We Say What the Chains Don't Want Printed.

"Starbucks brings customers. Then it takes them — and the shop that was there first."

Starbucks Brings Customers — and Then Takes Them

Here is the argument Starbucks defenders make, and they are not entirely wrong: a Starbucks on the corner draws foot traffic. It signals that a neighborhood is worth visiting. It puts people on the sidewalk who might wander into the independent coffee shop two doors down. We have heard this argument. We have seen it play out. And we have also seen what comes next.

What comes next is that Starbucks stays, and the independent shop — the one that was there first, the one that trained the neighborhood to want good coffee — closes. Not because it lost on quality. Not because it lost on price. Because it cannot absorb three years of a corporation willing to operate at a loss on that block until the competition is gone. The foot traffic argument is real. The endgame is also real.

Catholic social teaching calls this a violation of subsidiarity — the principle that economic life should be organized as close to the community as possible, by the people who live with the consequences. A corporation that uses its scale to outlast a family is not competing. It is eliminating. The distinction matters morally, even when the short-term effect on foot traffic looks like a benefit.

We are not asking anyone to stop drinking Starbucks coffee. We are asking everyone to notice what disappears when the independent shop closes — the owner who knew your name, the employee who lived on your street, the lease payment that stayed in the neighborhood. The foot traffic Starbucks brought does not replace what it eventually takes. That is the honest accounting.

Dutch Bros Is Number Two. That Should Worry Starbucks — and Inspire the Rest of Us.

Ask anyone in the coffee industry who is number two in America, and the honest answer is no longer Dunkin'. Dunkin' is older, larger by some measures, and deeply entrenched — but it is not challenging Starbucks. It is coexisting with it. The chain that is actually eating into Starbucks' growth story, stealing its younger customers, and expanding faster than any other coffee brand in the country is Dutch Bros. And the reason Dutch Bros is number two tells you almost everything about why Starbucks is number one — and what Starbucks has quietly lost.

Starbucks is number one because it invented the category. Not coffee — coffee existed. But the idea that a cup of coffee could be an experience, a ritual, a reason to linger, a signal of who you are — that was Starbucks. Howard Schultz walked into a Milan espresso bar in 1983 and came home with a vision: the third place, neither home nor office, where Americans would pay three dollars for something they used to make for pennies. It worked. It worked so completely that Starbucks did not merely dominate the market; it created the market that every competitor now lives inside.

Dutch Bros is number two because it understood something Starbucks forgot. Travis and Dane Boersma started with a double-head espresso machine and a pushcart in Grants Pass, Oregon in 1992 — a small town, not a city, not a trend. They built a culture before they built a company. Their employees are called "broistas." Their drive-thru windows are staffed by people trained to remember your name, your order, and something about your life. The Dutch Bros experience is not the third place. It is the thirty-second place — the window you pull up to on the way to work, where someone is genuinely glad to see you. That is a different promise, and for a generation that grew up watching Starbucks become a corporation, it is a more believable one.

The numbers bear this out. Dutch Bros has grown from 500 locations to over 900 in five years. Its same-store sales growth consistently outpaces Starbucks. Its customer loyalty scores, particularly among customers under 35, are among the highest in the industry. It went public in 2021 and has continued expanding aggressively into the South and Midwest — precisely the markets where Starbucks has always been a coastal transplant rather than a neighborhood fixture. Dutch Bros does not feel imported. It feels like it belongs.

Here is what this means for the independent shop owner reading this paper. Dutch Bros is not your friend — it is a chain, it is publicly traded, and it will eventually face the same pressures that turned Starbucks from a vision into a machine. But its origin story is yours. Two brothers. A pushcart. A small town. A belief that the transaction between a person making coffee and a person drinking it should feel like something. That belief is not a marketing strategy. It is the thing that independent shops carry naturally and that chains have to manufacture. Dutch Bros is number two because it remembered that. Starbucks is number one because it once knew it. The independent shop on your block is the only one that never had to learn it in the first place.

"Dutch Bros started as two brothers and a pushcart in Grants Pass, Oregon. Starbucks started as a single store in Seattle. The difference is what they decided to become."