The Final Straw? Coffee Shops in the Time of COVID-19
Editor’s Note: This week, we are publishing several articles on the essential role food and the food economy play in building stronger and more financially resilient communities. Make sure to follow along with all the articles from Strong Towns Food Week! The article below was excerpted and adapted by the author from a full-length piece, which you can read here.
April 2020
It’s the sort of mid-April day that feels unseasonably warm, today’s green budding trees and colorful tulips a stark contrast to the two inches of snow that fell yesterday and melted within an hour. Spring in the Midwest. I pull into the McDonald’s drive-through, blue surgical mask over my nose and mouth, joining the queue of a dozen idling SUVs and pick-up trucks. Ten minutes later, a mask-less cashier takes my money and hands me a receipt. I pull ahead to the next window where a guy in an identical polo shirt and visor hands me my coffee. He slides the glass panel shut before I can say “Thanks.” I drive home, close the door to my room, and try to write. The coffee’s bitter.
Just a month before, I was sitting in Theo’s Java Club in downtown Rock Island, Illinois, drinking a cappuccino out of a chipped mug while writing my senior thesis as a parade of regulars flowed in and out of the shop around me, the bells on the door jingling to announce the entrance and exit of each character. In a world full of fast food restaurants and drive-through coffee shops, places like Theo’s, with its glowing neon coffee cup sign, blue striped awning, and year-round Christmas lights, feel like incredibly special and fragile things. Theo’s is a pond, a forest, a delicate ecosystem in a warming world, held together only by the people who believe in what it stands for.
Rock Island, IL, circa 1911. Image source.
Yesterday, I was met by a cardboard sign taped to the glass that read “Closed Indefinitely Due to COVID-19.” I had known this day was coming since Illinois’s governor issued the stay-at-home order on March 17th, but once it did, the pandemic felt very real. Theo’s has only closed its doors one other time in the 26 years since it opened, and that was for a record-breaking blizzard. Then, Theo, the café’s mustached namesake, reopened the café in a few days. This time, with no end to the pandemic in sight, I hope Theo can afford to reopen once the coast is clear.
Theo’s is one of only a few small businesses left downtown in the group of blocks Rock Islanders call “The District” neighborhood. The District died slowly. The first blow came courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration—a wide high-speed road called the Centennial Expressway that bypassed the heart of Rock Island and cut the city’s majority-Black West End neighborhood in half. Single-use zoning and the car-centric urban planning epidemic of the 1960s further decimated Rock Island’s downtown. One by one, auto dealerships, supermarkets, and new creations of American capitalism—strip malls, fast food restaurants, and giant indoor malls—followed traffic to the new highways.
Like similar cities across the Midwest, Rock Island has suffered from deindustrialization and downscaling since the early 1970s. The farm implement crisis of the 1980s saw the city’s working-class population decline by half. The great suburban experiment and the ensuing redlining and white flight did the rest. At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, the city government entered its “desperation phase,” shelling out millions on a land clearance project in the West End hoping to attract Walmart. The handshake agreement fell through, putting the city in debt from which it still hasn’t recovered.
Photo by the author.
Once a vibrant hub of small businesses, movie theaters, restaurants, and department stores, a Friday night destination for families, today The District is a series of empty pedestrian malls and vacant storefronts. Statues of the Blues Brothers sit alone on a bench next to a concrete planter. Despite the city’s claims (a “premiere arts and entertainment destination”), The District is a dead place now—except for Friday and Saturday nights when an infusion of college students are bussed in (on a dedicated college-to-downtown transit line) to its bars and nightclubs. A handful of restaurants and secondhand stores persist and, of course, Theo’s. A couple of times each summer a city-sponsored concert or festival brings life to the empty streets and pedestrian malls, conjuring images of the exciting place downtown Rock Island could be. For the most part, though, Jane Jacobs’ mixed-use, compact, lively urban community is nowhere to be found. Theo’s is a vibrant spot in an otherwise empty expanse of dark buildings.
I find I miss Theo’s more each day. Some parts of my new quarantined life are easier than ever. I buy my coffee at drive-throughs without fielding questions from curious regulars or having to drown out conversations with earbud-delivered jazz. I order my groceries online, selecting the products I want with a click of my mouse, and they’re delivered to my door. I don’t have to search for a parking spot, wait in line, or make small talk with a cashier. Another few weeks of this way of living and the Zoom calls and emails and deliveries and drive-throughs will cease to be novel and become mundane—just “the way things are done now.” I hope this doesn’t happen. To see others sitting in Theo’s or in the grocery store is to be seen, to be acknowledged as existing, as really living, as being part of society. I feel as though I’m losing that feeling. We’re all being forced, by public health necessity, for the good of society, into this more efficient, more convenient, more online way of life. Don’t “distance learning” and online grocery shopping and working at home prove that life can be lived more efficiently and affordably through the internet?
In 1993 sociologist George Ritzer proposed “McDonaldization” to describe a concerning development he observed in American society. The fast-food chain tenets of efficiency, quantifiability, and predictability were being applied to America writ large and reworking the dynamics of social interaction. Human beings were the weakest link in the chain of production efficiency and could be replaced by machines in a “self-service” revolution—drive-throughs, ATMs, and grocery store self-check-out lanes are but a few examples. He chose the name “McDonaldization” because the ubiquitous restaurant chain’s fast, cheap, predictable delivery of identical hamburgers (and coffees) perfectly represented the problem he identified with society. And indeed, in the age of Coronavirus—in Rock Island at least—McDonald’s is among the few restaurants still open, drawing long lines of cars desperate for cheap, fast, food. Has the looming yellow “M” declared victory at last over the slow, inefficient chaos of the local café?
Photo by the author.
Shutting down for a month or more is dangerous for any small business. The federal government’s multi-billion dollar small business relief plan has mainly benefited larger companies (with up to 500 employees) with “deep relationships” with banks. Companies who’ve been forced to lay off workers—restaurants being a key example—are ineligible for loan forgiveness. In this way, Theo’s is a sort of microcosm for the state of small businesses in this country. The American financing economy has once again favored big businesses and chain restaurants over small businesses hardest hit by the crisis. Small, locally owned shops like Theo’s get by on the razor edge of operating efficiency in the best of times but face disaster when the engine of American capitalism falters.
I drive by Theo’s once in a while now and look in, hoping to see the glowing “OPEN” sign in the window, red lines of steam rising from the neon coffee cup. I want to sit in a booth again, to hear the life of conversations, to see the smiling faces of the baristas I know by face but not by name. For now, I’ll keep brewing my coffee at home. But someday soon, as I drive through downtown Rock Island, I hope I’ll see Theo with his ring of keys opening the front door, a smile on his bespectacled face, and the coffee shop will come to life again, reports of its demise having been greatly exaggerated. If nothing else, this seems as good a time as any to start thinking about how we can better value our small businesses and rework the economy and downtowns to be people first, profit (and cars) second. Maybe Ritzer is right, and the domination of rationalization, of McDonaldization, is inevitable. Perhaps the Theo’s coffee shops of the world won’t last forever. For my sake, and the sake of those like me who need their local Theo’s to feel alive together with others, who revel in the background noise, I hope that’s not the case.
June 2020
Photo by the author.
It’s the sort of early June day in the Midwest that makes you wish it was April again. I check the car thermometer—95 degrees. It wouldn’t be so bad, except for the humidity. On a whim, I turn one corner early to drive past Theo’s. I’m shocked to see the glowing “OPEN” sign lit once again. Trying not to get my hopes up, I pull into a parking space and put on my mask. With a familiar jingle of bells, the door swings open and I’m back home again. The barista with the beanie smiles through his mask as I step inside, delighted to see a familiar face.
I order a Theoccino, Theo’s signature blended coffee drink. As I wait for my drink, the barista and I make small talk about how our quarantined lives have been going. At the same time, Theo emerges from a back room.
“We had a really good day yesterday,” he says, patting another barista on her shoulder, “and don’t you worry, we’re going to build this thing back up.”
She nods back at him. “A lot of people that came in yesterday said they stalk our Facebook and were waiting for us to reopen.”
I decide to buy two of the mugs they’re selling as a fundraiser. Then I take my drink, drop a tip in the jar, and walk outside into the heat. You can’t hang around; the chairs are still piled up on the tables to make that point clear. Still, I feel a little reassured by what I heard inside. According to the Washington Post, at least 100,000 small businesses have already shut down permanently since the pandemic escalated in March, and a recent survey by Main Street America shows over 7.5 million more are at risk of closing permanently. Theo’s isn’t among them, yet, but countless small shops critical to the fabric of downtown communities like Rock Island may not be so lucky.
About the Author
Christian Elliott is a recent graduate of Augustana College with a Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology and environmental studies. As a student of anthropology, he believes in bringing together objective research and subjective personal experience to tell true stories about people and the places they call home.
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