The lack of timeliness in the New York Times’s coverage of cultural trends is a long-standing joke. Today, the Paper of Record has discovered that there are Starbucks everywhere:
In New York, said Alan Hilowitz, a regional Starbucks spokesman, “People literally will not cross the street to get coffee.”
So Starbucks, like Duane Reade, has concentrated stores in key neighborhoods, even if that meant that new stores took some business away from old stores.
There are, for example, two Starbucks shops in Astor Place. Within a small radius of those stores are five other Starbucks (including two on either side of Union Square), as well as two Barnes & Noble bookstores with cafes licensed by Starbucks.
To be fair, the snappily written story points out the somewhat amazing fact that there are now more Starbucks stores in Manhattan than Duane Reade drug stores.
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