True Tale #26 – Juan Valdez: Throwing his coffee beans in anger

Starbucks began as a small coffee shop in Seattle in 1971 and has multiplied, like a virus, throughout the world. It is now impossible to walk down a street in Manhattan without passing a Starbucks store as Christine Hanson found out. After a long search for a cup of “non-corporate coffee,” Christine set up www.delocator.net to find an independent coffee seller in the area. Just type in your zip code and a fresh cup, and a friendly environment, are probably closer than you think.

Out shopping, Christine Hanson had time to kill while a friend tried on a couple of outfits. So she decided to grab a quick cup of coffee. But she didn’t want Starbucks.

“My philosophy has always been that if you don’t like Starbucks, then don’t go there,” she says. “Easier said than done.”

Out the front door of the clothing store and to the right: there was a Starbucks. Up the block and to the left: there was another.

Sometimes finding a cup of non-Starbucks coffee is like finding a parking space in midtown Manhattan. God forbid if you want a cup of coffee that is also not from some other big corporate chain.

“And this was in SoHo,” says Hanson, a thirty-year-old multi-media professor at Los Angeles Mission College. “It’s supposed to be a neighborhood with a reputation for being alternative and creative.”

After failing to find a non-Starbucks coffee house, Ms. Hanson settled on a grande. But the annoyance stuck with her for days.

Eventually she sat down at her computer and invented the Delocator, a website where any Starbucks hater can enter a zip code and find out where the nearest independent coffee house is located.

Launched in April 2005, the website has received more than 2 million visitors.

“I don’t hate the company. Actually, I worked as a barista for them one summer,” Hanson says. “But after seeing them shut down my favorite coffee shop in Somerville, Massachusetts, I started noticing their presence everywhere and it really started to bother me.”

Coffee houses are supposed to be creative sanctuaries, she explains, but that becomes impossible if they all become the same.

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