Starbucks' cup to run dry in Albert Lea

ALBERT LEA, MINN. - For Kim Nelson, 16, Albert Lea's Starbucks was a gathering spot. Friends studied there together during final exams, and the coffee gift cards were their birthday present of choice.

But Nelson and friends -- some of whom drank Starbucks daily -- are in mourning. Albert Lea's only Starbucks, and one of the city's few coffee shops, is among the first 50 announced closings of 600 locations that will shutter nationwide.

Kelly Nelson, Kim's 14-year-old sister, summed up the feeling: "It feels like we're shrinking down to a yucky town."

Indeed, in many rural towns around the country, when a Starbucks opened it became Someplace, a sign that residents and their visitors knew and understood chic, dark-roasted coffee that was once thought of as an urban phenomenon.

In Albert Lea, the Starbucks is a far cry from big-city shops that often brush elbows with fashion retailers, five-star restaurants and financiers.

It sits on a divided highway, sandwiched between a Taco John's and a Perkins, and overlooking a plethora of auto-parts retailers and value-priced hotels.

Starbucks had become a new symbol of aspiration for towns like Albert Lea, a city of about 18,000 near the Iowa border, said Kevin Upton, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Minnesota. In the 1920s, people hoped for a train station; in the '50s, they hoped for an airport to put their town on the map, in a sense. "If you had more people, you'd have those things," he pointed out.

"They'd lost sight of the reason people selected them as their coffee drinking option," Upton said. Starbucks used to be seen as "a special place where you can get special coffee drinks, be treated in a special way, and therefore be a seen as a special person."

Since 2000, Starbucks underwent rapid growth, expanding not only in the United States but overseas. The company owns and operates about 7,000 stores domestically, although there are more than 15,500 stores worldwide, a figure that includes licensing partnerships.

The corporate vision of exclusivity doesn't necessarily fit small-town America, Upton said. "If I can get Starbucks in Tiny Tree, Wis., then it's not a specialty store anymore."

A statement from Starbucks Chairman, President and CEO Howard Schultz to the company's partners and employees said the economy and poor real estate choices lay behind the closings. Most of the stores being closed had opened in the last two years and were locations that were not profitable, the statement said.

The manager of the Albert Lea Starbucks wasn't talking about profitability, but Randy Kehr, executive director of the Albert Lea-Freeborn County Chamber of Commerce, said as a whole, the Albert Lea community just seemed more like a coffee-black-to-go town than a venti-latte-no-foam city.

He downplayed Starbucks' 2005 arrival, noting that when Applebee's opened four years earlier, it was a much bigger deal. "Our community had been asking for national restaurant chains," he said.

Alice Hanson, 61, of Albert Lea, said the location, on a divided highway just off the freeway but miles from downtown and the city's shopping mall, might not have been convenient for some people.

Employee Kammi Struck, 17, said the announcement of the closing blindsided the employees. Her manager called a couple weeks ago and told her, "We're one of the [first] 50 Starbucks closing."

"I cried for like a hour," Struck said, noting that some of the regular customers also shed tears when they heard the news. "I'm here every day -- it's like my second home."

Emma L. Carew • 612-673-7405