By Kirk Johnson
October 23, 2012
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Starbucks,
which started with this Seattle store, epitomizes the
coffee scene in a city
where smaller shops are trying to compete.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Ryan
Williams via The New York Times
|
SEATTLE — This city got caffeinated
over the past couple of decades, buzzed on its rise in the pop culture as a
symbol of hipster-geekster cool, but also on the real stuff: coffee.
Like salt and pepper — or more
aptly, cream and sugar — coffee and Seattle became an item, each word modifying
and reinforcing the other, thanks mainly, of course, to Starbucks,
the coffee giant that exploded around the world from here. Starbucks exported
beans and brews, wrapping it all in a cool, earth-toned vision of Pacific
Northwest life that may or may not have reflected reality.
But what is it like to compete
head-to-head, latte for latte, against Starbucks in the throne room itself? Ask
Demi Larsen. She’s a 25-year-old manager at a Tully’s Coffee, a struggling
local chain that positioned itself years ago as the alternative choice for
Seattle coffee-heads — brightly lighted where Starbucks was dim, medium roast
where Starbucks was dark.
“Starbucks opened the conversation,”
Ms. Larsen said in a Tully’s near the University of Washington. But where
Starbucks has become a designer global brand, she said, Tully’s tried to hold its
roots as a local joint where the coffee comes first. “I have my Coach bag and I
have my Gucci sunglasses and I have my Starbucks coffee,” she said of the brand
mentality. “And there is a Starbucks avoider we definitely get — ‘Are you guys
owned by Starbucks? No? O.K., good. We can get our coffee then.’ ”
Trying harder because you’re No. 2,
though, is perhaps a better slogan than it is a business model. This month,
Tully’s, which expanded to about 200 stores at its peak — mostly on the West
Coast, from here down into California — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection and closed many of its shops as it deals with rising costs, sour
real estate decisions, relentless competition from the big kid on the block and
perhaps the harsh reality that Coach and Gucci are hard to beat.
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But Tully's, which once had 200 stores primarily on the West Coast,filed for bankruptcy this month.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Ryan Williams via
The New York Times
|
Why Seattle became synonymous with
coffee at all, to the degree that the glass windows of a 1970s-vintage
Starbucks have become a downtown tourist photo-op, is a chicken-and-egg
question if ever there were one. Did coffee become huge here because the place
so needed stimulants — a chemical restorative to the gloomy damp — or was it on
some level a marketing creation that became real over time by force of
repetition?
“The ‘idea of Seattle’ was, and is,
an idea of urban livability that lives on in the DNA of every upscale coffee
retailer, whether they think of it that way and acknowledge it or not,” said
James Lyons, a senior lecturer in the English department at the University of
Exeter in England and author of “Selling Seattle,” a book about how Seattle
identity and Seattle products, from coffee to grunge music, was harnessed
together for fun and profit.
“Every time I see a new, independent
coffee store opt for outfacing window seating, so you can sip your latte and
watch the world go by, the store owes a debt to Starbucks and its origins in
Seattle,” Dr. Lyons said in an e-mail.
Tully’s president and chief
executive, Scott Pearson, said that prices for coffee and dairy products have
risen in ways that cannot be fully passed on to customers, and that store
locations locked in before the great recession, when the economic future seemed
as frothy as bone-dry cappuccino, have been hard to sustain in tougher times.
The company will continue to operate, he said, and hopes to emerge from
bankruptcy protection early next year.
Starbucks, meanwhile, is not
standing still waiting for the next challenger to step up.
The company’s senior vice president
for global coffee, Craig Russell, said that with recent renovations of stores
around the world, the company is reaching back into its own past for echoes of
how the first Starbucks felt 40-odd years ago, before anyone thought of it as
Seattle institution.
“They have a sensibility of the
Pacific Northwest, but they’re locally relevant,” he said. “As an example, I
might say, we have a store in France — part of it is made from barrel staves,
from wine barrels.”
As with any industry that carves its
initials deep into a city’s psyche — entertainment in Hollywood, or big finance
in New York — there are also places and companies here that have found niches
beyond the swilling down of the coffee itself.
Home Espresso Repair and Cafe, for
example — a company started and staffed by former Starbucks employees — has two
tables, a banged-up guitar on the wall and a back room full of home-brew
machines being lovingly restored. Some are huge antiques from an era of brass
and iron, with milk-frothers that look as if they could put out three-alarm
fires. Others are compact and lithe, Scandinavian designs that could be art
objects.
“Some people think huge companies
like Starbucks or Tully’s put a bad name on coffee,” said Shari Rainlyn, who
repairs machines and makes coffee in the front. “Really, places like my shop
wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the huge companies. Not that I go there to
get my coffee on Saturday morning. I don’t.”
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A version of this article appeared in print on October 24,
2012, on page A18 of the New York edition with the
headline: Struggling Against a Venti Starbucks Tide.