I was sticking something in the car the other day after dropping off my son to school and one of my friends busted me with the fast food coffee cups above.
Yeah, I've seen "Supersize Me" and I'm not buying a Big Mac with the damn thing. I'm very friendly -- a fellow traveler if not a card-carrying member of the true believers -- to various modern food movements from organic to eating local to slow food to sustainable agriculture. I'm not always practicing to the full extent required by dogma, but I think I'm probably a two percenter here relative to the general population.
The one slogan which I have tried to, and failed, to understand is "Fight Corporate Coffee." This is usually aimed at Starbucks, of course, and is vaguely linked up to the anti-Walmart pro-local-business end of sentiments.
Fight corporate coffee? My god, STARBUCKS SAVED COFFEE IN THIS COUNTRY. Decry the loss of local establishments if you will, but I couldn't get a freakin' decent cup of coffee hardly anywhere until Starbucks came along.
I was first introduced to what one would now refer to as "premium" coffee, but I would characterize as "drinkable" at Arabica in Shaker Square (and the one in Cleveland Heights by the theater where they showed Rocky Horror.) Having acquired a coffee habit at a tender age at home, the taste rush I got at Arabica was hard to understand at the time and hard to fathom now in this age of ubiquitous good coffee. But wher'er I roamed in the years after that, it was very difficult to get a good bean, must less a good roast. In college a friend and I did mail order from Zabar's, because that was about as close as we could get to fresh-roasted. (I chewed coffee beans in high school during class; I had every place on campus where there was a coffee machine, and I mean that quite literally, mapped out when I was an undergrad; I have twice decided on a place to live on a tiebreaker between places we were looking at renting or buying based on proximity to good coffee in the neighborhood. Oh yeah, I take this seriously.)
I started visiting Seattle in the late 80s, when there were just a handful of Starbucks in the area. There were several good local chains around there (notably the lamented Coffee People with its amazing drive-through espresso -- man, what a novelty back then), and maybe when people suggest via the bumpersticker soap box that I fight Corporate Coffee they mean I should be sad Coffee People got bought out by Starbucks. (One of the most memorably amusing moments I had in my Northwest travels back then, when it was the sole bastion of good coffee in this country outside of Little Italys, was seeing a backwoods shack with a temporary portable lighted sign -- like the kind you used to see at used car dealers -- in the middle of nowhere in Oregon that advertised "FISHING LICENSES - BAIT - ESPRESSO". I was not in Kansas anymore. Of course, seeing something like this today wouldn't draw a second glance.)
But let me tell you, I made a beeline for the back of Pike Place Market as soon as my boots hit the ground in Seattle in those days. Starbucks was, yes, an indy as much as anybody else was. Folger's was the enemy. I don't even want to talk about ward room coffee.
The Starbucks mug pictured above was purchased about 1988, because I was entranced by this plucky little local store that nobody had ever heard of back east. When Bux started doing mail order, I was all over it, since it was easier than schlepping into the roaster in the North End and being ignored until all the locals had gotten their beans.
So let's fast forward 20 something years to today. You can get good coffee almost everywhere now. This is 100% thanks to Starbucks. It's not just the oversaturated franchising that has become a joke in popular culture; it's that they raised America's standards of good coffee back up, and in turn sparked competition everywhere. So maybe there aren't a lot of national competitors to Starbucks, but you can get good coffee at McDonald's now -- and yes, the other day, exhausted from a hard day, I happily swang through the drivethrough and got a McCafé for a buck (about half of the Starbucks price) that was just as good as the Pike Place blend of today (although perhaps not nearly as good as my memory of the original Pike Place blend.) And just for full disclosure, I included my hated Jack in the Box cup above -- yes, I am occasionally that desperate for coffee. It's still better than the awful coffee you used to get everywhere.
What would resisting corporate coffee entail? We have a handful of local coffeehouses in the area, and I've sampled 'em all, and I can't say as any of them are sufficient to make me want to abandon Bux. We do have a Peet's -- Peet's is really good -- in Monterey, not convenient to me, which I patronize when I can. But Peet's is just another Corporation - albeit a more west coast, semi-local one. Fair Trade coffee, etc. is all well and good, but you can get a Fair Trade coffee in more and more places. Because of...the buying power of large corporations. So I think resisting Corporate Coffee would actually mean the death of the Fair Trade coffee movement, since premium coffee would become an unachievably expensive luxury for the few if it were all done in small batches by indy coffee places, and probably would result in just crappier coffee everywhere.
Oh, by all means, I'll patronize cool local coffee houses. When they have better coffee, no problem. But the slogan does not the cup make.
But I cannot resist corporate coffee. I've had far more crappy coffee in local dives over the years than I have in Corporate Coffee havens. Anyone who thinks Starbucks et alia are bad for coffee wasn't drinking joe in 1980.
By the way: not pictured, but best of all these days -- Dunky. Dunkin' Donuts is not in our area. Sad face.
