The Line Between Reality and Kitsch is Very Fine: Lest We Cross It!
Last week there was an article in The Guardian that reflected a café in Nottingham having apparently 1 700 applicants for eight barista positions.
See it here:
I was slightly unnerved by the headline having been an employee myself at this particular company for some months; both as a student and some months preceding it in London. A barista as the article rightly points out, roughly translates to bar tender in Italian and while this British company sells the Italian café culture image, they call all their employees in the Italian style. The journalist wrings out:
“Something sparkly clings to that word "barista". There's some special cachet there”
I did not, and do not begrudge this worker’s position. Someone has to clean the dishes and serve peoples’ coffee hit, I frequent cafés and certainly, I have many happy memories as a café worker. I also have a particular affinity with this café company because it was the first place to give me a job in London. Coming with nearly no money and ironically, spending the little I did have drinking in London’s cafés and smoking cigarettes, my life in London was becoming desperate.
The UK is still one of the few places in Europe where one can knock straight on a door, ask for a job and if timing permits; become an employee. Its informality is appealing. Every job I’ve had in Britain has been obtained in this fashion and it was Costa Coffee that finally gave me a job after handing out my 33rd CV on this particular London day (the 33rd is the exact CV given that day, hand-to-heart). Needless to say, Number 55 Baker Street, Costa Coffee was a god send under the circumstances. After been unemployed and broke, I embraced the job entirely without complaint or bitterness. I have since worked at three different Costa Coffee cafés because they favour past workers and the informality of getting a job there. To this day I still have friends from my time at Costa Coffee so I go on not entirely unsympathetic to the virtues of this company.
Being on minimum wage is leagues better than being unemployed; granted, though working on the minimum in London is trying at best. Without kids to support or even a car to run; I was still permitted to take on a second job to sustain what I thought a rather frugal lifestyle.
What unnerved me by this article was the journalist’s romantic zeal for the barista, just as the company had intended by calling us baristas and not workers; this journalist took the illusion as a drink; in this case a faux Italian bourgeois mix.
So what? You may ask, why shouldn’t a company sell a bit of romance with its product; isn’t that the reason why we pay so much more in a restaurant. I agree, in this regard I am of the romantic persuasion and willingly pay extra for the experience but lest we forget, it is an illusion none-the-less. The illusion bears its mundane head on working as one of the establishment’s minimum waged employees, such are all of Costa’s baristas; the muddling of the worker’s title is more for the company’s customers than the workers themselves. It helps promote the escape Costa is selling for customers to believe they’re drinking a bygone Italy and not a present day Nottingham.
The reality of a barista is like any other minimum waged service job: cleaning dishes, name tags, unpaid over time, early mornings, late nights, like all minimum waged jobs in London it entails a good part of your wage going to trains that get you to work, deliberately unattainable sales targets, constant screw-ups with your pay, hounding superfluous managers threatening you with this-and-that etc.
But alas this lifestyle is in the spirit of hospitality, a sort of muck in and carry on mentality tails these jobs which we end up drinking off at the end of our shifts anyway. It’s more humane than factory work and more social than admin, but what is most irksome about these corporate service jobs in Britain are the incessant themes they build themselves around. Costa is selling an illusioned Italian lifestyle, they sell it via a facade of lattes, hanging pictures of Italian peasants, barista name tags, biscotti etc etc. It’s a world of kitsch and there are about 1 200 of these exact replicated theme parks in Britain alone. No one thinks to glamorizes mining and only communist parties romanticize factory work, it would be laughable and even likely a little offensive. They’re unpleasant jobs though someone has to do them; but at least everyone admits they’re unpleasant, they don’t have managers coming into a mine selling the mining dream! Can you imagine a suited manager walking into a mine with a bag of sweets, asking everyone to sit around in a circle and talk about how wonderful and meaningful mining is? How it is the duty of miners to not only mine but to believe in the mining dream the company is trying to sell.
The faux Italian Costa dream they’re trying to sell is something they expect their workers to believe in, while you’re paid minimum wage it must show in your manner that you actually believe in their make believe world. There’s a sort of psychotic character to a world of kitsch, I remember thinking while sitting among a circle with the suited, candy bearing manager that he was psychotic. At first I thought it was mere audacity that these managers would come and brag about the record profits Costa is making in the midst of recession, while asking us to work harder and longer without an increase in pay. I soon realised that they are so audacious because they genuinely believe that we are living the Costa dream and thus wouldn’t think to ask them to pay us any more than they’re legally permitted to.
It makes me think of Kundera’s novel ‘The unbearable lightness of being’:
“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme”
This was his reflection of the communist world the Soviets had enforced, politicians and generals got all teary eyed when they saw children marching in unison, bearing flags and singing to bygone revolutionary songs. The officials had to believe in the Soviet communist dream world since their exalted positions were tied to the dream’s existence. The dream had to be a reality and most psychotically, it had to be believed. The inconvenient and irritable reality that persisted; state purges, political prisoners, food shortages etc etc would not interrupt the communist dream, they were sacrifices for a make believe world.
“The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch”
Instead of trying to bear unjust situations in the work place by making lurid comparisons with totalitarianism; dramatic effect is not my intention, I want rather to illustrate how offense the kitsch world is. If kitsch stayed in the realm of biscotti and lattes it would be harmless enough but when the line between reality and kitsch is ignored; it becomes psychotic. I understand why managers want us to work as much as possible for as little money as possible; that conflict is marked by their profit. I get it and while there are 1 700 workers for 8 jobs, they are in rather a good position to bargain. What I do not get and have trouble stomaching, is why they think we should believe in the dream they are selling that marks a barista’s minimum wage. The Costa dream, those managers might believe, is only possible if Costa can make as much profit as possible which means paying its workers as little as the law will let. For that Costa dream, one must not only accept one’s pittance, but take it with your head up high, hand on heart and teary eyed.
I cannot bear it when corporate companies try to put a moral veneer over situations that mark their profit. I would respect a corporation more if they just admitted it’s-all-about-profit instead of this wanky, dreamy, happy-clappy stuff they try to soften minimum wage with. It’s degrading.
1 700 applicants for eight barista jobs does not testify to the wonderful barista job, it testifies to the truly dire and extremely degrading economic environment my generation is growing up with. No one cleans dishes for its romantic appeal, whether they’re labelled pot-wash or barista, they do it to pay their rent.
To journalists concerned: Keep your romantic zeal for corporate illusions confined to the exact time you’re paying for the experience. If you want to partake in the kitschy Costa world and pay all the more for the experience, do so but it is most unsettling to hear one pass on the psychotic dream-world Costa’s managers are all spewing, on the front pages of news papers.
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