No More Lattes With Your Crappy Produce

By Andrew Jenkins in Food on Dec 21, 2006 8:36PM

It looks like 200-ish Starbucks locations in the Chicago area may have been a bit too much. For one reason or another (the company hasn’t given one yet) the coffee-slinging conglomerate announced the other day that it will be closing the 13 cafes it operates in local Jewel grocery stores. Seeing as how we will only peruse the cereal aisle with a double shot and piece of marble cake in hand, we’re not sure what this will mean to our grocery experience — we may have to start frequenting the Starbucks in our Jewel’s parking lot.

And as if this breakup wasn’t bad enough, Starbucks is already moving in with Jewel’s sometimes-better-looking friend. A few of Dominick’s new stores are hoping to target the wood-floor walking, organic-food eating, frappuccino-sipping crowd, so Starbucks will be making its way into those stores shortly after it leaves Jewel locations in early 2007. Crain’s seemed to be hinting that the recent Supervalue Inc. purchase of Albertson’s (and thus Jewel-Osco) could have played a role in the Starbucks announcement, and that in the relatively tight battle to win Chicago’s grocery store heart, any change like this one could end up having a pretty decent effect.

If this news, for some bizarre reason, has you distraught, you can find another Bucks close to you by using this hilarious map. Once we searched Chicago, a fellow Chicagoistonian noted, “It's like an army of coffee cups has surrounded the West Side but is too scared to go in….”