SEATTLE JOURNAL
Struggling Against Starbucks Tide
a
Venti
Matthew Ryan Williams for 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. Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times
Tully’s, a small coffee chain in Seattle, has tried to position itself against Starbucks as a local joint where coffee comes first. Enlarge This Image
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times
Abdullah Almudayhin at a Tully’s in Seattle. Some customers like Tully’s all the better because it is not Starbucks. Enlarge This Image
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Time
But Tully's, which once had 200 stores primarily on the West Coast, filed for bankruptcy this month.
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. 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.”
Available at :http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/us/tullys-coffee-struggles-againsta-venti-starbucks-tide.html?ref=us