“THEN I MADE THE USUAL STOP…COFFEE AT THE COFFEE SHOP…”

11/21/09

One of the big banks in Chicago is currently running an ad on news and talk radio touting its acuity in relating and providing services to small businesses. (Big banks can empathize with the needs and challenges confronting the entrepreneur about as naturally as Nancy Pelosi can empathize with the needs and challenges confronting, say, a resident of the back woods of Mississippi, but that is another issue.) As part of its pitch to what, in its endless, pointless meetings, its employees doubtless refer to as “the entrepreneurial community,” the bank’s ad says something to the effect that “If you run the local coffee shop...,” accompanied by the sound of a, well, I don’t know what you call it. It’s the machine in those Starbuckesque coffee shops that heats milk or makes foam or whatever it is the habitués of those places put in their coffee and makes a suction type sound that has become nearly as ubiquitous in popular culture as the irritating sound of a clicking camera was about ten or fifteen years ago. After being annoyed by this “Can’t you see by the fact that we are familiar with froo-frooey coffee shops that we are in touch with entrepreneurs?” ad, I thought that one’s conception of a coffee shop reveals perhaps a generational divide but, more succinctly, a nearly continental divide in people’s attitudes toward life.

One can think of a coffee shop as do those who sponsor the aforementioned ad, those brimming with the entrepreneurial spirit and small business energy but who somehow sacrificed their true aspirations to take positions with big, coddling banks in which one’s success is determined by the number of committees one joins and how skillfully one ingratiates himself with one’s gormless superiors at seemingly interminable and completely vestigial meetings. For these dazzling, sophisticated urbanites, a “coffee shop” is a Starbuck’s, a Caribou, or one of the countless knock-offs of these formulaic heralds of the decline of our society.

One can also think of a coffee shop as one, or, more likely, a combination of, the following:

--a place like the joint depicted in Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”
--a place like the place depicted in Helnwein’s “Nighthawks” parody, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”
--a diner in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, (on) Long Island, or any number of eastern locales. And I mean a real diner, not a yuppie place that calls itself something like “Franc’s old time down home diner,” where people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a real diner go to eat concoctions the names of which people who eat in real diners can’t pronounce
--Lume’s on 116th and Western in my old neighborhood
--a place a not yet ruined, old time casino, like the Tropicana or Binyon’s, has off in the corner where one can get a reuben and a cup of coffee or a gallon or so of iced tea after a rough night of at the tables
--the midwestern variant of the diner, which we refer to as “a Greek joint, not a Greek food Greek joint, but a Greek joint where the menu is 19 pages long and where breakfast is served any time of day”
--the place Denny’s does a mixed job of replicating
--the places politicians go when attempting to hoodwink us into believing that they have even the remotest idea of how real people live as they campaign in Iowa or New Hampshire.

If one has the Starbuck’s/Caribou idea of a coffee shop, one thinks of the world one way. If one has the other conception of a coffee shop outlined above, one thinks of the world a different way. I can’t exactly put my finger on the differences in those worldviews; however, depending on one’s side of the divide, one might describe it as one of the following:

--Backward looking/forward looking
--One with a profound appreciation of the country’s former greatness/passenger (or driver) as our country and culture heads over a cliff

--Cheap/bon vivant
--One who is prudent with one’s hard earned money/one who has the financial acumen of a grape

--old coot who likes elevator music/chic new age jazz aficionado
--one who likes real music by guys like Sinatra, Martin, Williams, Cash, and Davis/sheepish fan of idiotic “interpretations” of the aforementioned classics by people who until yesterday were listening to Brittney Spears

--Old fogey/bold embracer of all that is new and profound
--solid, God fearing, patriotic, testicular American/froo-frooey, latte sipping, new age confidante of Communists

You get the idea.

If this is not the first time you have read the Insightful Pontificator, you have a pretty good idea of which side of the divide I inhabit. However, don’t misunderstand me; I like, no, I LOVE, Starbuck’s coffee, and I even sort of like their stores. I especially recommend the Starbuck’s on the corner of 103rd and Longwood Drive, which was converted from a Christian Science Reading Room. While the conversion was a yet another sign of the decidedly downward turn our society was taken (but which seemed inevitable after the companion church was converted to condos), this is perhaps the most beautiful, and fitting, Starbuck’s I have ever visited. Again, unless this is the first time you have read this blog, you know that I don’t like paying for Starbuck’s coffee. But occasionally people give me Starubuck’s gift cards and, when they do, I enjoy a cup of COFFEE (a cup of black coffee, not some calorie laden, fancy dancy, hotsy totsy, latta happa waha cup of God knows what for $5.75 that the guy in either Birkenstocks or a $1000 suit right in front of me in line is ordering when I just want to get a cup of coffee) at Starbuck’s or I buy a bag of the stuff to make at home, which is much cheaper but still far too extravagant when Maxwell House can be made for, on sale, about 1/5 the price. I’ve only been to Caribou twice, when there was some kind of free or greatly reduced price deal, so I can’t venture much of an opinion on their product. That alone probably says volumes about it.

So this post is not a dissertation on the quality of the product; it is a statement on the culture divide signified by the dispenser of the product. On both notes, however, the best takeout coffee available anywhere is not in Starbuck’s or, on, to many, what is the other side of the cultural divide, Dunkin’ Donuts…

no, the best takeout coffee in the world is found at White Castle. And given a choice between a slider and some kind of froo-frooey overpriced “biscotti” (whatever on God’s green earth that is), well, even if this is the first time you’ve ever read the Pontificator, you know my feelings on those alternatives.