Starbucks

The Cherry Hill Mall's $200 million makeover, while expected to boost the mall's appeal when finished, is taking a toll on merchants in the short run. Starbucks Corp. said yesterday it would close one of two sites there, and other merchants have noted a decline in shoppers. "Usually a lot of people walk around exercising in the morning," coffee drinker Ernie Alejo, sitting at the food court, said yesterday. "They stopped because of all the inside construction. A lot of things have closed.

Latte-lovers shuddered yesterday to hear Starbucks was closing nine of its 115 caf?s in the Philadelphia area among 600 nationwide. But, really, there was no need to panic. Where one Starbucks is going under, it seems, another is just around the corner. And another, and another, and another. Therein lies the problem that got Starbucks into this whole mess. The Seattle company that transformed coffee from a mud-slurping morning routine to a daily luxury indulgence is now closing a big batch of outlets to stem losses.

Joseph Grasso, the Philadelphia real estate and business developer, is jumping into the red-hot gourmet-coffee boom with a milder, homier alternative to Starbucks. His firm, Walnut Street Capital, completed the purchase last week of Atlanta-based Saxbys Coffee Worldwide L.L.C. for an undisclosed price. Saxbys headquarters is moving to the Curtis Center, across from Independence Hall. Grasso and partners own the former headquarters of the Curtis magazine empire. He is building a mock-up coffee shop there, where dozens of managers and potential franchise owners will soon be trained each month.

Cappuccino babes of the world - get naked. Playboy magazine plans to do a picture spread on the "Women of Starbucks," and is asking latte-makers from its more than 6,200 coffee shops worldwide to send in photos. Playboy's Theresa Hennessey said: "Starbucks is such a big part of American pop culture, and Playboy is always trying to stay on top of the latest trend, so it seemed like a natural fit . . . " Starbucks has not warmed to the idea of the joining of these two cultural colossi, saying that it does not endorse the nude-coffee-makers issue.

A glint of violence more common around stop-and-gos in the city's rough neighborhoods struck a busy Starbucks in South Philadelphia, where on Saturday, for no apparent reason, a man repeatedly stabbed a patron waiting for his order, including once in the face. Police said the 5:44 p.m. assault, which left the 29-year-old victim in critical condition yesterday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, remained under investigation. It was unclear whether the attack stemmed from an argument or was just an outburst by a deranged person.

Can this relationship be saved? Or is trouble brewing over a steamy . . . hot . . . cup of Starbucks coffee? His story: Whenever it's time to correct term papers, Temple religion prof David Watt parks himself in front of the big window at New World Coffee, where he can see Rittenhouse Square across Walnut Street. He grabs a cup of decaf latte and gets to work. "I bet my students get higher grades because I'm a happy guy," said the associate professor. Weekends, when his girlfriend, Laura Levitt, an assistant religion professor at Temple University, visits, they sit at New World, happy with the view, the coffee and each other.

Even on a Monday night, in this quiet community far from city lights and thumping dance beats, there is a steady stream of people lured by that seductive mermaid on all those coffee cups. A man with slick, black hair wants one of those cups. Actually, two - one for him, and one for that blond he met over there. "Two doppio espresso macchiatos," he says at the counter of the Starbucks on State Street. "Tall. " "Tall" is Starbucks lingo that Tom Peters learned a few years back when the coffee chain opened a store in the borough, which has been transformed by coffee-sipping window-shoppers who linger late into the evening.

Starbucks is easy to make fun of. It's ubiquitous, cookie-cutter corporate, and - now that your grandmother gets her coffee there - far from cool. They skewered it on The Sopranos, showing a mafioso so incensed by the perceived purloining of Italian cafe culture, he steals a Starbucks coffeepot. In the movie Best in Show, a couple describe how they met, first noticing each other as they sat in separate Starbucks stores across the street. But now a bespectacled Temple University researcher wants you to think about Starbucks in a different way. Hunkered down among the caffeine-jones-ing latte lappers, risking deafness from the airplane roar of the milk-foaming machinery, Bryant Simon sits alone with his Apple PowerBook G4, chronicling the Starbucks zeitgeist.

Starbucks? Or Three Beans? That is the question. For nearly nine years, two coffee shops have dominated and coexisted in Haddonfield. Each one thrives - booms, in fact. Yet, aside from one obvious similarity - both sell coffee - the shops are completely different. And each has a fiercely loyal clientele. Starbucks, in the center of town, at the corner of Haddon Avenue and Kings Highway, is one of 8,949 Starbucks worldwide, part of a chain that had revenues of $4 billion in 2004.

At Starbucks Coffee Co., the chief executive, Howard Schultz, refers to his espresso-serving employees by the glamorous Euro-moniker "baristas. " At The Last Drop coffeehouse, the guy tapping the cappuccino machine identifies himself with a shrug as "the coffee jerk. " Different coffeehouses for different folks. And all, say those in the coffee industry, should be able to live together in jittery harmony. When Starbucks opens its first Philadelphia shop at 16th and Walnut streets next Friday, it will be entering territory pioneered by small-business owners: local coffee lovers who carved out a market for gourmet coffee bars where none had existed.

SO YESTERDAY I was at Starbucks with Kathleen Kane, discussing our transvaginal ultrasounds. I had one 17 years ago, after a miscarriage. Kane underwent three of them in more recent years, also after losing a pregnancy. How do we feel about it? Let's just say that the passage of time hasn't mellowed our memories. Kane found her ultrasounds "invasive, uncomfortable and often humiliating. " My experience was similar, despite the sensitivity, kindness and professionalism of the technician administering the diagnostic test.

And now, for Part Two of my annual year in review, in which I pause to bring readers up to speed and answer questions like, "Whatever happened to that guy who lived in the Starbucks?" Oh, you mean Dennis Jones? Jones was the homeless man who spent 12, 14 hours a day at the Starbucks at Broad and Pine Streets, finding comfort in an unlikely urban family. He kept plugging his laptop into an outlet by the front corner window even after revealing his secret, securing mental-health services, and moving into a subsidized apartment.

Four years ago, after Broad Street Ministries opened an overnight homeless refuge across from the Kimmel Center, the Rev. Bill Golderer noticed clients "migrating" down the block to the Starbucks at 6 each morning. Most warmed up and departed quickly. Dennis Jones moved in. "The business model is, you get your drink, you eat, and you leave," Golderer explained, recalling his concern. "You're not there for six or eight hours. " Or 12, 13, or 14 hours, which is often how long Jones still lingers.

Anyone with measleslike symptoms who has not been fully vaccinated and who has visited any of several locations in Bucks, Berks, Delaware, and Lehigh Counties should immediately contact his or her medical provider, the Pennsylvania Department of Health said. Officials said that an unvaccinated person who was exposed to someone with measles on July 11 in Morgantown had since become sick. Authorities tracked possible exposures to public places that included Starbucks, 443 E. Baltimore Pike, Media, from 7:15 to 11:45 a.m. last Friday, and Hot Spot Restaurant on Old Dublin Pike, Doylestown, from 6 p.m. till closing the same day. For more information, call 1-877-724-3258 or go to www.health.state.pa.us . - Don Sapatkin  

Valerie L. Harris Stukes, 65, an Acme Markets employee for 30 years and a former resident of Williamstown, Gloucester County, died of heart failure Sunday, May 29, at Summerlin Hospital in Las Vegas. Mrs. Stukes joined Acme as a clerk in the early 1970s. She was friendly and outgoing, said her daughter, Tanya, and eventually became a customer-service representative at Acmes in Germantown and Mount Airy. For several years before retiring in 2004, Mrs. Stukes managed the Starbucks concession at the Acme in Bala Cynwyd.

A 33-year-old man wanted for robbing at gunpoint a woman holding a 1-year-old child outside a Starbucks coffee store in Wayne has surrendered to Radnor Township police. Hassan Grimes was arraigned early Saturday at the Upper Darby Police Department, according to Mainline Media News. Grimes was charged with robbery, reckless endangerment and related offenses. He failed to post ten percent of $150,000 bail and was sent to Delaware County Prison, the news agency said. The robbery occurred at 9:30 a.m. Thursday at 216 E. Lancaster Ave. The robber put a gun to the woman's temple, police said.

Warning, irony ahead: In Twelve Thirty , the Church of the Open Door is locked closed. That's about as subtle as writer/director Jeff Lipsky's maddeningly talky family drama gets. Set in a sterile, suburban swath of Iowa City, the film follows Jeff (Jonathan Groff, from Glee ), a boyish and blank twentysomething, as he has sex with the girl he eyed from afar in high school (Portia Reiners), and then with her older, still-a-virgin sister (Mamie Gummer), and then with the girls' mother (Karen Young)

A seafood-centric restaurant and condo project planned for the landmark former Wilkie Buick-Chevrolet-Subaru dealership on North Broad Street will have two key ingredients - Stephen Starr and Marc Vetri. Restaurateur Starr is fielding the dealership conversion into 98 condos. Chef Vetri will get in on the ground floor - literally - with a 140-seater slated to open in September 2011. No name yet, but the restaurant will have an outdoor courtyard with fire pit and horseshoe court. Fortune tellers see the future in tea leaves.

After the divorce was final this spring, Ylanah Sloane turned her bedroom at 13th and Spruce into a studio. She sold the mattress, slept on the floor, and gave her butcher-block table a second chance as an easel. Every morning she set out her palette and brushes and paper on the flat surface that stood about four feet high, took a deep breath, then tried to paint flowers that she could barely see. Roses were first. "I've always loved roses," she said. She had to hold the vase close, to see through pinholes in the cataracts that have covered her eyes since birth.

A pair of masked men armed with a stun gun ambushed two Bryn Mawr Starbucks employees early Friday as they prepared to open for the day, police said. The bandits entered the popular coffee shop at 766 Lancaster Ave., at 5:15 a.m. and forced the baristas to the floor behind the counter, said Lower Merion police Superintendent Michael J. McGrath. The robbers took approximately $800, he said. The men used a stun gun to shock the employees, who suffered superficial wounds, McGrath said.