The Starbucks Backlash?
I remember the early days of the coffee boom, late eighties early nineties when Seattle grunge and the coffee shop atmosphere was all the rage. In San Antonio and Houston a few hip coffee shops popped up. Candlelight in SA and a nice place in the Museum District in Houston. Of course, there was no wifi yet, so they were nice places to order a cup of Joe and curl up with a good book. Or play a video game on my oversized, underpowered laptop with about as much free memory as a gnats brain.
But within a few short years Starbucks stores were popping up on every corner and all the little independent coffee shops were put out of business. The honeymoon with Starbucks actually lasted a long time, considering. But today, I sense the reverse happening. As if there is a large cultural backlash against the mega-corp, no matter how much good they claim to do.
I’m in San Antonio for the day. I pulled up Yelp to see if there were any independents in town. San Antonio is kind of a cultural laggard, but also somewhat of a bell-weather, in the sense that when something happens in San Antonio, it’s already happened everywhere else. (I don’t notice these things in Austin, as Austin is usually years ahead of San Antonio.) And so, I was very surprised to see a long list of independent coffee houses here. I’m sitting in a pretty classy joint right now. The wifi is free–unlike Starbucks–and the coffee is good. It’s a clean, modern looking place, in a kind of anti-Starbucks vein. It’s nice to see.
Anyone else notice this happening in your town?