晨读美文

1. Starbucks invades Parisian cafe culture

A form of alien civilisation has finally landed in Paris - unfamiliar green and black signs

have appeared on the Avenue de L'Opera.

It is the first Starbucks cafe to boldly go where no Starbucks has gone before, onto potentially hostile French territory.

Its advertising posters on the Champs Elysee announce "Starbucks - a passion pour le cafe".

But is the company aware of the risk it is taking by challenging the very birthplace of cafe society?

"I think every time we come into a new market we do it with a great sense of respect, a great deal of interest in how that cafe society has developed over time," Bill O'Shea of Starbucks says.

"We recognise there is a huge history here of cafe society and we have every confidence we can enjoy, augment and join in that passion."

And he may be right. Despite some sniffiness in the French press, some younger French are expressing their excitement that they will finally be able to visit the kind of cafe they love to watch on the US TV series Friends.

In fact, for some, it is an exotic rarity, far more exciting than the average French cafe.

Melissa, aged 18, says she can hardly wait: "I love Starbucks caramel coffee - it's very good and I like the concept that they're opening in Paris. I think Starbucks will be OK for French people."

An American tourist is equally excited when she spots the sign - this could be just the thing to help her get over the occasional twinge of homesickness.

"I love the French cafes, but Starbucks is so popular in the States and it's become part of American culture and now it's come to France, and that's OK," she said.

But that is the problem for many French, who do not want France to be just like the rest of the world: with standardised disposal cups of coffee - identical in 7,000 branches around the world - even if they are termed handcrafted beverages.

At the traditional cafes, customers worry that the big US coffee house chains could drive out small, family-owned cafes.

Others here think they could come round to the idea of Starbucks, though for them it would never replace the corner cafe or the typical Parisian petit noir coffee .

2. The beauty industry

The one American industry unaffeted by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump--about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are 'official', and can be accepted as being substantially true.

The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered．Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.

Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hithero reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. The fortunes are made justly by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.

It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indisinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrai of the Artist's Daughter. The success is part due to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, and in part due to impoved health. So for some people, the campaign for more beauty is also a compaign for more health. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of heslth is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. Every middle-in-come preson can afford the cosmetic apparatus and more knowledge of the way in which real herlth can be achieved is being universally aced upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features? The answer is apparent: No,for real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self.