a yahoo.com discussion board. “I was considering this matter today,” answered one woman. She told the members of this virtual community that she used to go to Starbucks “only once or twice a week,” but then she started going even more. “Now I’ve gotten into a routine of getting up at 6:30 A.M., going to the gym and getting some Starbucks afterward.” She took out her calculator. Sounding like David Bach or Scott Burns, she figured out that going for a latte five to six days a week at $3.75 per day added up to $18.75 per week and $975 per year. Sure, she could do other things with that money, but, as she purred at the end of her post, “that wonderful concoction of sugar, caffeine, and whipped cream is so delicious” that it kept her going to the gym and feeling good. Wasn’t that worth something, she wanted to know. “For $975,” answered another member of the yahoo.com discussion, “you get a tremendous number of little luxury rewards every year, right?” 30
    “I just purchased a home,” Lisa Bree wrote in 2006 on Oprah’s discussion board, adding, “[o]bviously, I dont
[sic]
want to lose that.” Filling out the details of her story, she explained that she had some credit card debt, but the actual problem was cash—she didn’t make that much. “We do live check to check but dont have many of the ‘habits’ that need to be reigned
[sic]
in . . . thankfully. Such as, eating out, spending on clothing.” But lattes, they were a different story. She felt like she needed an incentive to keep going, to keep working and saving, and Starbucks filled the bill. “Okay,” she confessed, “I do go to Starbucks 1–2 times a week . . . but I’ve switched from coffee to decaf-tea (half the price of coffee). But as I fill out the tracking sheets, the only extra money I am putting out isto the coffee bean ‘god’!” It didn’t seem like she was switching religions anytime soon. 31
    Neither was Seattle law student Kirsten Daniels. She dealt with the daily pressures of
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Chase–like professors grilling her in class by heading to Starbucks for what she called “my comfort latte.” Like a good citizen of the postneed, pre–New Depression economic order, she usually paid for her three-dollar latte with a credit card. “A latte a day on borrowed money? It’s crazy,” said Erica Lim, the law school’s director of career services and a kindred spirit to Oprah’s financial advisers. Quantifying the craziness, Lim created a few charts and graphs. One showed that a five-day-a-week latte habit through three years of law school on borrowed money could cost as much as $4,154 when repaid over ten years. Another table calculated that if you made your own coffee at home for thirty years and refrained from buying three-dollar lattes, you could save $53,341 with compound interest. The numbers surprised Daniels, but it didn’t change her ways—not at all. She added things up differently in her day-to-day life. “I guess I never