Fear and loathing in Seattle as Starbucks swallow's city's best

By Blaine Harden - Washington Post April/2003

Starbucks' purchase of Seattle's Best has residents wondering who they've become.

SEATTLE -As a corporate acquisition, it was barely a story -Starbucks Corp. bought Seattle's Best Coffee last week for $72 million US. The number-one specialty coffee company in the world swallowed the number two coffee purveyor in Washington state without a burp. The Wall Street Journal explained it all in 187 words.

But as a measure of Seattle's mixed feelings about itself, the buyout was a cultural earthquake, shaking loose doubts about the soul of a city that has binged in recent years on both caffeine and capitalism.

"We have a lot of liberals here and they worry," said Patricia Halsell, a corporate lawyer and admitted liberal who drinks two lattes a day at Torrefazione Italia Coffee, a downtown coffeehouse. It serves super-premium, locally roasted coffee and is part of the Seattle's Best chain that Starbucks now owns.

"We are scared about how corporate money controls our choices in coffee, in politics and in everything else," said Halsell, who is 46.

Her anxiety percolated onto the front pages of local newspapers this week.

It prompted a National Public Radio affiliate to convene an earnest hour-Iong program to discuss whether one should worry about corporate domination. The buyout also became an occasion for existential urban analysis: Should Seattle be a place to get rich or get by, to eat gourmet food or wear grunge, to work in an office cubicle while complaining about dank weather or to play out of doors while embracing the inexorable sadness of rain?

The questions cut to the conflicted heart of a city that is simultaneously dependent on and contemptuous of that which is corporative. Seattle is immensely proud of its local billionaires, who continue to vacuum up money from around the globe. But when the World Trade Organization came to town in 1999, it rioted violently against globalization.

The paradox plays out daily on city streets. Downtown, you can slip into a New Yorky shop where thin women in black will try to sell you a $2,500 nickel-plated showerhead. On sidewalks in the University District, slacker dudes in need of a shower will make fun of you for talking too loudly on a cellphone. It is not uncommon for angry young men to dart into a Seattle Starbucks and scream: "Don't drink the corporate swill."

A generation ago, nobody was screaming about Starbucks. Like Seattle itself, it was a homely refuge, a place to read a book, listen to a bit of mediocre jazz and endure a not-especially-lucrative life on the soggy, western edge of the American mainstream.

The first shop opened in 1971 " in Pike Place Market on the waterfront. Starbucks then had a perfect pitch for its audience. The coffee was good and strong. It stimulated stoic Scandinavians in a socially acceptable way. And there was something about a coffeehouse where you could linger and read newspapers for which someone else paid that touched lefty leanings in this city that was once the headquarters of the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies.

In the 1990s, of course, Starbucks, like Seattle, got deliriously rich, thanks to sharp minds and even sharper elbows. Bill Gates and Microsoft. Jeffrey Bezos and Amazon. Howard Schultz and Starbucks. There was nothing remotely homely about capitalism Seattle-style. Astonishing growth was good. World domination was better.

A half-million newcomers poured into the Puget Sound area within a decade. WIth about ten million newly minted millionaires fuelIng the frenzy, Seattle real estate-prices jumped 80 percent- between 1978 and 1998. By the end of last year, just seven per cent of the city's homes were affordable to middle-income families, according to the Seattle Times.

The boom fizzled out three years ago. Since then, the jobless rate in Washington state has been "among the highest in the U.S., and population growth has fallen to its lowest level in nearly two decades. But Microsoft and Starbucks have sailed on in seas of profitability.

It's the triumph of Starbucks, though, that seems to stick in Seattle's craw. In a city that prides itself on knowing good coffee, part of the irritation seems to be driven by the taste of espresso drinks, which often depends on how recently coffee beans were roasted.

"If you go to Starbucks in Seattle , or anywhere else, you don't know when they roasted their beans," said Gregory Dicum, a coffee expert and author of The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry .from Crop to the Last Drop.

Dicum said that as Starbucks has grown ever bigger -it now has 6,241 stores around the world and 62,000 employees -it has been forced to emphasize uniformity over quality.

"It may not be the best coffee in the world, but it is consistent," he said.

Sneering at Starbucks -no matter how many competitors it mayor may not have gobbled up in recent days -is also a matter of local fashion. For young people at Coffee Messiah, a scruffy joint where a neon sign says "Caffeine Saves," hating corporate swill" is de rigueur, like having a stud in your nose.

"I went to New York City, and I saw three Starbucks in two blocks, and it just irritated me," said Lucy Pastier, 17. "I didn't drink coffee in New York the whole time I was there."

She was drinking a latte in the Messiah. Across the room, behind the espresso machine, a. dozen crucifixes hung on a wall. One of them was torturing a Pee-Wee Herman doll.

"When you come here at night, they show weird little homemade films," Pastier said. "In the bathroom, there is a disco ball."

Yet, even for radical caffeinistas, it's often impossible in Seattle to escape the ubiquity of Starbucks.

There is a Starbucks coffeehouse a half-block down the street from the Messiah. If customers want to watch weird little, films and drink espresso on a weekend night, they have to at least pretend they are intent on drinking corporate swjll. Starbucks has the neighborhood's only free parking lot.