Rich coffee

Starbucks Chief Executive Howard D. Schultz’s announced efforts to upscale the fabled coffee chain are classic hard-times adaptations. These are the days when car dealers claim that their higher-ticket models are still selling well, when newspaper publishers speak of attracting a smaller but more demographically desirable readership, when producers roll out musicals.

In short, Starbucks, battered by falling sales, rising costs, competition from older fast-food chains and even a court order to pay millions of dollars in back tips to California baristas, still wants to sell the dream. The company is trying to stay competitive through such innovations as a self-grinding espresso maker, a pricey one-cup-at-a-time coffee machine and some smart frequent-customer rewards.

Whether these improvements will invigorate the company’s sluggish stock price is perhaps a less interesting question than what they say about the still-unfolding democratization of leisure. Just a little less than 10 years ago, the Onion could mock the then-novel growth of the coffee chain with the headline “New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks.” Now the Starbucks model -- a global-village blend of faux-Italianate lingo, American efficiency and post-modern abundance of selection, all built on the easy international flow of coffee beans -- is everywhere, readily reproduced by McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and any old bodega.

It’s the happy flip-side of living in a country where even the poor people are fat. We have access to levels of luxury and glamour we once scarcely imagined (some of us can remember when drinking Maxwell House meant you were sipping with style), sold in such exclusive locales as Kohl’s, Wal-Mart and Target (tar-ZHAY). So widely has the great upscaling been distributed that the United States is no longer the locus of strongest growth: Starbucks is reducing its U.S. presence and gearing up overseas.

We wish it well. Hats off, or rather pinkies up, for common people with rich people tastes.