The commercialization of Macau's cafés

Abstract

The 442-year Portuguese colonial presence in Macau influenced the city's café scene comprised of Portuguese coffee shops and southern Chinese cafés (locally referred to as tsa tsan teing). These cafés are an important element of everyday social life in Macau. However, Portugal's handover of Macau to the People's Republic of China in 1999 prompted significant changes in the composition of the population and in the spaces of everyday urban life and leisure. The concomitant dismantling of the 40-year gambling monopoly and opening to foreign investment has brought new casinos and other themed leisure spaces to Macau, attracting 20 million tourists to the tiny city in 1997. One increasingly observable material dimension of these changes is the introduction of western franchises and chain outlets like Starbucks, Haagen Dazs, 7—11, and McDonald's — as well as their local imitators — leading to the increasing homogenization of facades and urban spaces and standardization of service work and related cultural practices. Starbucks and other commercial café spaces in Macau participate in the aestheticization of social life in the city, increasingly transforming Macau's quotidian public life into an arena of spectacle and performance where café activity becomes focused less on functional eating and drinking and collectivistic group belonging and sociability and more on individual display of lifestyle for others. This aestheticization also leads to an increased aesthetic reflexivity among people. This transformation is explored in two ways: analysis of formal training of service workers in a standardized performance of `friendliness'; and analysis of representations of café consumption in Macau that encourage people to see café activity as a mode of individual performance.

Commodification of place, consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China1

“…This construction and performance of identity becomes more evident in a coffee shop. Here the author both assumes and identifies with the xiăozī identity (‘many people as xiăozī as us’) by ‘indulging’ in coffee, which represents middle‐class taste in a traditionally tea‐drinking country (see Bao 2002; Simpson 2008). But since performance of identity can always be subjected to evaluation or even contestation (Bauman 2011; Bell 2011), a sense of insecurity was countered by reflexively authenticating oneself as a xiăozī (‘I guess a real xiăozī life is just like this’).…”

Materialist pedagogy: The function of themed environments in post-socialist consumption in Macao

“…This study is based on more than five years of fieldwork in Macao's casinos, hotels, fast food restaurants, and shopping arcades (see Simpson, 2008aSimpson, , 2008b. In a general way, this study responds to 'the urgent need in contemporary tourism studies, and in the social sciences more generally, to investigate new spatial and cultural products, structures, and processes of a rapidly changing world geography of tourism' (Terkenli, 2002: 228), by demonstrating the role of such spaces and structures in the historical development and geographic expansion of consumerism.…”

“…In the case of Macao, this themed landscape comprises a grammar that budding capitalists must master in order to participate in transnational consumerism (see Simpson, 2001Simpson, , 2008aSimpson, , 2008b. Young (1999) makes a similar point regarding the emergence of shopping malls in Southeast Asia and their role in producing middle class subjects in the midst of unprecedented economic growth that characterized the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.…”

Coffee Commercialization in the Bolaven Plateau in the Southern of Lao PDR

“…Other examine case empirical studies of commercialization of agriculture [3,5,7,9,11]. Most of the empirical study take general cash crop and limited focus on coffee commercialization [12][13][14][15][16].…”