Is Stumptown the New Starbucks — or Better?
Posted by TheShot on 09 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Roasting, Starbucks
Stirring a bit of the coffee world today is this piece from TIME magazine: Stumptown Coffee vs. Starbucks: Portland, Seattle Rivals – TIME. If Josh Ozersky’s headline of “Is Stumptown the New Starbucks — or Better?” seems oddly familiar, it’s because his article conceptually (and shamelessly) recycled Ethan Epstein’s piece for the New York Press from last June: “Totally Stumped” — an article that lead Eater to run with the headline “Stumped: Is Stumptown This Decade’s Starbucks?” Mr. Ozersky may have won a James Beard Award for food writing, but talk about a strange coincidence.
One major difference, however, is that the TIME article goes all third wave on us. Our years-long annoyance with third wave fiction aside, there’s something outright creepy about mainstream media stumbling cluelessly into social trends years after the fact in an attempt to explain them to us. It made us rethink their headline as, “Is TIME the new 60 Minutes — or Worse?” — given how reading the article made us feel like we were watching Mike Wallace introduce the World Wide Web to a 60 Minutes audience circa 1999. (We may be fans of 60 Minutes, but its track record of reporting on cultural phenomena years after the fact was exceptionally poor.)
In any case, Trish Rothgeb created a mutating monster that must be stopped.
The TIME article also alludes to, but does not deliver on, the Portland vs. Seattle coffee turf wars going on lately. This would have been a much more interesting angle, although it is only a regional (and not national) story, e.g.: A Tale Of Two Cities: Portland’s Coffee Culture Swipes Seattle’s Crown. Could you imagine an amusing piece invoking a comparison with the infamous East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry? With Duane Sorenson playing the role of 2Pac and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz as “Biggie,” The Notorious B.I.G.
2 Comments »
I realize it’s a subtle point, but I didn’t actually claim to be making the Stumptown / Starbucks comparison. You can tell by the VERY FIRST SENTENCE of my article, which reads, “Coffee aficionados have been asking the question over and over again: Is Stumptown Coffee Roasters of Portland, Ore. — the most conspicuous exponent of coffee’s “third wave” — the new Starbucks?”
As opposed to just asking it myself. It’s really not that subtle a point. Thank you.
yours,
Josh Ozersky
We hear what you’re saying about context and citation. And, for example, copy editors can be the bane of any writer for slapping on a headline that takes an article’s subject matter in a completely different direction.
But at least among all of the coffee aficionados we know, the question of, “Is Stumptown the new Starbucks?” honestly never comes up. At all. Ever. None of them even take the question seriously. Among the coffee aficionados we regularly encounter, the question is as nonsensical as asking James Beard Foundation winners, “Is Thomas Keller the next Ray Kroc?” In the past several months, we’ve received more than a few e-mails from roasters and other coffee professionals linking to the Totally Stumped article and pointing out its perceived absurdity.
Not that this is based in a defense of Stumptown per se. Most people have honestly forgotten how Starbucks modestly started with a much greater attention to quality detail before their obsession with scale completely commoditized the product quality and the brand. But objections to the comparison are rooted in bewilderment over how such an apples-to-oranges comparison can be made. We may lament gourmet burgers from the likes of Thomas Keller, Hubert Keller, and every Keller in-between as the most tiresome and unimaginative Great-Recession-era restaurant concept going today, but their sense of scale is an entirely different universe from McDonald’s.
In fact, the only people we’ve witnessed who legitimately ask the question “Is Stumptown the next Starbucks?” are coffee journalists on the outside looking in. So your subtlety argument is a red herring: one cannot suggest they are paraphrasing others, and disavow themselves of originating the quote, when those others could claim false words are being put into their mouths.