by Peter Selgin
by Peter Selgin
You know New York City is in trouble when it starts taking orders from small towns.
Seattle is a small town.
Don't get me wrong, I like Seattle.
I like rainy days too -- when they don't start in October and end in mid-June.
As for coffee, I like that too. But it will be more than a month of rainy days before you catch me drinking the stuff in Starbuck's, or any such place by any other name.
Whether it's Java Joe's or Cooper's or Jittery Jake's or whatever, the problem is still the same.
The problem isn't the coffee, but the franchise. And all other franchises: Banana Republics and Barnes & Nobles and Warner Brothers, turning our once gritty city into a giant Pedestrian Mall, a Museum of Name Brands, an Island of Logos.
Why pick on Starbuck's? It's only a coffee shop. But, it's not. It's a coffee museum.
A coffee shop, as true New Yorkers will testify, contains two or more of the following:
- eggs over easy,
- laminated menus,
- muddy coffee brewed by the stainless steel tank,
- cardboard cups of printed Wedgwood bearing the words, "It is our Pleasure to Serve You,"
- and fast-moving Greeks.
That's a coffee shop.
A coffee shop has no pretensions, whereas a coffee bar is nothing if not pretentious.
For one thing, it's pretending to be Seattle.
For another, it's pretending to be a bar. Now, as I recollect, a bar is a place where strangers converge and talk. Whereas at Starbuck's, those who don't know each other sit facing a plate-glass window, pretending not to wish to be disturbed, sipping au laits, revising, in a notebook as blank as their faces, their screenplays-in-progress.
That's a coffee bar.
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