“At least we’ve got it stopped.”
“Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.”
– Earl Rowe and Steve McQueen in The Blob
OOPS. IT MAY be time for a sequel to that 1958 horror movie in which a huge, unstoppable ooze is finally corralled and dropped near the North Pole. Poor old frozen Blobby will probably be wearing a Speedo and some suntan oil pretty soon.
In the meantime, though, humanity appears to have stemmed another spreading green mass. In April Starbucks closed a café in Richmond’s Aberdeen Centre, the first closing of a Canadian location. Vancouver Starbucks have disappeared before but only in the way that decapitated dandelions do: temporarily. Two different Denman Street locations have closed over the years, but the total number of Denman Starbucks now stands at two. There has been no net loss – until now.
It’s happening all over the world as the Seattle chain starts to pull back and consolidate. In all, 900 locations are expected to lose their healthy green glow. Perhaps they will turn to gold and brilliant shades of red as they die, lending gorgeous autumn hues to city streets. There are certainly enough of them to create the effect.
It is highly unlikely that any Lower Mainland citizens will mourn this loss, outside of the immediate Aberdeen Centre region. No doubt the store closing was met by the same kind of cheers raised by sandbag fillers when a flooding river finally starts to drop. But the death of one Starbucks at least raises the spectre of a more widespread die-off. What if they all went? Could there ever come a day when people will look back with nostalgia on the days when Starbucks was inescapable?
Starbucks really are like dandelions or kudzu vines – attractive, potentially useful and not at all unpleasant when considered in isolation. Yet their near ubiquity and opportunistic spread frequently inspire loathing. Implicit in this distaste is the idea that we will never be rid of them. Yet like Zeppelins or carhops, there’s always the chance that one day the green Starbucks awning will be seen as the mark of a specific era. A 1952 Ford Mercury was no big whoop when the streets were full of them. Now the sight of one would turn heads.
Despite their upscale clientele and cosy street corner locales, Howard Schultz’s coffee giant tends to be lumped in with fast-food franchises in the public mind – i.e., a soulless corporate blight on the landscape. Perhaps most disturbing is the way they seem to suck up all the available retail oxygen, asphyxiating the small fry. Miriam’s ice cream parlour was a fixture at Davie and Denman for years; to see a Starbucks move into the spot created the dispiriting sense that a city’s character was slowly being obliterated.
At the other end of the street, the familiar Mr. Bojangles café at Robson and Denman recently shuttered – and within weeks a green awning had been installed. Was the independent café bullied off its perch? Starbucks has frequently been accused of using its corporate muscle to steamroll mom-and-pop cafés from choice locales.
A pullback by Starbucks doesn’t necessarily portend a blossoming of small, independent cafés. If Schultz is having troubles, small operators will too. But Starbucks’s problems also have to do with issues that are particular to the chain, such as overextension and poor merchandising decisions. Quality has suffered too as automated systems have replaced the tamping of well-trained baristas. Having created a North American market for espresso drinks, a shrinking Starbucks might finally be making room for some of those small fry.
But it’s unlikely. The closing of the Aberdeen Centre location probably says more about Aberdeen Centre than about Starbucks. Our streets will probably stay green for a while. And as a coffee addict, I will admit this: it sure beats a city full of Tim Hortons.
