September 7th, 2008
Things progress
It’s finally happened, Lancaster has turned 0SB.
What I mean is, last night I saw them installing our very own Starbucks – In the future every town and city will be dated by the first appearance of a Starbucks – thereby making this year 0SB, the next being 1SB, following that 2SB and so on.
I figure that makes Lancaster quite a new town. In fact under this scheme, most of the ‘Old Towns’ are in the US. It’s a nice change to lose the baggage of history.
And so we look forward, here in our new town with it’s swanky new coffee and its brand new litter. We can’t wait to shed our established cafes and family-run coffee merchants. We have been liberated.
I hope I am missing the sarcasm here, other wise, I am flying over to slap you.
You are. There’s no way I would let the addition of a Starbucks slide in such a nonchalant fashion.
My town is dying, rapidly. In an eager and greedy bid to attract more money, the council sacrificed local businesses for the sake of international brands… They hiked the rents up for shops in town, forcing all the smaller business out and leaving us with a city centre half-populated by empty stores. The ones that remain are international brands such as the coffee giants. And that’s fine, but sometimes I want to buy something that isn’t coffee.
They raised rent because their revenue had dropped because they had forced small businesses out, it seems this cycle is going to continue.
The best bit is that they have given permission for a massive shopping development to ‘provide more retail space’ despite the fact that half the town is empty. It just seems like another desperate attempt to lure a stable, but ultimately pointless, set of shops to the area.
Our council is corrupt or inept, I still can’t decide, perhaps both… they refuse to listen to the citizens of their own town and are in it for all they can take, reagardless of their political orientation.
If any of you councilors read this, by the way, I stand by that… why not take me to court for slander, that should be fun? A nice open debate, for once, about your motives? Accounts on the table? Links with businesses, conflicts of interest?
Sorry, Ben, this sort of thing gets me quite worked up. I love my home town, it is as much a part of me as anything else, and yet there are these idiots in charge who are trying to choke it to death.
That sounds far too familiar. : (
Where I used to live the council decided to bring in funds by introducing parking charges in the town centre, partially to recoup the money from a horrible library refit. They turned it into a “Discovery Centre”, meaning they put in an art installation that broke down on a weekly basis, increased the amount of computers, shifted the local reference section in to what was the museum and move a tiny fraction of the museum exhibits into the main library building. Increasing the amount of books or replacing the old ones was not in the plan.
Anyway, I digress. I’m still bitter about that, but back on subject. The additional revenue from the parking charges did not come close to the money they lost from reduced market stalls. Eventually they saw the light and scrapped the charges, but it was too late. Most of the stall holders that had left had already found new places to fill the holes in their schedules and the market was all but dead.
Now I live in a place where the managers of the shopping centres are doing exactly the thing you described. They’re increasing prices and killing off small businesses then finding that they need to charge more for shops and more for parking in order to make the lost earnings back.
Meanwhile one of the larger shopping centres, which is currently half empty, gained permission to acquire and demolish a cheaper retail site next door and expand the gluttonous monstrosity that is their main centre.
I’ve seen the same in other places, replacing terraces of small shops with overblown shopping centres, killing of the speciality businesses, when they can’t fully rent out the one down the street. It’s a farce and not a funny one either.
They closed a bunch in America. But since there’s one on every street anyway it’s not like there’s a shortage of overpriced chain coffee.
In my town, they closed two that were in the same shopping plaza. But there are still two more open there. And the plaza’s only about 150 yards in size.
Ah, Starbucks! More humble pie, Starbucks? I’ll wrap that to go, shall I?
They just recently closed a shitload of stores here in Australia too. Despite the fact that all the analysts and store owners were trying to spin it in some tricky economic direction, every time they asked any lay person off the street, the answer would always be the same: because they make SHIT coffee.
“Coffee flavoured milkshakes” was a phrase which arose frequently.
“We have one of the largest populations of Italian migrants in the world. Family-owned cafes and decades-old barista traditions saturate every major capital city. Even petrol stations have espresso machines. We all drink real coffee. Why the fuck would any Australian who liked coffee set foot inside a Starbucks?” was another.
Good riddance, Starbucks. Go and peddle your boiled dishwater elsewhere.
Lancaster, it turns out, is elsewhere…
I think they are hoping that our complete lack of sophistication means we’ll drink there… they’re probably right to some extent. Our corner of the UK is renowned for being 20 years behind the rest of the civilized world.
I actually thought about you whilst typing the post, being our resident expert on all things realted to the bean.
I think I’m going to start drinking tea from now on.
Your town hasn’t really developed until there are at least two Starbuck’s on every corner. Portland is full of really health conscious people but even they can’t be asked to actually cross the street to get a caffeine fix.
I have never bought anything from Starbucks. *proud*
*Philippa wins a medal*
Congratulations… and thank you.
I don’t like coffee, but I used to get their strawberry frappucino, which is basically a really expensive really delicious strawberry milkshake. I like milkshakes.
if the coffee was good, i might understand the fuss, but its really so terrible
me living in a capital city that has ‘country town’ status among all the other states, we dont have starbucks and i cant see us getting any any time soon
(welcome to perth, australia: our claim is that we are officially the most isolated city in the world)
the only thing thats good at starbucks is…everything except the coffee
those iced drinks (i forget the name) and stuff do ok though
i too hate the idea of my local coffee hangouts turning into chains, and fear that people will forget what good coffee is
I forget what time was like B.SB. (before Starbucks). What will archeology say in describing lives of that era?
I suspect that the buckian right might suggest that coffee mugs were put there by the devil to test us.
I’m surprised Ben missed the sarcasm… but maybe my own mindset t’wards the S’bucks makes it easy for me to find. Nasty coffee, bad business practices, not to mention the social thing that goes along with it. Pretension? I can’t really think of the word, but you know what I mean — the people that go to Starbucks and the chain itself have this consume-consume-consume-ruled-by-trends-and-fads attitude that really gets under my skin.
I saw a video a while back that included the line (delivered to a Starbuck’s barrista) “Why don’t you take a venti razor and shove it up your ass, you tall brained moron!” I laughed for an hour, as much at the stupid names as anything else.
There’s a really great little history of Starbucks in the book Uncommon Grounds, a history of coffee. There’s some really interesting history there, from humble, honourable beginnings, to some in-fighting and a coup, followed by money-grubbing and business practice changes, leading to the mega-corporation of today.
It’s the venti thing I think that bothers me more than anything about the place. It’s like they’re trying to trademark sizes.
But TALL = SMALL? What the hell man, what the hell?
I don’t get the size thing at all. I can walk into a cafe in Lancaster and utter the words ‘coffee please’ and one is placed in front of me. I can even be more specific and say ‘coffe please, white, two sugars’ and I’ll get that… what I can’t do is list evey possible ingredient (ask for low fat water) in every possible configuratio using the bizarre and contradictory language they have concocted.
Could you explain the sizes for me? Anyone?
Well you see “Tall” (which would normally indicate large) means a small, and “Grande” (which is Spanish for large) means Medium. Then Venti (which is actually Italian for 20) is a Large. It’s stupid in 3 different languages.
Also, I shamelessly stole the gist of the above from a movie clip I saw on the Daily Show.
The one thing I love about starbucks is that you know you are getting bad coffee.
It is a given. If you go there and hand over money, they are going to give you something that tastes like the reject batches of Nescafe 43 or International Roast (crappest of the crappiest crap instant crap coffee crap (Starbucks was brought to you today by the letter Crap)).
What shits me is when you go to a really sauve looking joint, art hanging on the walls, nice looking snacks on the counter displays and the coffee taste like shit.
Where I lived in Perth, there was this great looking cafe open up in the Beaufort st cafe strip, it had art for sale on the walls, great snacks, great music, great lounges and shit coffee. I think is called Exodus, maybe ppl were leaving because of the coffee?