Bucking the trend

As many of you know, I live in the Valley they call Silicon, which has more coffee shops than all the Benelux countries combined.

Naturally, at least 75% of them are Starbucks, but even so—there are lots and lots of places to go to have a really adequate beverage (or even a meal) in a clean, non-sterile environment without forking over the GDP of one of the aforementioned Benelux countries. There are some national chains, like Panera Bread, and local ones, like Le Boulanger; and independent shops. Some of the latter charge Starbucks prices, but at least they serve you decent coffee and you don’t have to wade through the disgusting seasonal crap like gingerbread or eggnog lattes. You might even get your drink in an actual mug, maybe with a latte art flourish.

So I just freaking do not understand why it is that, when someone needs to connect, they invariably say, “Let’s meet up at the Starbucks at [blah-blah].” I understand wanting a venue where there’s no table service, or check to split. But why Starbleedingbucks?

Every single one of them I’ve been in (Menlo Park, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Newark—doesn’t matter where) has been uniformly groady, with bad acoustics and few tables (fully occupied, no matter what time of day or night). And the tables aren’t big enough to support a checkerboard.

This week I was meeting with a guy who’s helping me with a number of things (including connecting me to the law enforcement community for my novel research). My venue choices (proposed by him): ‘Bucks at Poplar and El Camino or ‘Bucks at Mathilda and Maude, in Sunnyvale. I chose the latter—it’s in a shopping center so there’s actually some parking available—and arrived at 1700.

I could not believe—at 1700 every one of the (tiny) six tables was occupied, and there was a queue nearly out the door of people ordering overpriced froufy coffee-like drinks, wrapped in the ersatz cheer of a Starbucks holiday canned music CD blaring. I felt like I was in the third rung of Hell.

The only thing I can think of in mitigation is that the places are freaking ubiquitous and that if you can’t find one you must be an idiot. Although that in itself is problematic, since it’s fairly easy to go to the wrong ‘Bucks when there are two in the same shopping center or within a block of each other on a street like El Camino.