I found myself in Sisters Thursday night for a city council meeting, and flipped open my laptop in search of Wifi. A network! After some futzing, I guessed the password. But alas, the network would not assign me anything other than an IP address starting with 169… and I figured either they forgot to connect the base station to the network, or they are employing MAC address screening, too.

I guess I might as well let the cat out of the bag now. If you haven’t deduced it already, I am in fact the writer of these fine articles, among others. What’s that? You can’t get to them cuz you need a password? Sucks, I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so direct your complaints elsewhere. Or direct them here and I will smile and nod.

So there I am, sitting at City Council, thinking that I am a genius for guessing the (obvious) password, only to find that I can’t actually get online. Which means I can’t file my story from the meeting, but must drive back to the newsroom in Bend. Which, to meet the copy deadline, means I must leave the meeting before they get to the topic of the story that I had pre-written a large portion of: a Wifi cloud coming soon to Sisters. The story ended up in today’s papers, but if there had been functional Wifi in City Hall, you would have seen it yesterday. I would link to the story here but the software that puts all the stories online and indexes them is spazzing out these days, so I can’t find it. It’s at the top of C1 in today’s paper if you’re one of the cool people with a subscription.

Ah, well. Baby Steps.

In other news, props to Ray’s for better bagging practices and that awesome sale on chicken breasts. Anti-props to the Wall Street Journal for missing my delivery every day this week since last Saturday. It wasn’t snowing that much, guys.

I got all fired up reading Anna’s post below and some of the news articles in the last day, so here goes…

It’s been five years since I quit working at Starbucks, my first “real job” and one that I held down for most of high school. Towards the end of my time, Starbucks rolled out the vile “automatic bars” and we protested them loudly. They were in fact slower than a well-trained barista, the coffee tasted worse, and the operator had no control over tamp pressure, the amount of coffee grounds used, water temperature, or even milk temperature. I became so mad at the machines one morning during the rush when both kicked into their automatic cleaning cycle, rendering them inoperable for about 60 seconds each, that I kicked in the top grille of one. Considering that the tops of those are almost as tall as me and I was hardly athletic back then, I must have been mad.

But the point remains: Starbucks/Schultz and Co. only care about growth. You can’t keep growing and maintain those personal touches at the same time. Coffee quality has gone down the drain, employees are not trained to the same standards of customer service, and more often than not I walk out there feeling like I paid too much for something that tastes terrible. It’s been a while since I’ve been in one, and with much better choices around, like Ka’va and Dilusso here in Bend, I don’t see myself going back anytime soon.

I came across this piece of breaking news in the Seattle Times. Apparently, Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz sent a memo to top executives lamenting that the Starbucks experience has been “watered down.”

Basically Schulz no longer wants Starbucks coffee shops to feel “corporate” and “cookie cutter.” He wants people to walk into a Starbucks store and get that warm, neighborhood feeling. He wants people to feel the Starbucks passion for roasting coffee each time they walk into a store.

Simply put, Schulz wants to “de-Starbuckify” Starbucks.

I am highly amused by this article. How do you insert creativity into a model that has been successful worldwide? Will there be a financial cost to the creativity Schulz desires?

Part of the success of Starbucks is its predictability. For example, I was at a Starbucks in London’s Gatwick airport last summer. I walked up to the counter, and saw a familiar sight — the Starbucks menu on the blackboard. The same menu exists in Starbucks coffee shops in the United States. The place felt familiar — smooth, corporate, warm, and undeniably American. I know that a Starbucks restaurant in London will have my favorite grande nonfat raspberry latte, that it will have the same comfortable chairs, and the same smooth jazz CDs as in my Starbucks back home in Seattle.

In my opinion, Starbucks coffee shops will always feel like corporate chains, never like neighborhood coffee shops. Why? Because the neighborhood coffee shop has its own special feel to it that a corporate chain will never be able to simulate. The clientele is different. The art is spectacularly different. The layout is different. Starbucks will need to break out of the mold that makes it familiar to travelers in order to approach the neighborhood coffee shop’s appeal. And I don’t think Schulz will let the company do that.

So read the article. Tell me what you think.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003585973_webstarbucks23.html

I’ll get the confession right out there: I only reuse grocery bags when it is blindingly convenient, e.g. if they’re sitting in the passenger seat or if I have to step over a pile of them to get out of the house. Yes, I’m that guy who lets seagulls suffocate by saying nothing when the plastic bags come out, and even when I have a neatly folded selection of brown bags next to the dishwasher, they just multiply.

And despite all my obvious shortcomings, I still am appalled at the poor level of bagging technique that I’ve seen since I’ve been in Bend. My two trips to Safeway constitute an ideal sample, and I figure the margin of error of my findings is about 50 percent. Good enough for government work. Most recently, it was a $120 trip to get all those perishable essentials you need when you move in; before that it was $140 for all the dry goods. And both times, we came out of there with no less than 15 plastic bags, each completely underfilled. Cascade dishwashing detergent powder got its own bag. So did a loaf of bread, not to mention a quart of vegetable oil.

Even if I’m a bit at fault for failing to bring my own bags, isn’t crappy bagging like this only making matters worse by using up way more bags than necessary? My wee kitchen garbage can was filled with empty plastic bags after all was said and done. (Oh, the irony.)

Then on the flip side: When I was in Chicago last year, I once had a conversation with a Trader Joe’s checker, about how TJ’s checkers routinely do a fantastic job of getting everything into as few paper bags as needed. He said most TJ’s employees have excellent spatial skills. More than that, they were aware of what they were bagging: frozen stuff together, dry goods together, and so on. Same trip, only 3 or 4 bags.

Ergo, TJ’s needs to hurry up and get here. Safeway needs some competition in the bagging department.

We made it to Bend last Monday after a glorious 8.5-hour drive from the Bay Area, and we’ve been holed up at the Phoenix Inn since then. House (the rental kind), check, but we can’t really move in cuz the moving company decided to let our stuff sit in a warehouse instead of driving it up here. Inshallah it will arrive Wednesday.

Hot:

• Growlers. We had local beer at least once a day between Monday and Friday. Our reigning favorite is the Deschutes Brewery, though I cannot deny the appeal of local’s nights on different days at all the brewpubs.
• Our landlords. They gave us new fire extinguishers and a little pot of red tulips to welcome us.
• Bend City Council. They’re suing the bus resale company in SoCal that sold them crappy buses.
• Our house. Soooooo amazingly cute. Gas range. Built-in bookshelves. Yard with ample room for barbecuing. Garage with room for car and fuselage of homebuilt plane I don’t yet have.
• Our waiter at Bluefish Bistro last night. Highly entertaining guy, yet he would not give us the bottle remnants from the open bottles when we were the last table to leave. It’s okay, we won’t hold it against you.
• This thing. I seriously need it. Even though I will never have an opportunity to use it. When you need a snow thrower, this is the kind of beefy thing that should be in every garage. Six forward speeds and two reverse speeds! The pic isn’t quite what I played with at Costco, which is 11hp and has a lever to control the pitch at which it discharges snow.

Not:

• Phoenix Inn Wifi. “Intermittent” doesn’t even begin to describe our agony.
• North American Van Lines. Why move when you can just keep everything in a warehouse?
• 55 mph speed limits. So slow for no good reason. That goes for all highways (but not interstates) in Oregon.
• Home prices. $345,000 for a house with the original 1950s kitchen, including GE Cook-o-Matic De-Luxe? I think not.
• Central Oregon weather forecasts. Maybe we just hit an off week, but they’ve all been terribly, horribly wrong. If they were right we’d have at least 3 inches of snow on the ground. Instead it rained a bit yesterday.

I love Grey’s Anatomy. I feel that so far, it has been pretty accurate in its portrayal of Seattle. Parts of the show are shot locally — on ferries, in parks, and in nearby national forests. As the show finished this evening, a teaser played for next week’s episode.

Cue deep-voiced announcer:

“In a city of four million people, anything can happen.”

Whoa. Hold up. Seattle is NOT home to four million people. The Greater Puget Sound region, which includes three counties in addition to Seattle (including the cities of Bellevue, Everett, and Tacoma), IS home to four million people. Seattle proper is home to just 560,000.

It’s an error. What’s the big deal, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. I don’t like seeing my city misrepresented in the media. I don’t like seeing such a HUGE mistake about Seattle’s population on an extremely popular television show. And, this is a bit political. Mayor Gridlock (aka Mayor Nickels) wants to develop (read: overdevelop) Seattle. He envisions the city proper as home to one million someday — I don’t remember the exact time period, but I remember thinking “wow, that’s soon.” That would double our population. And, knowing Seattle, the infrastructure would stay exactly the same. This means that our traffic, already some of the worst in the nation, would just get worse. The air quality, which can get pretty bad in the summer (and right now, when we have a temperature inversion going on), would be awful some days. The dead zones in Puget Sound would grow. The quality of life in Seattle would seriously suffer.

Maybe I’m turning into your stereotypical Seattleite — you know, the latte-drinking, tree-hugging, unfriendly, polar fleece-wearing, cantankerous hiker who wants all Californian transplants to please, in the words of Emmett Watson, GO BACK HOME! We Seattle natives are vastly outnumbered by transplants. It’s like we’re becoming an endangered species. My theory is that because we’re outnumbered, we’re hyperprotective of this lovely city — to the point that when images of Seattle’s beauty were broadcast throughout the US during last year’s football NFC conference championships, a (Seattle native) friend of mine said “Oh no — don’t show how nice it is! That’ll make everybody want to move here!” We cringed every time a shot of the Space Needle in the sunshine (this happened to be one of the first sunny days after a streak of 29 rainy ones) played before a commercial break. Oh, and the stereotypical Seattleite? We’ll wave, smile politely, and tell you to have a nice trip, but don’t forget to turn off the lights before you leave. That’s Seattle-speak for “f–k you, sucker!”

In a tribute to Seattle “niceness,” I went to abc.com and filed a complaint. I expect that other Seattleites who feel threatened by the Grey’s Anatomy commercial will file similar complaints. Maybe there will be enough for ABC to pull the ad. I wish.