Ah, Starbucks, Seattle's temperamental teenager! She's long outgrown her training bra.

Founded here, headquartered here, fawned-over and cossetted, she's as closely watched as a pubescent-adolescent celebrity, and as exasperating a child as ever captured our fancy.

Starbucks remains the world's most popular brand, with something like 50 million customer visits a month. She's trying so hard, our mercurial, petulant sexpot! The world loves her, but the family that raised her, and still has her under its roof, knows her all too well. Is she really sneaking out of the house and having sex for money with strangers? It's too late for summer camp but we don't know if we should send her to reform school or to Hollywood.

On the daughter we blame the sins of the elders (when Uncle Howard sold the Sonics, for example), on the daughter we shower unconditional praise (how cute that upturned nose, how lovely those golden curls). Her room is the aftermath of a tornado, a candy store strewn with designer castoffs and thrift-store knockoffs as product after product gets its turn in the spotlight (some "green," some "reasonably healthy," some ordinary), only to be dumped when the wind shifts and the mood swings.

In recent months, several new outfits, new shades of lipstick, new personalities.

Remember the pledge to stop using all that makeup in an attempt to disguise herself? No more stealth Starbucks stores masquerading as independent neighborhood coffee shops. The new Starbucks, they told us, is going to be honest and pure and open, just like an idealistic 14-year-old. Oh, wait: Uncle Howard has plans to pimp her out with beer and wine. Never mind, sweetie.

Remember the new upscale accessory, Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee? Won't you buy this for me, daddy, please? Look, it's Limited Edition, Single Origin! Only $40 for a half pound of beans, and I know that sounds like a lot of money, but it's sooooo good, you won't regret it, I promise. Would you like to taste a cup? They'll make it for you over here, in this amazing machine called a Clover. Six ounces for $5, you won't regret it, I promise. (Why should this even raise an eyebrow? An unhappy Bud Lite costs $5 and doesn't give you half the bang for your starry bucks.)

You want free? WiFi everywhere, free, free, free! The promise of no-cost internet, as public a utility as one can imagine in the 21st century but still beyond the will or capacity of any metropolitan government, has become a reality in our little girl's room. Come in, come in, don't mind the mess! Our parental heart beats proudly, doesn't it?

Instant gratification, that's VIA. The bizarre little package has to be torn open like a take-out pack ketchup or soy sauce; you're never quite sure you've shaken out all the coffee dust. It actually tastes good enough to inspire a counter-campaign by Nescafé, claiming to have claimed instant coffee's virginity 50 years earlier. Popularized by social media tweets, VIA has become a phenomenal, word-of-mouse success story over the past six months. And the new wrinkle: iced instant VIA. The official word came from Annie Young-Scrivner, Starbucks global chief marketing officer. Imagine, our little girl has her very own global chief marketing officer!

Well, a friend said to me the other day, at least Starbucks never did flavored coffee. "But what about Frappuccino?" I shot back. "Oh my god, so good," came the reply. And indeed the Frappuccino-Your-Way campaign, which flashed across our consciousness like a bolt of summer lightning, seems to have taken hold, except that the latest version is no longer gluten-free. Our girl's defense actually makes sense ("I never said the original was gluten-free, so I don't have to say the new version now includes gluten").

Still, we're reminded of that other adventure she had with the guy from Vivanno, the really smooth-looking boy with the whey protein. He's still in town, we see him hanging around the store, but our little girl has moved on. Gluten, whey, fiber, there's so much out there to keep track of.

Back to the lack of flavored coffee. Lo, in the inbox a while back came a note from a PR firm describing something called Starbucks Natural Fusions. "Even if you're not typically a fan of the flavored coffees currently on the market (we wouldn't blame you), I encourage you to try the new line, as it's the first of its kind naturally flavored with real ingredients ground right in to make three coffee-forward flavors - caramel, vanilla and cinnamon." Coffee-forward, indeed. Our last illusion, shattered.

Ah, so much more than coffee. There's nothing more important for a consumer brand than its logo, the thinking goes. McDonald's wouldn't be Mickey D without those Golden Arches, formed by the gracefully rounded "M" of its name. You don't have to see the name on the Nike sneakers to recognize its graceful swoosh, or own an iPod to recognize the bite taken out of a Jonagold.

"Even though we have been and always will be a coffee company and retailer," says Uncle Howard, "it's possible we'll have other products with our name on it and no coffee in it."

That's already happening, frankly, with all the sandwiches, sweets and non-coffee beverages available at the company's stores (nearly 20,000 of them). But this goes a step further, dropping the Starbucks name and the word COFFEE from the logo completely.

"It's a gutsy move," says Terry Heckler, the Seattle graphic artist and ad director who designed the original logo some 40 years ago. Heckler lost the breasts on the first siren because they were sort of an in-joke at the beginning, but the mermaid, the siren, was always part of the logo. The company's founders wanted Starbucks to signify the spirit of adventure and exploring implied by a seafaring image, and the real Mister Starbucks, first mate on the fictional Pequod in Moby Dick, reinforced that.

What now? Even if the public can still connect the image of a mermaid with the company that sells Frappuccino, will that extend to other Starbucks ventures? Clothing? Automotive? Is this just another mood swing by our petulant, moody teenager?

Heckler says it's going to be interesting to see what Starbucks makes of its new nameless logo. "There's no question that the strongest brand signal is the name." If the siren herself (emblematic of adventure on the high seas, a symbol of the yearning for coffee) no longer makes sense, why keep her around? Without the ring of words, of the company's name and its flagship product, she's just "a princess with a crown on her head," Heckler says.

And the very latest news, the one that inspires this post, was in the Seattle Times yesterday: Starbucks in a shipping container. You don't unpack it; it's not a pop-up. That's it, the 448-square-foot shipping container is the whole thing. First one goes to Tukwila, near the Boeing plant on East Marginal Way.

Don't think of it as cheap, think of it as recycling the box that all the candy came in. What's that? You still think of Starbucks as a coffee shop? Dreamer.

Filed in Food and tagged retailing, starbucks

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