When did I feel like a grown-up?
When I could vote at 18? When I could drink at 18? When I faced various vices at college? No. It wasn’t until a grown-up (actually a Sacred Heart nun, at a college social event) handed me a cup of coffee. That’s when I felt like a grown-up. For much of the twentieth century, coffee was America's drink. A 1939 survey found that ninety-eight per cent of the country's households drank coffee. After the Second World War, consumption rose steadily until the early sixties, when the average American was downing almost fifty gallons a year. Then coffee went cold. Younger consumers came to regard it, like Scotch, as a palliative for parents and squares.

The January 13 issue of the New Yorker has an article about coffee and the business of ‘tastemaking.’

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to build a successful business. You can give people what they want but give it to them more efficiently, as Wal-Mart and Dell have done. Or you can persuade them to want something that they didn't previously want, as Starbucks has done. One might call this the tastemaker approach. Instead of competing for a share of an existing market, Starbucks invented its own, heeding the advice of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote, in 1939, "It was not enough to produce satisfactory soap, it was also necessary to induce people to wash."

A very interesting article. And I do believe coffee is still effective as a palliative for parents and squares. Speaking strictly from my position as a parent and square......