Sandra Tsing Loh Quotes

Food trends don't just drive the obvious things, like cupcakes or cronuts, but something as elemental as your daily cup of coffee. The way you have that coffee now is probably very different from the way you had it ten years ago, and it'll probably be very different in ten years. That has a huge impact, culturally and economically.

I've always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.

Everything in our world is branded.

People don't go to Starbucks for the coffee - of that I'm pretty sure - they go for the atmosphere, they go for the 70 decibels, they go for the Starbucks effect.

All the airports kind of feel and look the same now. Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the 'USA Today' or 'New York Times' in every airport.

When I went around promoting 'Crumb,' there would be days I'd wake up in, like, Houston or Cleveland, and I'd step outside the hotel and get no idea where I was. It all looks the same: one big corporate, consumer theme park. It's all, 'Here's the Starbucks, and here's the Gap, and we'll go over to Banana Republic and the Cineplex.'

Starbucks is spreading like a cancer.

Many large brands are now just marketing machines for what's being made offshore.

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

I wanted to share my love of coffee with a wider audience and also continue to raise money for The Thirst Project through Common Culture Coffee.

These days malls are the cathedrals of the modern world, and old buildings that had character are gone to allow for econo-worship and peso-pilgrimages.

The promotional environment is part of the world we live in.

Before Starbucks, there wasn't as much of a coffeehouse routine; we generally drank really cruddy diner coffee.

The Internet seems to have killed American fashion in the sense that everybody has good style, but they also look vaguely the same.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

I look at Starbucks, Howard Schultz has made many brilliant decisions, and one of the things that they did was they invented the third space. It's not work, it's not home. That's one of the engines of its spread. But at the same time he was doing that, he bet the farm to open more and more stores in any given town, and making it ubiquitous made it much easier to say to your friend, I'll meet you at Starbucks.

I'm not a huge spender. Sometimes when you pay a lot, you're paying for the company's advertising. It feels ridiculous to pay for a name.

Nike is Nike. Adidas is Adidas. I've played in their circuits and stuff like that, but now it's a business. You don't want just product. You're not a kid anymore. You're really trying to get bank. That's about it.

The modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top

It all looks American because America, the country that invented mass capitalism and consumerism, got there first. the impact of mass capitalism is now universal.

No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution, just people selling t-shirts.

The greatest story ever told is, in fact, the greatest story ever sold

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.

Being branded to some subset of your fans is important when it comes to creating films and characters they're not familiar with. It's enormously difficult to market to a global audience, and it's becoming more difficult. A brand matters to parents, whereas kids are largely driven by their urgent reaction to the product. In the future, where there are going to be choices that have to be made by parents because it will be prohibitively expensive to access everything, those will be driven partially by brand.