Some news from the distant future:
EVANSTON, Feb. 21, 5005–Anthropologists Wednesday uncovered clear evidence of a deeply ingrained cult that inhabited a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan some 3,000 years ago.
Its members wore natural fibers, spent almost all of their time talking about education, collected a spectrum of unusual Swedish cars shaped like cinder blocks, made a living by perpetually refinancing their homes and gathered almost every morning for sacred drinking rituals.
It was a very jumpy group.
The Evanstonian cult declined and then disappeared toward the end of the 20th Century.
Specialists suspect sleep deprivation.
“It was all that coffee,” their report concluded.
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Okay, now it’s time to come back from the future for . . . ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE!
The coffee business is getting way out of hand in Evanston, a city of 70,000 souls, many of whom are clearly jones-ing for as much java as they can get.
Few people are ever more than a brief stroll from a cup of 100 proof, 93 octane joe.
The tea-taking set might be growing elsewhere, but in Evanston, there is enough coffee afloat to make your thumbs start jumping involuntarily, which can happen once all that caffeine starts pumping.
It is enough of an industry that it has broken down into various disciplines: Starbucks is the home of quick, dependable corporate coffee. Caffeine is where you take your date for some eye gazing and late night love talk (open until 2 a.m.). Cafe Express on Dempster is the gathering place for real estate agent talk in the morning.
How many coffee shops are there? That depends on how you count. Is St. Louis Bread Co. a coffee shop or a sandwich shop? Do diners and restaurants count,too?
A conservative estimate: 700,000, 10 shops for each resident.*
Welcome to Sherman Avenue, one of Evanston’s little shopping districts.
How much coffee can you drink on one block of Sherman Avenue?
There’s einstein’s bagels on the one corner, then cut across the street and have a cup at Dunkin’ Donuts, then go right next door to Starbucks, then cut straight across the street to the Unicorn Cafe, then go down the street to Barnes & Noble’s second-floor cafe, then go across the street again to the St. Louis Bread Co.
That’s a lot of coffee options for one block of such a small town.
Thirsty on Dempster?
Starbucks is just east of Chicago Avenue, just a jagged, caffeine-driven shuffle from one of Evanston’s most preferred drink-coffee-and-rest-places, Cafe Express.
A few blocks south to Main Street and there is Main Street Cafe, less than two blocks from Mama Java’s. Ramble around town and there’s more of this stuff everywhere, from a Viennese-style coffee shop at Davis and Chicago to Caffeine a few doors north.
How is it that a little town where you couldn’t even buy a stiff drink a while ago has suddenly gone crazy for coffee?
Joe Godek, who manages the Unicorn, says it’s all a question of options. Coffee is not like hamburgers, so it is a hard product to McDonald-ize, he says. Atmosphere is another part of the formula.
In Evanston, Starbucks, which seems to have covered all the bases with shops on Central, Dempster and Sherman, has become the hit-and-run corporate cup of coffee place, even though it has seating areas.
The Unicorn and a whole collection of other shops play a different role.
“We fulfill a need. People will either go corporate to Starbucks or come to a mom and pop kind of place,” Godek says. “You can come in here and relax.”
Up on Central, Irene Dallianis is the part owner of the Bean Counter, just down the street from Starbucks and pretty close to Tag’s Bakery, where customers can get coffee and pastries too.
There is such a thing, she says, as too many coffee shops.
The marketplace takes care of the slackers, she says. Shops are opening and closing all the time. Bean Counter draws its crowds with music on the weekend and a good range of eats during the day.
“People are usually going to choose a corporate coffee place as opposed to an independent,” she says. “They always get the quickie coffee people. We do more to cater to the people than they do.”
The competition with Starbucks is intense, she says, but she doesn’t go in for much criticism of her corporate challenger. What Starbucks has done, she says, is turn the market on to a whole range of coffees. The independents benefit from their interest.
Starbucks people locally don’t have much to say about it at all. They’re not supposed to. The corporate culture creates some unusual problems. You can’t quote Starbucks people by name, but you can use their names if you don’t say they work for Starbucks.
It’s the perfect Catch-22 for coffee workers who don’t want to comment.
But –r–, who works for —- bucks, says the coffee business is thriving in Evanston because the place is so residential. Going to get coffee has become part of the city’s culture. He estimates that 50 to 60 percent of his customers are regulars.
He attributes Evanston’s tendency to create coffee pods, shops right down the street from other shops, to “people trying to ride on our coattails.”
That’s an interesting thought, but it isn’t right.
The pattern in Evanston, long-time coffee addicts note, has been for —-bucks to open up where other coffee shops are already succeeding. The coattails are going the other way, in other words.
Whatever the marketing strategy, the demand is pretty apparent.
“Maybe it really is becoming the city that never sleeps,” says the manager at Unicorn.
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* This is hyperbole, of course, but too much coffee will have that effect.
