An image has stayed with me all week. A handsome barista making me a hot drink on a cold day. But not just any barista. A Starbucks barista.

That barista (defined as: “one who makes and serves coffee in a coffee shop”) was compelling to me for a number of reasons. One, he was as square-jawed and even-toothed as a model, swarthy and cool, an accent that was not English – his was a young face that could be seen serving in any branch of Starbucks across the world. Two, it was a dark wet morning in London; I was just a unit in the tired, damp and dense commuter stream pouring from the rickety underground system and out into the rain. There are few grimmer experiences in the world. The Starbucks kiosk cheers me up. Good design? It’s hardly progressive. But it pleases me. Three: I don’t know how I fit in with the world economy, run by the multinationals. It confuses me, once it begins offering me things that I like.

I used to make cappuccinos for a living, in the ’80s, when I was putting myself through drama school. Then, there must have been only about a dozen cappuccino machines in all of Dublin, if that. I didn’t get it right all the time – I had no proper training, and the physical properties of milk when heated were only learned by trial and error. I began to know when the milk got too hot – so I’d learn to pour it somewhere else, use fresh milk, and come back to it – but because I was only going on intuition, it wasn’t formalised into a proper routine, and, often, customers got boiled brown milk with a few white bubbles floating on top. I got better at it though, in time, and when it was right – fresh aromatic syrupy espresso at the bottom of a heated wide white cup with smoothly steamed milky froth ladled on top with a light sprinkling of chocolate – it was delicious.

Starbucks are coming soon to Ireland, according to the Sunday Tribune. Be prepared – within a few years there will be a kiosk at every train station, and every main street in Ireland will have a local franchise, if things go as they are in Britain and elsewhere. The Nasdaq-listed company is aiming for 10,000 branches worldwide by 2005. Globalization is something I’m against, right?

Our main streets are changing and are becoming generic, standardised, interchangeable with any other similarly-sized borough or town in the world. Small, locally-owned firms are being given their marching orders by the big corporate chains with their enormous financial clout. Profits are being creamed off and sent back to HQ, outside the town/city/county/country, and then divided up by shareholders the world over. We all are becoming citizens of a (largely American) branded consumer superstate, our towns and lifestyles being designed by executives from Japan to the American West Coast.

Starbucks give me a pain politically because they make damn fine coffee consistently. I can comfortably oppose globalization when it comes to the brands at the forefront of the race for world domination: McDonald’s, which I detest – Coca-Cola, which I never liked, Benetton, whose doors I have never darkened, Microsoft, who should be sued for crimes against humanity for selling such an insecure, sloppy, unstable system such as Windows and for bullying the competition out of the marketplace so I don’t have a real choice. I could go on. But where are my principles, when I see a Starbucks open a new kiosk near where I work, and all I feel is a sensation close to drooling? What is “wrong” with me when I pay twice the price for a cappuccino from them, rather than go to the friendly little café next door to where I work, to whom I’ve given my custom for nearly five years, run by delightful people from South America?

Because the little family-run café doesn’t know how to do proper cappuccinos. The harassed young one from Colombia, new for the past few months, is now operating the coffee machine and, because she’s obviously doing her best, I don’t like to complain. But, like me when I was her age, she doesn’t really know what she is doing. In Starbucks, they have natty thermometer swizzle sticks for the milk, with several different jugs on the go at any one time. They all look as if they’ve gone to barista college and have a degree on how to produce the perfect coffee with a smile. The process is as efficient as one could imagine – pay and order first, and queue separately to collect the moment it’s ready. Add nutmeg or cocoa powder if you like – and experiment with all the various varieties of taste you can imagine. Yes, it may be the running gag in Frazier, the peculiar faddy varieties of coffee one can order with a straight face in Seattle coffee-shops, (where Starbucks originates) but there’s nothing like corporate branded permission to indulge your taste buds and not feel guilt.

One in eight Americans has worked in McDonald’s at some stage in their lives. That’s the future for us all, a shared corporate experience, the prospect of most of us in the world being served and employed by the same global conglomerates – companies larger than most national economies, with more power to change our lives than any government. The handsome model who made my perfect cappuccino to brighten my day could have been from anywhere in the world, but he made it exactly the way I like it, and he said the same sort of thing that all Starbucks staff say, something vaguely cheery and brisk. It made a difference to the start of my day, the coffee, the pretty face, and the friendly remark. That’s corporate policy. That’s real power. The world over.