Starbucks has us hooked - on convenience

Starbucks down the street simply can't be the same

By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 18, 2008 at 3 p.m.

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Joe Raedle

Starbucks has 15,000 stores in 44 countries.

Until our office moved into a building with a Starbucks two years ago, I'd only occasionally sampled the company's wares.

Once its location became too convenient to ignore, I became a veritable junkie, ingesting eight or 10 cups of coffee a week (by hard-core customer standards, I'm still in preschool.)

Now the company has announced that it will close 600 of its stores, including the one in our building. I feel like a crack head suddenly told his dealer is moving to Scottsdale . . . or Peoria . . . or Basra.

When I mentioned this to one of the friendly people who work at our Starbucks, she smiled indulgently and said: "There's another store just a block away."

In truth, there are three more stores within a six-block radius. But I'm an American. I live for convenience, not statistics. I was once at a San Francisco intersection with Starbucks stores on three corners.

I still remember the first cup of Starbucks coffee I ever had. I was sleep-walking through Chicago's O'Hare airport early one morning 25 years ago, and there was a coffee cart on the concourse. I bought a cup and proceeded to spend the connecting flight twitching like a man with delirium tremens. It was that strong.

Like everyone else, I've been known to mock the Starbucks culture, with its "half this" and "half that." And shots. Who ever heard of getting a shot of anything outside of a doctor's office or a bar?

Still, whenever I'm trying to lose weight, they've been kind enough to skim the whipped cream off whatever I order, even if it's just a glass of water.

And who am I to criticize the corporate decision to turn the stores into mini flea markets? Sure, you can get cups and thermoses and bags of coffee from places that have yet to be charted on a map. And books and CDs. I mean, Starbucks has its own XM radio station. Given a few more months, I'm sure our store would've been selling used musical instruments. And car batteries.

Given that diversity of merchandise - and the fact that the company seemed to be opening a new store every 30 seconds in the '80s and '90s - who expected cutbacks? (The company has 15,000 stores in 44 countries.)

I'm tempted to write the CEO and offer my advice, like start charging for wi-fi or offer the breakfast sandwiches you promised months ago. I should have seen the writing on the wall when they canceled the egg and cheese bagels.

My friend Cathy is a shift manager at a Starbucks in Atlanta. Whenever she's in town and I ask her some question about the company ("They made up that word 'barista,' didn't they?"), she smiles indulgently and offers a perfectly sound answer. Then she repeats herself slowly, as if I was being housebroken.

Cathy loves her job, and has the added advantage of working at a store in a neighborhood where a lot of rappers and R&B singers live. I've never been more impressed than when she told me about the time Usher came in for a cup of coffee and she made him go to the back of the line because he was talking on his cell phone when it came time to order. Cathy don't play that.

The sense I get is that our Starbucks will close sooner rather than later, which means probably by the end of the summer. I worry about what will happen to the employees who greet me so perkily every morning ("How's your day going?" "I'll tell you when I wake up"), but they all assure me they'll be farmed out to other stores. No baristas will be harmed during the closings.

For some, that means walking just an extra block to work.

I may have to follow them. Or suffer the DTs for real this time.

pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2592

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