I ran across an old post at Coffeegeek.com, entitled, A Reluctant Admission: I Don’t Hate Starbucks, by Lou Pescarmona.

Well gee whiz, Lou, I rather like the place. Or the places. The lots and lots of Starbucks places.

I’ve heard all about Mom & Pops being better. Some are better than Starbucks, and some… well, they’re not better. But the thing is, there aren’t that many of them, and there weren’t before Starbucks came along, either. When I lived in the South Bay, there was, for instance, the Coffee Roasting Company in Los Gatos. But you had to go to Los Gatos, and you had to find a place to park.

And there was, back in ancient history, The Upstart Crow, a fine little bookshop at the Pruneyard Shopping Center, that had a coffee shop in back on a raised wooden platform.

There were two guys always at their table playing chess (Where’d they get their coffee money? Did they sleep?). And there was always this serious fellow with chin length hair and a goatee at his table with a laptop, writing. My husband and I called him Shakespeare.

And young girls with their hair shaved to raven mohawks used to loll around talking to each other through their black painted lips. I liked to eavesdrop, to hear what such creatures talked about–a new world order based on black leather and inward truth?

Nah. It was, “so I said, ‘hi,’ and he said, ‘howyadoin?’ and he was just so cool, ya know?” So that could have been me at their age, only in black this and black that.

But The Upstart Crow closed, and the blackness girls and the chess playing guys and Shakespeare all went home. And then there was the Coffee Roasting Company, if you wanted to go to Los Gatos.

Now, I said I like Starbucks. I used to love Starbucks, back when it was new.

My first “house tall” came from a shop that opened at the corner of Bascam and Campbell in San Jose. I walked into this fabulous gold and purple bedlam of lines and chatter, the grinding of coffee beans (and the smell!) and the unearthly roar of the milk steamer, and above it all, the voice of the barista barking like a carney with his sandy Rod Stewart voice, “One decaf espresso machiato tall, Three house grandes, and one cafe mocha grande!” And everybody moved, like they were jive-dancing behind the counter. And when they delivered your nonfat latte amidst all that excitement, you felt like you’d won the prize.