Starbucks save my life....

MICHAEL GATES GILL, who once made about $160,000 a year as an advertising executive and who now earns around $10.50 an hour making coffee at Starbucks, has written a book called “How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else,” and it is so admiring of the firm, one fears he has drunk of the Grande Iced Kool-Aid.
His story — divorced, broke, entitled middle-aged white guy with brain tumor and no health insurance learns to respect persons of other races who did not go to Yale.
It’s true he doesn’t socialize with his former friends, but he does not feel lonely. He reads, listens to classical music on the radio. The brain tumor, which still worries him, has not grown in the four years since diagnosis, so he does not face imminent surgery. He truly enjoys the work.
“What you are doing is trying to help other people enjoy something,” he says. “It’s not doing Iraq policy, it’s not even doing a serious multimillion dollar ad campaign. It’s just trying to serve a good cup of coffee.”
“I always feel better after working a shift, maybe because my own life feels so complicated — there are so many things you can’t control. You can’t control relationships, you can’t control life, but I can get that drink just the way they want it, that double tall skim latte.”