Starbucks announces location on Stowe’s Main Street

His protest, however, turned out to be in vain. On Wednesday, after a version of this article had gone to print, Starbucks’ corporate communications confirmed that Vermont’s ninth Starbucks location will open at 109 Main St. this winter.

Rhett Palmer, a radio host, among other things, based in Vero Beach, Fla., last week stood in front of the nearly completed building next to Stowe Community Church with a homemade sign protesting Starbucks with a distressed drawing of the coffee maker’s ubiquitous logo.

“We don’t want franchises here, this is why Stowe is special,” Palmer said, who said he visits annually despite not being a homeowner. “You step out into the traffic and people stop. People are very nice, and their cars let other cars go, politeness prevails here. This is impolite and it’s rude.”

“We support mom and pops,” Palmer said. “They’re the backbone of America.”

Others have echoed Palmer’s concerns. In local online forums, where rumors are often discussed as fact without verification, commenters have deemed a potential Starbucks in Stowe as inevitable, weighing in on the quality of its product, the ethics of supporting the coffee giant and whether chains are good for the town.

It was Schrödinger’s Starbucks, and like the cat in the physicist’s famous experiment, both already here and not yet arrived. But no more.

Previously, when prompted by a comment on the Mink Development Facebook page, Cristina Mink, who owns the Main Street building with her husband Graham, said Starbucks wants to open coffee shops in both Stowe and Morristown. She also said Starbucks was looking for a drive-through location in Morristown and still deciding where to open in Stowe between three different locations, with 109 Main St. among the locations being considered.

Mink Development won approval for the construction of the three-story building last summer from the town’s development review board. Last April the board approved changes to the building, including minor exterior alterations and the construction of outdoor seating with a covered porch. This summer, an arcade opened in its basement level.

Mink Development and former professional hockey player Graham Mink are perhaps better recognized for the company’s spearheading of the residential boom in Morristown, where he has most recently butted heads with the Veterans of Foreign Wars over parking.

Coffee competition

Stowe already has a handful of coffee shops.

Girakofi holds territory on Mountain Road alone following the departure of PK Coffee, which closed shop in January following six years of operation.

Down on Pucker Street, The Roastery exists in a stratosphere apart, brewing and wholesaling a kind of directly sourced bean nearly unrecognizable as the same product that Starbucks sells.

There’s the Dunkin’ on South Main Street, connected to the Jolley gas station, and it will always have its partisans in New England. Woodland Baking and Coffee operates from Baggy Knees, and for those who don’t mind a drive, Vermont Artisan Coffee and Tea roasts in Waterbury Center.

Though she has a location directly across from the future home of Starbucks on Main Street and another in Morristown, Laura Vilalta, the owner of the local coffee chain Black Cap Coffee and Bakery, isn’t worried.

“Competition is part of business, and it makes us better,” she said. “We serve high quality food and drinks rooted and sourced in Vermont. We believe that the public, both locals and tourists, will keep supporting us no matter who goes across the street.”

After Starbucks saw a wave of attempted unionizations in 2022, it also faced widespread allegations of illegal union busting, efforts that were criticized by no one nearly as much as Vermont’s long-serving senator, Bernie Sanders.

In March, Sanders led the grilling of Howard Schulz, the company’s former executive, over the allegations, which he denied.

The chain’s South Burlington location unionized last year, making it the first and only location of the eight in Vermont to do so.

Chain reaction

In his argument against chains in Stowe, Palmer claimed that operations like McDonald’s had come and gone without success.

The golden arches flipped burgers on Mountain Road for about 20 years on the property now occupied by Sushi Yoshi, from its contested opening in 1984 to its closure sometime in the early 2000s.

When word came the restaurant was planning to open in town in 1982, it drew some of the same reaction Starbucks currently faces.

In a letter to the editor titled “McDonald’s doesn’t fit in Stowe,” Bud and Carol McKeon voiced fears that the restaurant didn’t fit the image Stowe wanted to project, and worried that its presence would open the Mountain Road to takeover by every national chain imaginable, a future that never came to pass.

A Vermont Supreme Court ruling eventually allowed Ed Jacobsen, whom the McKeons accused of building his Burger ‘n Brew restaurant to the national burger chain’s specifications to circumvent the local zoning board, to open McDonald’s in Stowe in 1984, according to reporting in the Stowe Reporter.

“McDonald’s opens to mob of burger mavens” the Reporter headline read.

While negotiating regulations around the Morristown McDonald’s location in the late 1980s, the corporation argued that the diminutive sign featured at its Stowe location caused it to never live up to expectations, but Morristown planners saw the claim as an attempt at manipulating them into giving the corporation a larger sign.

The chain quietly slipped away at the turn of the century after it had become, as one Stowe High School teen put it in a supplement that students once published in the paper, “slow as hell.”

Other than the long-gone McDonald’s, Stowe has only had one other real fast-food restaurant: a short-lived Kentucky Fried Chicken on Mountain Road, that lasted from 1970 to 1972.

The fried chicken powerhouse negotiated a deal with town leaders at the time not to greatly alter the exterior of Giroux’s Restaurant, which it took over, but the experience sparked a call for stricter zoning regulations in Stowe.

Updated on Sept. 7, 2023, to reflect an announcement from Starbucks that a location will open on Main Street in Stowe this winter, which was received after the original version of this article went to press. Corrected Sept. 11, 2023, to reflect the correct spelling of Laura Vilalta.