Starbucks Coffee and the Ideology of Ethical Consumption – by Slavoj Zizek

“Starbucks coffee! I’m regularly drinking it, I must admit it. But are we aware that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks we also buy quite a lot of ideology? Which ideology?

You know, when you enter a Starbucks store, it’s usually always displayed in some posters their message: “Yes, our cappuccino is more expensive than others,” but, then comes the story: “We give 1% all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy, for the water supply for some Saharan farmer, or to save the forest, to enable organic growing for coffee, or whatever or whatever.”

Now, I admire the ingenuity of this solution. In the old days of pure, simple consumerism, you bough a product, and then you felt bad: “My God, I’m just a consumerist, while people are starving in Africa . . .”

So the idea is that you had to do something to counteract your pure, destructive consumerism. For example, you contribute to charity and so on.

What Starbucks enables you is to be a consumerist, without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity. Like, you pay a little bit more, and you’re not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on and so on.

It’s, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. 
A film by Sophie Fiennes. Download (kick ass torrent).
Share this post on Facebook.