Weekly News Column Opinion and Laughs on The Record

A Quest for Coffee

Jeff Borgardt's Soundoff from Summit Column 8/10/05

  I usually start the day with a cup of coffee.
    Morning coffee is bought at Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds or Burger King.
    At Dunkin Donuts, it’s always a medium coffee with cream and sugar. Perhaps Dunkin is my favorite coffee.
    The employees add the cream and sugar for you.
    This is advantageous since it saves you the time bundling with little cups of cream, ripping small packets of sugar and disposing of this refuse along with the stirrer.
    However, I sometimes suspect that the Dunkin employees put more sugar into the cup of coffee than I would normally add.
    Often, I’d stop at the Burger King on Archer and Harlem for my morning cup of jove. However, this eatery was demolished and a new one is being erected. So, I’ve found myself driving down Archer into Garfield Ridge for a McDonald cup of morning coffee or else the Dunkin Donuts on Harlem at 63rd and the new Dunkin on Archer at JJ Peppers is also opening.
    About once a week, I brew my own coffee on the kitchen coffee machine.
    I also enjoy eating out for breakfast. In those cases, we are talking about two or possibly even three cups of morning coffee.
    On those days, I resemble a steroid-driven athlete. I’m a
performance enhanced editor - until the caffeine wares off.
    So, that’s pretty much it for my adventures in coffee.
    Compare to a guy named Rafeal Lozana. Eight years ago, he made it his life’s mission to visit every Starbucks in the world.
    To date, he claims to have visited 4,775 Starbucks in North America and 213 Starbucks in other parts of the world.
    (There are a total of 5,715 stores.)
    The 33-year old Lozana is a computer programmer who goes by the name Winter.
    On his website starbuckseverywhere.net he writes “Hello, my name is Winter and since 1997 I’ve been trying to visit every Starbucks in the world. Why? Well, I’m not obsessed, if that’s what you’re thinking...No, my reason is simply to do something completely different.”
    According to the site, Winter will be in Chicago at a Starbucks on Thursday, Aug. 11.
    According to an Aug. 10 AP article, Winter’s personal daily record is 29 Starbucks stores in one day.
    The AP article quotes the caffeine madman. “Every time I reach a Starbucks I feel like I accomplished something,” Winter said.
“When actually I accomplished nothing.”
    Filmmaker Bill Tangeman has joined the coffee road trip to make a documentary movie called “Starbucking.”
He tells Soundoff from Summit that this week’s AP article has triggered a national media response. He insists that Starbucks public relations executives are not bankrolling the coffee campaign and says Winter “spends every penny he makes going to Starbucks” due to a collector-style obsession.
    A Texas native, Winter began aspiring to visit every Starbucks in his home state, then the nation and now the world.
    “Its really a compelling story,” Tangeman says. “How many
Starbucks have you been to?”