On the bean: Pacific northwest eats itself, corrupts purity of coffee’s black heart

As many readers may be aware, Starbucks is beating a tactical retreat, shutting 73 per cent of its Australian operation and 600 stores across the US. This will be big news for latte-loving Aussies in the big cities, but is a drop in the ocean for its American empire, which accounts for around 75 per cent of its operations: some 6,793 company owned stores.

The company endured some minor controversy earlier in the year when it revived its old symbol, that of a Greek siren, as a kind of Coke Classic stunt. There’s an example of its inspiration from New York’s Met Museum at the top of this post. To be fair, it does look indecent – what appears to be a topless mermaid parting its ‘legs’ in a suggestive manner. (Being suggestive was the whole point of sirens, of course; not in a Carry On fashion, but in the luring sailors to their death sense – odd choice for a logo when you think about it, but that’s another thought.) The question is whether you care.

Coffee shops have dodgy associations. Some in Vancouver aren’t all they appear to be, and then of course there’s Amsterdam. More surprising might be the existence of SexxPresso in Las Vegas, a wheelchair accessible erotic coffee shop where ‘bodacious baristas’ ply their frothy trade. Plans to create a topless coffee shop in Boston appeared to fall foul of local opinion (including that of the owner’s wife), if not actual law. Community disapproval is a powerful force; it closed an Espresso Gone Wild concession in Belfair, Washington, but this is only one of several. A carbound man interviewed over the naked controversy could do little but squint and scratch the back of his skull, claiming that the barely clad girls had always seemed ‘really nice’ and served good coffee to boot. What a great buncha gals. The local outrage left him cold, but reports indicated that many of the fairer sex regard Espresso Gone Wild as little more than a ‘drive thru strip joint’. All this, and they have the pink hotpanted girls of Seattle’s Natte Latte to deal with – the Hooter girls of the coffee world.

Is this localised corruption of the coffee shop ideal the bean’s Sodom and Gomorrah moment? Is this why Starbucks, once the evil empire lampooned in Austin Powers, has been driven back from its borders? Espresso Gone Wild spreads its naked tendrils about the coffee giant’s very heartland – the rainprone Pacific northwest, where Natte Latte and the drug fuelled Vancouver coffee shops lie coiled, drip-dying the sex trade into coffee’s black, black heart.

That’s one opinion. More likely it’s the credit crunch, a decline in discretionary spending that forces people to choose more basic, less expensive coffee, or simply make their own; but one should never rule out a pending vengeance from above.