The independent coffee roasters in San Diego are artisan craftsmen who make everything they produce by hand. Of course, the roasting process is done by machines and the roasters aren?t Luddites contemptuous of the modern age, but all of them use machinery in conbination with their own highly developed senses and long years of experience which makes their coffees so wonderful, day after day, batch after batch, year after year. They are the last of the pre-industrial 19th century and as different from large scale food producers as a sweat shop is from a tailor.

Roasters have a personal sense and knowledge about whom they deal with. When it comes to organic, shade-grown, bird-friendly and sustainable coffees, their links are with individual farmers and planters half a world away. The established links between these parties can be proved by a paper trail that list every significant player in the coffee process from the fellow who planted the tree to the roaster. Trust and respect are key values essential to the growth and success of this trade, and a personal identity mixed with the product they sell will do much to increase the sales and acceptance of these specialty coffees in the future. Values and old fashioned, one on one personal qualities are the ticket to growth in the indie trade, for the long term. Unfortunately, the chain of a value-based trade is broken all too often at the critical link of the coffeehouse operator.

The independent coffee seller or coffeehouse owner is another anachronism. Small mom ?n pop shops that rely as much on their individuality as business acumen, they are rare hold outs against the rising suburban-megacorporate complex in which more people live and shop for their daily items. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, there are some 9,800 indie houses in the USA, at least as of 2003, and the indie trade overall earned some $6.1 billion.

That kind of money ought to buy some stability and respect, but it doesn?t. Starbucks is expanding at a great rate, gathering up more trade and doing its raw capitalistic best to kill off as many indies as it can in the name of market domination. Apologists for this kind of economic Darwinism say it?s as American as apple pie. Many people will tell you that Starbucks offers the best of fast food service, convenience and consistency and that?s why they prefer to go there, daily. The ideal seems to mean that progress is speed and convenience and the slow, individualistic and iconoclastic indies and alchemist roasters no longer fit that equation.

If that were really true, the indies would be dead already, but perception isn?t always reality and the indie trade can and should do something about it. What they should do is develop and promote their values as the driving force of the indie trade.

In his three hundred page tome of labored minutiae of self congratulation entitled Pour Your Heart Into It, Howard Schultz, CEO and now ?Global Master Strategist? of Starbucks neglects to mention the word ?coffeehouse? even once. A quick trip to any S?bux or the one across the street from it discloses that they are in the real estate business even more than the dairy business-the majority of their drinks go out the door brimming with cow and they have artfully contrived a language to describe the world of spec coffee to their advantage. Venti, grande, etcetera may as well be counting in Martian, but when Americans describe coffee drinks, the terms are Starbucks. C?est la vie, folks. So what is there to be done about that?

The first thing perhaps for indies to do to counter the mighty mermaid is to stop thinking S?bux is in the same coffee business they?re in. Starbucks is the coffee equivalent of Denny?s and it?s fast food for yuppies and suburbanistas who are far too leveraged to waste time making coffee at home and can?t be bothered with the personality of the indie house while zooming off to work each day. Not that the indies? personalities can?t use, uh, shall we say, some polishing.

The most engaging aspect of any indie coffeehouse is its personality which includes ambience, feel, comfort level and just plain feel-goodness. Some houses have that more than others-comfort is subjective, after all-and ambience derives from an Old French term meaning ?well-being?. How many indies really incorporate well being into their four walls? How many owners understand all the elements that make up ambience?

As ESPRESSO?s readers have pointed out over the years, their first choice for what makes a good house is the one where they feel comfortable. Where the light is good, the air is easy to breathe, the chairs are soft and where the service isn?t painful to engage. The cliche? of the snotty, stinky, inept and socially backward barista is a living, breathing and altogether too healthy reality for too many coffeehouses. But the baristas aren?t to blame for that, at least not entirely. The fault is the result of a lack of values-of the operators. Awful baristas need to be ruthlessly weeded out because they keep people from coming in the door and because the indie house?s best marketing tool is the employee. There are plenty of sources on the net and in libraries that can tell a curious house owner what to look for in someone looking for a job, and finding a person who is not a drug addict, an exhibit for an anger management seminar or an outpatient from the local loony bin shouldn?t be as hard as it seems for some house owners.

Too many indie c?house operators believe that good help is impossible to find. They?re wrong. Good help can only become good after they have been well trained to the job, and that ought to be a combined effort between the house operator and the roaster who sells the house its coffee. Roasters in San Diego are often mortified by what some retailers do their carefully handled beans, but are reluctant to urge the retailers to use better practices. That?s a failure of values. What good does it do to take extraordinary care of a coffee from seed to roaster if the retailer is slack, ignorant or uncaring of the product, staff or business? Would a chocolatier, baker or wine vendor allow a retailer to badly abuse his product and keep his name in a shabby shop where the help could degrade the wholesaler?s image daily? What kind of respect is being paid to the public by houses that would do that sort of thing?

The answer to that last question is ?very little.? Indie coffeehouse owners and staff have no right to be unkind-or as one notable imbecile once put it, ?iconclastic?-to their public, either. Not only is the public in need of that ?third place? after home and work as a refuge and pick me up for what the modern world does to them, but they appreciate the myriad acts of kindness and the human scale interactions in a place where they feel they belong and which lessens the loneliness that is built into modern city living. They pay it back with loyal patronage, too. According to ESPRESSO?s surveys, that loyal patronage averages at five visits per week, at a few cents over five dollars per visit. It means that even if a coffeehouse sees only 20 people an hour, it can still gross a bit less than $250,000 per year. Hardly chump change. It pays to be nice.

It also pays to let the public know that the coffeehouse stands for something. Organic, fair trade, bird friendly, shade grown coffees are a new and developing part of the trade that is value rich because their growth will mean better coffee plantations, a healthier environment for the animals in the regions of the coffee fincas, a more equitable distribution of wealth among those employed in the planting and harvesting of the coffees and a more stable trade and eco-system for the long haul. There are problems with it of course, but there are problems with the French wine industry too, over the same kinds of quality control issues; over time and with public scrutiny, they will stabilize, and that means a big demand for specialty, ?traditional? coffees that could be sold from local roasters in indie coffeehouses. For that to happen, it takes organization from both ends of the trade. It takes outreach and it takes the long view.

Part of that long view must be shown by a more cohesive organization between all the roasters and coffee traders in San Diego. Though they all compete with each other they need to meet eye to eye on core issues of how to expand the trade overall. Their thinking must change from how to cope with saturation in neighborhoods (a completely non-existent issue) to helping entrepreneurs find house locations in the many areas of San Diego where there are none now. Though the San Diego Coffee Alliance has been gone for a decade, something must take its place if the trade wants to keep growing.

The indie houses need to come together too, to find ways that promote them as a class of business instead of a bunch of tiny birds scrapping it out for too little return. The San Diego Food & Beverage Association is probably the best avenue for them to join to get help with essential business services of all kinds, discounts on services and assistance and, importantly, political power with someone in their corner to face off against government when necessary.

The indie houses need to partner with their public and declare that as an essential value as business operators and members of their community, they will do what all they can to assist their patrons in pursuing their worthy interests in the community. The most loved caf?s and coffeehouses in town have done that for years: Judy Forman at the Big Kitchen, Rick Dieterle at Bean Bar, Magali Jay-Snyder at Santos and many others go far out of their way not only to give their customers great product and service, but help people make connections, refer those who need all kinds of assistance to those who can help, provide a showcase for artists, performers and other creatives to gain applause and generally become a power in their neighborhoods and of their tribes. Make no mistake-every coffeehouse in San Diego owes the performers, musicians and other creatives dearly. In 2000, a law was almost drafted that would have regulated coffeehouses the same as bars for purposes of entertainment. Had it passed, coffeehouses would have been crippled, not just by losing entertainment, but as meeting places where creatives would choose to go. When ESPRESSO led the charge against that law, we packed the SDPD public hearings, the City Council chambers and deliberative sessions with hundreds of entertainers-not coffee traders-who demanded that the law exempt the indies. It worked. The creative class known as caf? society came out of the woodwork for the coffeehouses and the trade should be willing to do no less for the public. The ones in the forefront of a more coherent stand on values are the ones making a lot of money at the trade, too. They are Starbucks-proof because their public sees them as human beings running cool businesses that they want to go to. Their values cohere.

What values does Starbucks offer? Are theirs better? Do they not already sell organic coffees, donate to charitable causes and claim to be good corporate citizens? Don?t they pay more to their help? Doesn?t this make them impossible to beat? The answer is that they are not impossible to beat-far from it. Martin Diedrich, former CEO of Diedrich?s Coffee summed it up well when he said ?Starbucks sees the indies as their biggest competitor. They are afraid of the indies because if either side gets the advantages in this trade, the game is over.? Those advantages have everything to do with values. Values in the presentation of your business to the community, values in the quality of what you serve, values in the people who serve what you sell, values in how you treat and compensate the people who move your business forward, values in what your business stands for in the community and values in what you do for your public in that community are things no chain can touch because no chain has the heart the indies do. No chain outlet is as well-tuned to a community as someone who is from that community and who knows everyone by name and is dedicated to serving his community as imaginatively, creatively and completely as possible. No chain has any greater value than the desire for a more profitable quarter than the one before. Sometimes this reality leaks out, and when it does, it exposes Starbucks for the aggressive coffee monster it really is.

Take one example: On 9/11, the New York firemen and medical crews went off in search of any water they could gather to aid victims of the disaster. Water is important in treating shock victims and can save lives if given in time. When the First Responders went to the neaby Starbucks outlets, they found that they had to pay for every bottle of water they got.

No one in the Starbucks organization had the common sense or common decency to willingly give one single bottle of water to survivors of the attack who needed aid.

That refusal is a direct reflection of Starbucks? corporate value system which, as one barista told me means, ?Nothing is free here, ever.? It speaks volumes about the coffee-giant?s so called corporate citizenship and its commitment to the communities it profits from. While no business ever got rich by giving away the store, no one should forget that when the going got to be at its worst, this business remained determined to do ?business as usual? no matter what the cost in lives and to its reputation. Against that level of business behavior; against that kind of thinking, how difficult can it ever be for any independent coffeehouse to make itself into a paragon of respected community interaction at Starbucks? expense? Values are the way to beat this monster?and it?s something they cannot compete against.

As for community involvement, the mighty mermaid long ago issued a directive that all but prohibits discussion groups, poetry readings, musicians, artists or other creatives from accessing the public via their shops. Local publications are scarce there, too. As one regional manager once told me, ?We don?t want your smelly ideas here?. ESPRESSO isn?t alone in that regard; they do not seem to want other publications either-whether they?re apartment guides, Christian literature, health care information for the aged or anything else. Perhaps ideas that may cause customers to linger over them aren?t part of their bottom line.

Perhaps the indies will be able to pay better after they organize and get discounts on insurance, loans and breaks on coffee prices. Let?s hope they do. Let?s hope the roasters and other suppliers organize and offer a better deal not only on coffee, but on machinery and equipment and perhaps entice other supply tradespeople to do the same. Those better organized trades might then offer competitions for excellent baristas with prizes that make the competition worth fighting for. Karen Cebreros of Elan Organic offers trips to coffee growing regions of Central and South America; a paid vacation for San Diego?s premier barista might be a great way to stimulate the regular creation of the perfect shot. Another way to grow the trade would be to find worthy baristas and pledge a degree of support in the form of recommendations to lenders or promises of initial supply of goods if they want to start a new coffeehouse business. The design of coffeehouses could use some tweaking, too. Somewhere there must be a design for a simple one-person kind of house, where everything is literally in arm?s reach of the house operator in a modular system that can be prefabricated and dropped into a suitable building at moderate cost. The list could be endless, but should also include some kind of political watchdog or horsepower enough to reign in the madness at County Code Enforcement that makes life such hell for indie house operators because the inspectors have such capricious leeway in interpreting laws. ESPRESSO has written no end of stories about indie houses that have been hammered by repeated inspections, harassed by inspectors who say one thing one day then demand another the next?this cripples business and it won?t stop until the trade makes it stop and you can?t make it stop until you get a voice and use it.

Lastly, I?d like to leave you with a story. I knew two women once; their names were Victoria and Eleanor. Victoria was a beautiful, buxom blonde, built like Mae West or Anna Nicole Smith. When she entered a room, conversation stopped and all the men turned their heads to stare. She was a woman who knew what she had and how to use it; she was the ideal of feminine beauty. Of course, she married well and lived happily ever after. Eleanor, on the other hand, was a very pretty girl, but she was small, slim, petite, brunette and just not the head-turning knockout Victoria was. She was more like Audrey Hepburn. But she was fiercely competitive and wasn?t willing to take a backseat to her sister. So, Eleanor learned to walk, talk, laugh at other people?s jokes, flirt, and in short, she developed a unique and compelling personal style. She was always dressed to the nines, poised, and dignified. She knew how to make a man feel good and her smile was unforgettable. Eleanor had quite a following who looked to her as an indicator of fashion; they listened when she spoke and considered her every word. Her friends missed her when she wasn?t around and no party was really complete without her. She told her daughter and granddaughter that ?Women are art; everything a woman does is artful.? Her personal artistry made her irresistible to many people and when she died, her funeral packed the church with mourners who felt they?d lost their best friend. Starbucks are the Victorias of the coffee world?they fit the mold of people?s pre-conceived notions exactly?everyone can enjoy them without thinking. The indies are like Eleanor; they have to design themselves from the ground up, invent their personal style, make themselves charming and therefore wanted. They have to lead people to understand their attractiveness and they must always be artful in every sense of that term. The payoff is that it works; their customers love their favorite indie coffeehouse and want no other. Should the indies capitalize on their unique personality, couple it with excellence of style, and really show what they value consistently, then they will snag all the advantages the trade has to offer. And it will be Starbucks that fades into the oblivion they deserve.