How Starbucks Saved My Life

Gill, Michael Gates  How Starbucks saved my life: A son of privilege learns to live like everyone else.  Gotham Books.  272 pages.  $23.00.  [ISBN: 978-1592402861]

Written by Michael Gates Gill, the book tells an engaging story about how Gill coped with a difficult transition from a high-powered, financially secure life as a marketing executive to a service level partner position with Starbucks.  The book begins by describing Gill’s job loss from a marketing company where he had been employed for more than two decades.  After a few years of making a career as a marketing consultant, Gill was forced to look for employment elsewhere.  After months of an unsuccessful job search, newly divorced and recently diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, Gill stops into a local Starbucks to rest and gets a job offer that changes his life.

Gill fills the majority of the book with stories of his daily work as a service employee, describing the personalities and interactions with partners and customers.  The book is peppered with stories about his privileged upbringing, from the mansion he grew up in, to the celebrities and parties he regularly attended due to his famous father, a writer at the New Yorker magazine.  He writes about an embarrassing incident that involved him and the British Queen’s husband at a sporting match he attended as a child, as well as hobnobbing and fundraising as an adult with New York’s elite.  The stories provide a sense of the incredible differences of societal levels experienced in his life’s journey.  As the story continues through his employment at Starbucks, Gill becomes more comfortable in his role and changes his view on the world and on diversity.  He comes to realize that he is happier in this life than he was during his years as a privileged member of society.  He realizes that there is dignity in supporting himself, no matter the job title.

Gill devotes himself to his position at Starbucks and the partners become a second family to him.  He embraces the diversity that he was closed off from as an advertising executive and he grows in his role of handling local coffee tastings.  Gill later meets an upper-level manager at Starbucks and is offered a position in a location closer to his home, which he ultimately takes, even though he is pained to leave his newly found family.

Overall, this book is an intriguing and uplifting story about how one manages to find happiness in the most unlikely situation.  Besides being a story about retooling after a layoff, the book can challenge a rethink in what really matters in life and what happiness really is.  This book is pertinent to the current financial crisis and those whom have been affected by it.

Senovia Guevara
University of Michigan Library
Senovia_guevara@hotmail.com