Coffee People

When I first got to Portland, it was very much a coffee town.

This was before the world was a coffee world. In New York, we did frequent cafes, but we ordered things by their full names: caffe macchiato, latte macchiato, cioccolata calda. Cafe au lait if you wanted to go simple but milky. We went to real sit-down cafes with marble floors, wrought-iron chairs and large windows; Edgar and Lalo and Monaco. Most of the romance of those places is gone now, because of what happened with coffee since those early days of the coffee revolution.

But back in the early '90s, when I found Portland a real coffee town, I was only slightly surprised. It was very cool to be able to go down and get amazing coffee drinks from the college campus cafe, and even before I started college, I remember the scent of coffee hanging in the cool moisture of the city air. There were frenchie cafes, late-night coffee hangouts, and countless tiny shops with groovy little drinks of their own. There were even chains from the hometown Pacific Northwest---but locals were already starting to avoid and badmouth Starbucks. It was a huge chain (over 250 stores at that point!), it was the bully, it wasn't the coffee for the cool, free-spirited folk.
This turned out to be pretty funny. Here in Portland if you had to choose a chain, you'd go for Coffee People or maybe Seattle's Best, but as the popularity of store-made coffee drinks grew in other parts of the country, most people were relying on Starbucks as their introduction. I never did like Starbucks, so it usually meant that when I went back east, while my family grew excited by the arrivals of Starbucks stores, I sat there without any coffee. Although I did enjoy the old-fashioned diner coffee you could still get back there (it's changing now, and I hope that doesn't stick). But that's a different beast altogether!
Coffee People was also among the very first to start the trend of reusable mugs rather than countless paper cups. Their "Road Tour" mugs were all over town. My '96 and '98 cups are sitting in separate places here in my living room right now, waiting to get collected and dumped in the dishwasher. The whole philosophy of the company seemed a little bit hippie, but at the same time there was something not very hippie about coffee, and not so hippie about a growing chain of stores, even if there were fewer than 15 to Starbucks more than 200. So Coffee People always had a soft spot in my heart. It was the coffee chain I really liked and believed in and hoped would grow. Thinitiallylly hoped they would grow also, but in 1999, the original owners sold the company to Diedrich Coffee, a small Californian company, and I thought that was sad. But they were still there with the same stores, the same employees, and even those same Road Tour mugs. People still gathered there and bought coffees and their crazy concoction milkshakes. One location still flourished on a corner directly across from a Starbucks. I've never even entered that Starbucks. But then that NW 23rd Coffee People, their first store in Portland, was gone. And today the whole company is gone, another one gobbled up by the greedy, soul-sucking bastards at Starbucks. I wish I'd kept up getting those mugs. I sort of thought it wasn't a big deal missing years here and there. I guess they still have kiosks open at the airport, and you can still get Coffee People items online, but I'm really not sure how it would all work when in all other ways, the company is gone. Maybe they'll rebuild from those tiny remnants!
I don't understand why no one has ever been able to rival Starbucks after they got going. There have been many coffee companies that had far better coffee than Starbucks. But they were steamrolled, eaten. It's really rather sad that most people can only have access to Starbucks coffee. Obviously, there are still local coffee places in most cities and towns, but chances are if you are looking to grab a quick coffee somewhere, you're more likely to find a Starbucks than anything else. And there's nothing anyone can do to stop it, apparently.

Except maybe don't get your coffee there. In the past year, I've had coffee from Starbucks maybe 5 times---and that was because I was in New York in winter, making my way through ice and snow for late-night coffee in a cafe-free neighborhood. It was generally pretty foul---one time I even had to have it remade, because it was intolerably so---and in general I'd rather have gotten my coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. But to be honest, I don't usually drink a lot of coffee drinks. I like coffee, but I feel like it's a mulling kind of drink, a cafe kind of drink, not something you pick up in a rush just because. Or something you'd drink in a fake McDonald's of a cafe like Starbucks offers. So even though I live above a Starbucks, I don't go in. I used to frequent another Seattle-born chain, Tully's, but they, too, were chased out of Portland. (A damn shame, because they had delicious sandwiches, great bagels, and bakery items--they'd absorbed a local bakery that was foundering.)
If I want a coffee drink, I'll walk a block to Via Delizia or that cute little place up on 17th. Because, yes, Portland is still a coffee town, and here you are less likely to have to resort to Starbucks. In my neighborhood, I can still find a Peet's, a World Cup, and a Boyd Coffee Company, in addition to a handful of local bitties. But still, there are two Starbucks. And there will be no more Coffee People. We can all hope that perhaps someday in the future, when the coffee obsession has really settled in, other coffee places will have just as much chance as Starbucks, and won't get crushed by their massive corporate hand. Until then, I hope people won't forget that there was once a nifty little Oregonian chain with great coffee and no backtalk.