I take my coffee pretty seriously. By that I mean I’m insufferable. I’m one of those people who will Google the nearby coffee shops before booking a hotel. I will pack my own beans, brewer, scale, and hand-cranked grinder if the options aren’t up to par.
But one of the most striking things about traveling in American cities in recent years is how rarely I have to resort to such extreme measures; independent coffee shops serving quality brews can be found pretty much everywhere.
For that I’m grateful to Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, the man whose ubiquitous stores and kiosks I take so much effort to avoid.
Though it seems weird to think about now, there was a time when people genuinely worried that Starbucks would kill off all the local coffee shops. “Starbucks’ policy is to drop ‘clusters’ of outlets in urban areas already dotted with cafés and espresso bars,” warned Naomi Klein in her 1999 book No Logo. “This strategy relies just as heavily on an economy of scale as Wal-Mart’s does and the effect on competitors is much the same.” The company’s aggressive approach to real estate deals was seen as an unfair competitive advantage and brought on at least one antitrust lawsuit from an aggrieved coffee shop owner.
As recently as 2007, the idea that local shops could not only survive but even thrive in competition with Starbucks was taken as Slate-worthy contrarianism. But as was evident even then, America’s appetite for specialty coffee wasn’t a fixed pie to be divvied up between mom and pop shops and big corporations. Schultz’s company helped nurture a market that had barely existed before, introducing Americans to unfamiliar Italian (or at least Italian-ish) espresso drinks in a comfortable atmosphere.
For many of us, his shops provided our first coffeehouse experience. When a Starbucks moved into the space previously occupied by a taco chain in the Houston suburb where I went to high school, it was where I learned to avoid rookie mistakes like drinking a latte through a straw or letting a takeaway espresso linger in the paper cup for twenty minutes. Along with countless others introduced to coffee via Starbucks, I didn’t stay loyal for long. In college I moved on to the kinds of hip cafes one finds surrounding universities (where, if we’re being honest, the quality of coffee often fell short of the green mermaid’s). In D.C. I finally made my way to the “third wave,” the industry term for the coffee shops that truly elevated the beverage by refining brewing techniques, working closely with roasters, and educating their consumers. After that there was no going back.
By the early 2000s, coffee pros were willing to concede that Starbucks was helping to raise standards and seed a new market of coffee enthusiasts. “Every morning, I bow down to the great green god for making all of this possible,” the publisher of Fresh Cup gushed to Willamette Week in 2004. By helping to introduce a thirst for espresso beverages and quality coffee, Starbucks created opportunities for even better shops to come and slake it.
Though Starbucks acquired some of its competitors, the mythical apocalypse of smaller coffee shops never really happened. At the start of the 1990s there were about 1,600 specialty coffee shops in the U.S. Fifteen years later there were more than 30,000. And while many of those are chains, fully a quarter of them were companies with just a single location. Even my hometown of Spring, Texas, now has a coffee shop with one foot planted firmly in the third wave.
As I write this, I’m a block away from the Starbucks Reserve store in Seattle, the company’s answer to the never-previously-asked question, “What kind of coffee shop could you build with a $20 million budget?” It’s very big and shiny and stylish, but I’m much happier here at Victrola, a local roaster that’s doing brisk business despite the neighboring behemoth.
There are some things money can’t buy, and it turns out that the ability to serve exceptional coffee at scale is one of them. In Seattle and in most other cities, one’s best bet for a great cup is to find a similar shop succeeding despite all the surrounding Starbucks stores.
Howard Schultz’s recently announced presidential ambitions have given coffee snobs new motivation to malign the company he formerly led. But while building an espresso empire is slim qualification for holding the nuclear codes, this seems as good an occasion as any to take note of the ways in which he really did improve the American coffee scene.
The coffee still served in many hotels and airports stands as a reminder of how much worse it could be, and so often was. So although I’m unlikely to give Schultz my vote, I will lift my mug in appreciation — not from a Starbucks, of course, but from the cool indie shop down the street.
Jacob Grier (@jacobgrier) is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Cocktails on Tap: The Art of Mixing Spirits and Beer.
