A shorter version of the following article was published on the Strong Towns organization blog under the title "The Final Straw? Coffee Shops in the Time of COVID-19". (August 11, 2020)

Cold Days and Coffee Shops

It’s the sort of Midwestern mid-February afternoon that feels about a month late, like it’s trying to make up for lost time by substituting an extra cruel chill for what should be late-winter warmth. It was sunny yesterday and I could see some green through the receding snow; today I am sitting in my car and I can see my breath. I turn off the ignition—when I try to start it again a few hours later the engine will protest heavily before turning over with a shudder. I get out and the wind hits me, cutting through my wool coat like I’m not wearing anything. It wouldn’t matter much if I wasn’t—there’s no one on the street to see me. I walk around to the passenger door and yank on the handle until the frozen rubber seals give way with a creak and the dented door swings open. I retrieve my backpack from the seat, slam the door shut again, and walk a block up and across the street to Theo’s Java Club. I pull on the handle under the little handwritten sign that says “pull” and it opens with a familiar jingle of bells.

Inside it’s warm. The Christmas lights that Theo never takes down glow in the fogged windows, hanging in a haphazard arch over the backwards-from-in-here writing that spells the coffee shop’s name for those still outside in the cold. I order a cappuccino from the barista with the beanie and the mustache. He works here a lot, but he doesn’t know my name and I don’t know his. He stamps my card; next time I’m in I’ll get a free drink. I turn around at the counter and survey the room, checking if the second booth is open. It’s the only one with an electrical outlet in range of my laptop cord. I only see two patrons, the regulars: the old guy in the wheelchair who talks to everyone and the quiet guy, maybe homeless, who comes in for a free black coffee courtesy of whichever barista is working that day.

I settle down in my booth, take off my coat, and pull out my laptop and binder. My coffee arrives in a slightly-too-small off-white ceramic mug. The foam rising just over the chipped rim is in the shape of a heart. I spread my papers across the table—academic articles printed front and back and covered with annotations and highlights. “It’s for my anthropology senior thesis,” I explain to the guy in the wheelchair when he asks, as I knew he would. He already knows I go to college. The tall barista with the arm tattoos and the long black hair emerges from the kitchen and starts talking about the weather with the beanie barista. John Coltrane fills the air from the speakers in the corners of the room. Theo likes jazz—more often than not that’s what’s playing here. The guy in the wheelchair chews his BLT, too loudly. Outside it begins to snow.

An hour passes and suddenly we aren’t the only people here anymore. It’s five o’clock. Men in suits come in and buy pastries: “I need two of the lemon scones, they’re my wife’s favorite!” Some people I vaguely recognize from college—enough to smile at but not enough to say “hi” to—come in with their backpacks and head to a booth. A woman running for state’s attorney comes in with a photographer and a campaign manager. With each entrance the bells ding and a rush of cold air follows the new patrons to the counter. Everyone thinks it’s too cold for February. The same conversation plays on repeat when new people enter: “…especially since yesterday was so warm!” The photographers go to work making their candidate look relatable—she drinks coffee like everyone else! Every few seconds, a camera flash interrupts the dim ambience otherwise maintained by the glow of incandescent table lamps. The old guy in the wheelchair isn’t impressed. He announces he doesn’t like the woman—she looks too much like a politician, and she’s never been in here before. The barista with the beanie agrees, then they start commiserating about cats—the old guy’s keeps urinating on his Wi-Fi router. Someone turns up the music. It’s becoming hard to write my literature review.

I slip my earbuds in and open Spotify on my phone. My jazz has fewer conversations in the background. Another hour passes. I write my literature review. Then it’s time to leave—I have a meeting. As I pack my backpack I begin thinking. Why do I get into my car and drive here to do work I could do at home without having to listen to music to drown out the music already playing? The coffee’s probably a factor—I can’t make a cappuccino at home. There’s something more to it, though. Whether my cup’s full or empty, sitting at booth at the right sort of coffee shop can be invigorating. Theo’s Java Club’s atmosphere carries a productive energy that my desk at home or a table at the college library—not to mention the college coffee shop—can’t match. To be in Theo’s is to be alive with other people who live lives parallel to yet so different from my own.

Unlike my campus Starbucks, filled by an endless stream of 18 to 21-year-olds from Chicago, Theo’s serves Rock Islanders from all walks of life. To be in Theo’s is to be in a different world than the world of the college. No matter what’s happening in my personal life—the life I deal with at college, at my house, in my car—Theo’s is always the same, and here who I am does not matter. Baristas and patrons come and go as the hours pass and I sit in my booth, and yet Theo’s remains frozen in time—the framed newspapers documenting historic floods, the scuffed black and white checkered tile floor, the wall-length chalkboard with its unchanging menu. The predictability and the predictable unpredictability alike comfort me. To me, Theo’s is a sort liminal space. When life gets too cold outside, I enter, drink a cappuccino, write my literature review. Then I pull my coat back on, pack my binder, push the door open—ding—and walk back out into my real life.

Everyone has a Theo’s, I think—the sort of place you can be alone yet surrounded by and together with strangers. The sort of place where you can close your eyes and focus in on the life all around you, then let the smell of brewed coffee and the whir and hiss of the espresso machine fade into the background as you achieve that magical state of mind where the words flow from your head onto the page and form the kind of graceful sentences that you just can’t force. 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 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, whether they know it or not. I call Theo’s a liminal space because it always feels like it’s in between being here and being gone, just on the verge of disappearing. One day I’ll move away, then I’ll come back, pull up to my usual parking space, and it’ll be gone, like it was never there at all. It’ll be an empty building with no framed newspapers or old road signs on the walls, or worse, yet another parking lot. I’ve tried to capture the essence of Theo’s here because I’m afraid it’s slipping away from me.

COVID-19

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 but melted within an hour. It’s spring in the Midwest. I roll down my squeaky driver’s side window and rest my elbow on the rubber seals, drumming my fingers against the metal roof in the inexplicably way drivers do in nice weather. I pull up in front of Theo’s and turn off the ignition. I slip my surgical mask over my nose and loop the straps around my ears before getting out of the car. You can’t sit in Theo’s anymore; the baristas have set all the chairs up on top of the tables to make this point clear. Still, I like to go in, buy a cappuccino to go, and ask the barista with the beanie how his day’s going. I’m almost done with my thesis. I’ve been working from home, like I know many people are now. I still think I write better when I can at least bring a little bit of Theo’s back to my desk in a Styrofoam cup. The background noise is a little different—barking dogs, blaring TV, and freight trains rumbling by outside, instead low conversations and espresso machines—but a good cup of Theo’s coffee and a pair of earbuds (jazz, again) can get me to some semblance of that “flow” place. I dim my table lamp, sometimes, in an attempt to replicate the soft glow of the booths.

Today I’m here to buy a pound of fresh roasted coffee beans in a little paper sack. I’m trying my best to help a business I know is struggling. Last time I was in, the barista with the long hair and tattoos was worried Theo wouldn’t be able to meet the minimum threshold for the monthly supply order, business had dropped off so drastically. When I reach the door there’s a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach—taped to the glass is a cardboard sign that reads “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 17^th, and now that it has, the pandemic feels very real. There would be no drive-through adaptation at Theo’s—that’s not how a place designed to hang out in rolls.

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 reopened the café in a few days. This time, almost a month later and with no end to the pandemic in sight, I hope Theo can afford to reopen at all once the coast is clear. I turn around, pull my mask back off, and get into my car. I feel a little guilty about it, but I drive out of (even emptier than usual) downtown Rock Island and up the hill to the more suburban uptown land of big parking lots and strip malls. I still need some coffee. I pull into the McDonald’s drive through, joining the queue behind a dozen SUVs and pick-up trucks. A mask-less cashier takes my cash and hands me a receipt. She looks tired. I pull ahead to the next window where a different guy in an identical polo shirt and visor hands me my coffee. “Thanks,” I say. He slides the glass panel shut. I drive home, close the door to my room, and try to write. The coffee’s bitter.

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 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. The “decontaminating” single-use zoning and 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 American Midwest, Rock Island 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 ensuing redlining and white flight did the rest. At the end of the 20^th century and beginning of the 21^st, the city government entered its “desperation phase,” shelling out millions on a land clearance project near the downtown in an attempt to attract Walmart. The handshake agreement fell through, leaving the city in debt from which it still has not recovered. 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 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. I don’t have to put on jeans or pack my backpack to go to school. I can still talk to my friends through social media and video chat software. 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. I find I’m beginning to miss the life of the supermarket as much as the life of my favorite local coffee shop. 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. We may even begin to forget how it felt to experience the seemingly meaningless background noise of the coffee shop as the months go on. I’m certainly afraid I will. 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. Ritzer described the changes he observed as a “control revolution” in the world of consumption—suddenly, consumers become unpaid employees dutifully performing the tasks paid workers used to. 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, McDonalds is among the few restaurants still open, drawing long lines of cars desperate for cheap, fast, food. Has the looming yellow “M” has declared victory at last over the slow, inefficient chaos of the local café?

I don’t know all the details of Theo’s economic situation. Downtown, the coffee shop definitely lacks any major competition. Still, shutting down for a month or more is dangerous for any small business. The federal government’s multi-billion dollar small business relief plan, so far, has mainly benefited larger companies (with up to 500 employees) with “deep relationships” to 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 and a while now and look in, hoping to see the glowing “OPEN” sign in the window, glowing lines of steam rising from the neon coffee up. I long to hear the jingle of the bells on the door as some suit-wearing businessman or other walks in to order a scone. 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. It’s not safe yet, of course. For now, I’ll keep working from my desk, and I’ll brew 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 mustached, bespectacled face, and the coffee shop will come to life again, reports of its demise having been greatly exaggerated. It seems likely enough—this “shelter in place” experiment has shown us all what we have to lose. I know I’ll be among the first to crowd into Theo’s as soon as it’s safe to do so and finally be face-to-face with others again. 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. This is the Midwest, after all—it’ll be summer soon, and I’ll need an iced coffee and a cool place to work.

Resilience

It’s the sort of early June day in the Midwest that makes you wish it was February again. Dripping with sweat, I unlock the car door and settle into the driver’s seat, watching the heat rise in visible ripples off the dashboard. It turns out going for a run on Rock Island’s riverfront bike path at 11 a.m. in June is ill-advised. I start the ignition, glad I shelled out to have the air conditioning in my twenty-year-old Ford Taurus repaired last week. The thermometer measures 95 degrees. It wouldn’t be so bad, except for the humidity. On a whim, after pulling out of the parking lot, 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 mustache smiles (I think, though I only have his eyes to go on) as I step inside. He’s lost the beanie—probably a good idea.

“It’s good to see a familiar face!” he says. His is familiar to me too, though I still don’t know his name.

“It’s good to be back,” I reply. I order a Theoccino, Theo’s signature blended coffee drink. I leave my completed stamp card in my wallet—they need the money this time. 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. They said they check our page every day!”

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 inside; 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 small businesses 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’s may not be so lucky.