"Pop" goes the Starbucks bubble

In the early 2000s Starbucks opened a store in New York City on upper Broadway, near the City College campus. I taught there as an adjunct a few years later, when the neighborhood had become much hipper and less dangerous, but nonetheless the store was long gone. Perhaps, like the real estate industry, Starbucks overestimated the "validity" of some of its markets.

In my small town of 600, all the local coots gather round when the hardware store opens to drink coffee. Starbucks? Phooey? Pour me some Folgers.

For them fancy-pants fancy-coffee-drinking liberals in Nacogdoches, there's a place called Java Jacks (with a geodesic dome roof, no less) where they roast the beans on site.

Starbucks? Never liked them, don't miss them...

Where there were six Starbucks in my neighborhood (along with a Peets and a local roasting co.) there will now be five. This one was about 2 blocks from another. Starbucks has seriously over expanded and now they're having to pull in their horns. Hardly the harbinger of an economic meltdown.

The Starbucks in our town never really took off any way. Whoever convinced Starbucks to come to our depressed area and then to locate where they did, really, really needs to be fired. They built out on
"Fast Food Alley", as my husband calls it, A four lane highway that ate up farming country about twenty years ago. It is full of Wal-Marts, MCDonalds', and empty strip malls all the way from our small town to Buffalo, several homogenized towns away. Not a baby stroller in sight. The best "fluffy coffee" drink around here IMHO comes from a chain of (I think) more locally owned convenience stores, anyway. Second best "Tim Horton's" a Canadian chain.

Interesting thing,two more are set to close around here. One in a small city very much like ours, but the other is in an area full of rich business men, career women, soccer moms and desparate housewives. You'd think the area would be drooling over a Starbucks but they have an aversion to any type of chain. They lost the fight with Mickey D's, but as far as I know, still have no Wal-Mart. Go figure.

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My major complaints about our local Starbucks are thus:

1. No wireless network. If Vickie's Coffee Corner up on Bathhouse Row doesn't have it, fine, that's a tourist area that I mostly avoid, anyway. But, for me, the entire point of going into a Starbucks is to get away from the kiddos and get something done on the 'puter. I figure $4 coffee is cheap table-rent for the afternoon, but our Starbucks in Hot Springs doesn't have wireless. Instead, I wind up at San Francisco Bread Co. [still a chain, but more intelligently designed and they have actual affordable food].

2. It's in Strip Mall Hell down on 7 South [Arkansas State Highway 7 heading to Arkadelphia]. From my place, it may as well be in Louisiana.

3. Related to #2, there is no walkability from anywhere. The only residential neighborhoods are separated by 4-and-a-turn-lane from it and there are no sidewalks to speak of, not to mention the fact that hiking a mile and a half in an Arkansas summer does not put people in a Happy Starbucks Mood.

4. The staff seems Hipper-than-Thou about stuff.

Actually, I wonder what James Howard Kunstler would say about Hot Springs were he to get a gander at the place. I think I can imagine some of it-- too car-dependent, not enough local-instigated business, a touristy downtown that the locals avoid, and not enough places worth caring about that would be useful in a more local-oriented economy.

What I can't understand, Rod, is how you can stand using Sweet n' Low. That stuff is the bane of human existence.

When I was a high-school kid (circa 1970) there were no "coffee houses" in suburban Marin County where I lived -- no place where you could buy whole-bean coffee or an espresso drink. When I went to Berkeley for college a few years later, I discovered cappucinos, lattes, and the whole coffee-house experience, and I have been a "coffee snob" ever since.

What Starbucks has done is to "mainstream" that whole coffee-house experience. There's a trade-off there: drinking espresso isn't special, secret, and hip anymore; but on the other hand you don't have to live in a college town to get a decent latte either. Heck, you can get an espresso at the service plazas on the Ohio Turnpike now.

I'm still enough of a coffee snob to say that the very best espresso is at the independent coffee houses (like Firenze in Berkeley), not at Starbucks. But thanks to Starbucks you can now get good (if not great) espresso just about anywhere. Not just because of the ubiquity of Starbucks stores themselves, but because Starbucks are the ones who created the mass market for quality coffee and espresso, the mass market both they and their competitors have thrived in.

So I may remain a coffee snob, but I'm not gloating over Starbucks' current retrenchment.

With apologies: Rod wrote "Their coffee tastes burned..." "Burned" being the past tense of the verb, "to burn."

Shouldn't the object of the burning, not the one or thing that does the burning, be "burnt?"

(Hey; it's not my fault. My wife was an English major; this is her revenge...)

"Their coffee tastes burned to me"

Hence its nickname in our family -- Charbucks.

I tend to like dark roasted coffees (French Roast, Sumatra, etc.) which naturally have that smoky flavor, but the thing that's odd about Starbucks is that even their lighter varieties have it. Maxwell House's new "Dark Roast" is pretty good, and the various dark blends from Trader Joe's are excellent (and reasonably priced).

Fortunately, I live in an area that has a nice number of independent coffee houses; the Starbucks won't be missed all that much. I do agree, however, that they deserve some kudos for bringing the 'coffeehouse' experience to mainstream America.

For some reason, I always love Starbuck's when I'm traveling, for example, Oakland, LA, Jackson SC, Orlando FL, Ft Benning, Houston, NYC...

But oddly enough, not so much her in San Jose CA.

Starbuck's always tastes much better to me elsewhere than here in San Jose/Willow Glen, where there are two Starbuck's on Lincoln Avenue and the less popular one is closing.

And I know these might be fighting words, but I prefer Blue Note at Great Bear Roasting Company in Los Gato to Peet's.

I don't really like Starbucks, but agree that it's the best alternative on long trips.

As a parent of an Ethiopian child, I still resent how they treated Ethiopian coffee growers who were trying to strike a deal with Starbucks. I guess the deal was finally struck, but Starbucks certainly came off looking like a traditional, money-first business.

Lately when I've gone into Starbucks, sometimes there is no coffee on tap, they are in the middle of brewing it, and I have to wait 5 minutes. No big deal (and they give it to me free), but they ought to improve their customer service. This has happened much more often in the last few months, than in previous years.

- It's because the focus right now (with Howard at the helm) is on quality. Ever since the day the stores shut down, the coffee is rebrewed every 30 minutes (counting the brewing time.) So, as I figure it, you have a one in six shot of being there when it is being brewed each time you go... But look on the bright side... the coffee is fresh, and you get one out of six of them free! :)

I agree with those who've already said they don't see the Starbucks closings as very much of a big deal, since they still have thousands of very profitable stores, although it will be a loss to the communities they served, some of which may not have had much retail to begin with.

Both Starbucks and Washington, D.C., are frequent topics in these pages. I don't often comment, but as a District native who never left the city (and speaking for a second native who also never left): we love to see Starbucks open here and stay in business here. (Their only District store to close is 21st and L NW; there are others very nearby, and my guess is that the West End isn't quite as busy as the chain had hoped.) In every case we can think of, Starbucks is an improvement over what was there previously, and always generates more foot traffic than the business it replaced.

I get tired of reading about $4 coffee (as well as cliched references to McMansions and SUVs, as if everyone owned them). I no longer drink coffee, and I didn't like Starbucks' blends when I did, but I don't pay $4 now, and I didn't then, either. I order a small hot tea, in those words, $1.60 including District tax. Usually I take the tea with me to drink on my walk. Occasionally I'll also take home baked goods. Most of those in line with me ( later in the day; I'm not there mornings) place similar orders: hot coffee, iced tea, iced coffee, bottled fruit juices.

No independent shop here (and we don't have too many) appeals to me: none are on my regular routes or would make me want to go out of my way; they tend to be too loud (although most Starbucks are on the loud side, too), not clean enough, and visually unappealing to me. I don't encounter the supercilious staff mentioned by some; most of the staff at the stores I go to are adults, mostly minority groups and non-native English speakers, and in the last few years, a handful of men who I'm guessing were downsized from managerial jobs.

I encourage Starbucks to keep opening in the District, expand their tea selection, and extend their closing times.

Stefanie,
Refills at Starbuck's are free, if you have a registered Starbuck's card. The card also entitles you to free wifi connectivity if you bring your laptop along. And the advantage of the cards is: no tipping. (Just kidding, I always dig in for a tip from my pocket change...but the card makes it easier to "forget" the gratuity.)
For me, the appeal of Starbucks is that it's the corner pub where you don't have to drink booze. And thought of that way, the prices are not exorbitant. But like Rod, I drink just the coffee (equates with beer on tap, I suppose), not all the Barista concoctions.