"Welcome to the Metropolitan Market Café!"
That was the greeting we received when we rounded the corner to the front lobby of said market. That and a giant, bland sign listing the coffee drinks this new "café" will be selling. "Are you fucking kidding me?" is what we wanted to say to the lady behind the counter, wearing a sparkling clean apron and Lisa Loeb glasses. Instead, we rolled our glazed eyes from her face up to the strips of brown butcher paper covering most of the logo of our favorite Seattle coffee establishment. "We'd better still be asleep," we said, not really under our breath. "And this'd better be a nightmare."
No more Peet's Coffee at the new lower Queen Anne Metropolitan Market. Oh shit. No. More. Peet's.
We sort of knew this was going to happen, what with the hoopla of Larry's Markets being suddenly sold off to the highest bidders earlier this year. And the transition from Larry's to Metro had begun in earnest, with the signage changing, and then specific sections of the store being tucked away behind murky plastic sheeting. And there was the nice display table set up in the lobby, right beside Peet's, as a matter of fact, where large signs and fancy comment cards encouraged patrons to give the new ownership their two cents—"Tell us what you'd like to see!" Or something like that.
We know all this because we dropped into the store to get coffee four out of five weekday mornings. Because we love Peet's Coffee. Because it's the best fucking coffee we've found anywhere, and far superior to the brew our local world-dominating-mega-roaster pours. (Yes, Caffe Ladro, yours is next on the list. But we'd love you more if you didn't make us listen to your lame barista-gossip while we waited in line.)
Numb, we take out our wallet and stare at our recently charged Peet's card (it was Friday—just three days ago, when Peet's still existed), heavy with 20 electric, worthless dollars. We look up from our wallet to Lisa- Loeb-in-an-Apron and must have been pale-faced with shock. "Don't worry, this one's on us," she says.
It's a small consolation, and initiates an embarrassing exchange: Lisa says they haven't figured out their coffee makers yet—that one of them brews too strong, and the other too weak. They haven't figured out the right combo of ground beans to water, in other words. Not a good sign for this new establishment. That's okay, we say, still in disbelief. Whatever, we think, none of this matters now. Life is over. We're then presented with four cups of coffee (and find that their "small" is indeed, literally, very small): two of them are the "strong" brew, and the other two the "weak." We told Lisa that we favor strong coffee, but apparently that didn't matter. So we grab a couple of lids and find that they're too big. They'd fit a normal small cup, but not these tiny things. Oh, Lisa says, we still have Peet's lids out here. Ours are in the back. And she makes to run back there to retrieve them. Feeling the knife twist in our guts, we tell her we could just pour this stuff into a larger cup. Look, the larger cups you have right there. She says good idea! and hands over four bigger cups. Oh, good Christ.
When this is behind us, and we're back on the road to work (with half-full cups of strong/weak coffee that taste like cardboard ass), we repeatedly recount what just happened, and lament the loss of the best coffee (despite its grocery store kiosk-ness) in Queen Anne. What really pisses us off about this development? We wrote a little something in one of those Metro comment cards, something that was obviously ignored.
"Please, whatever you do, for the LOVE OF GOD," we wrote, "Don’t get rid of Peet's Coffee."
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