Whatever Happened to the Coffee Shop?

Somewhere between a ubiquitous diner and the proliferation of Starbucks stood a brief period where the independent coffee shop reigned supreme, and the chains on the rise were more than just app-driven money mills. Believe it or not, two decades ago, gastropubs and beer gardens weren't the way flannel-clad Gen Xers spent their evenings. There were bars, to be sure, mostly stuffed with stuffy parents sipping Manhattans and complaining about taxes, or sad dives not yet appreciated with a hip sense of irony. 

If we went out to drink, we went out: dance clubs, concert venues, warehouses that were loud, hot, and sweaty. Booze was incidental. Getting together "for a drink" was for old people and alcoholics. When the Slacker Generation gathered to watch the world pass us by, we met up at the coffee shop. 

On the heels of International Coffee Day (do we really need another "Day?"), it's clear that caffeine's addictive personality is sunny as ever. There are six Dunkin Donuts, four Starbucks, two Saxbys, and a La Colombe within two blocks of City Hall, and each does a brisk business. But each operates on a fast food franchise model, not under the cozy notion of a traditional cafe. Even Starbucks, arguably the end result of a fifty year American trend, pales in comparison to its past. Comfy chairs have been swapped out for metal stools which, like those at McDonald's or Burger King, are designed specifically to keep customers from lingering. 

It's unfortunate that an industry built on bringing people together in a warm and inviting atmosphere, welcoming them to lounge for hours, now so blatantly wants to get you and your money in and out as fast as possible. This says nothing of the hours, either. If you want to get out of the house after 7pm, you're options are severely limited. In fact, unless you want a cocktail or beer, there is almost nothing to do after dark.

What happened? Money is certainly a culprit, as is a spendthrift 21st Century culture of consumerism. As with everything, I'm sure technology can be to blame somehow. And of course, generational rifts drive new fads. Millennials will someday lament the loss of micro-brews the way our parents and grandparents may wonder whatever happened to the Supper Club. 

But this isn't exclusively a case of rosy memories and the frustrations of change. The loss of the independent coffee shop is one in a myriad of examples where another layer of our culture is stripped away on behalf of homogenization and the most profitable status quo. It's a bit odd that cafes have gone the way of music shops and bookstores despite offering one of the few products you can't buy on Amazon. Perhaps it was discarded by fickle Millennials, the coveted goldmine of marketing, because of its mere 90s-ness. 

Like all business trends in the 21st Century, metrics drive decisions. For all progressives like to tout a European ideal, they sure have a penchant for corporate creature comforts like Target and Chipotle. We should be embracing the notion that exponential profits and "going public" aren't the end-all goal in life, even business. Start patronizing employees who simply love their jobs. Why aren't we more reluctant to hand our hard earned cash over to corporate entities that view us as nothing more than aggregated data and a transaction?

Of course these are all subjects better fleshed out over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, were there such a place. Maybe we should turn down our nostalgia filters and start looking at Generation X for the insight we once offered, and not just an interim exercise in uselessness. We loved life as we watched it pass us by, and we refused to succumb to "The Man." I'm not sure when that turned into a bad thing, but probably somewhere around the first time a Millennial suggested how much better the world will be once the Civil Rights trail-blazing Baby Boomers start dying. 

They're cold. 

Generational debates are a minefield of conjecture, but there is something valid to be said of a demographic raised amid the isolated anonymity of the internet, and their resignation to corporate greed. Their relationships with the largest companies in the world - Apple, Facebook, Google - are every bit as intimate as, if not more so than, those of family and friends. To Millennials, Starbucks is a Mom and Pop and Amazon is Main Street U.S.A.

Wall Street won, and no one should think that's good. 

Some corporate ills are impossible to avoid - banks, credit cards, utilities, even careers - but we should all be less willing to sell out to those who only feign an interest in their customers' well being when it can be aggregated for a quarterly prospectus. Be less willing to be a number wherever possible, even if it means using cash in lieu of an app. Such tactics are paraded as streamlined simplicity but really just a nefarious way to continue making money off you long after you've left the store. 

We should all want an independent coffee shop at the corner of our block, not just for the coffee, but for everything it represents. 

"Not on Rex Manning Day!"

Somewhere between the exhausting praise, disdain, and endless coverage of Millennials and their more-often-than-not parents, Baby Boomers, sit a once-explored, recently-forgotten, and now-nostalgic generation: Generation X. 

If you've ever looked up from a smartphone long enough to watch a movie you didn't live-Tweet, you probably know Reality Bites as the slow, pastiche, embodiment of this "slacker generation," one replete with our Patron Saints, Janeane Gerofalo and Winona Ryder. But set aside easy memes about childhood playground equipment and the first Motorola flip-phone for a minute and you might remember another film that encompasses so many of the cheesy, stereotypical trappings of late-Millennium youth that have become synonymous with the 1990s.

Like most teen comedies, from Grease to Mean Girls, there's nothing particularly novel about Empire Records, and at the time it was hardly a standout in the immediate wake of Clueless. At best it was a poorly performing sleeper that served as a 90 minute commercial for a great soundtrack. And maybe that's what it was, at least commercially. Although it's drawn a significant cult audience in those who may have borrowed it from an older sibling, and it lingers in the back of the mind of most late-Gen Xers who know we've seen it more than once but never really paid too much attention to it; all of us are loathe to admit that, realistically, it's not a great movie. 

But that doesn't mean it isn't a decent movie, and most importantly, a movie with heart. 

It's not without a jaded sense of irony that a movie centered around an independent record store desperate to stave off a corporate takeover was produced primarily as a vehicle to send teens and 20-somethings off to big businesses like Tower Records, Sam Goody, or Columbia House to buy the soundtrack. But it's also apparent that Carol Heikkinen's screenplay was intended to be something else entirely, an indie film when the genre meant something, and if you squint a bit - or ignore its high production value - you can still find fleeting moments of her vision. 

Before the likes of Napster, and obviously iTunes, local record stores (and their bookstore brethren) were faced with a similar threat from big box retailers. In a way, these retailers greased the wheels for internet competition by dulling our senses and our perception of what was truly independent. Conglomerates like Tower Records maintained the token gestures of stores like Empire with well trained staff and in-store concerts, so much so that when the time came, we lamented their loss nearly as much as those independent shops we lost before.

Of course the frustration over the loss of stores like Tower Records was more out of resignation than idealism. We knew Tower and The Wall were big business, but by the end of the 20th Century they were nearly all we had left, and we knew there was no way a brick-and-mortar record store could ever compete with the Silicon Valley's Borg. 

But that's exactly why, in hindsight, Empire Records means so much, maybe even more so than well crafted teen comedies of the 1990s with less corporate intentions. Empire Records doesn't just take us back to our youth the way Clueless does. It takes everyone back to the rift that separated one generation and the next, and introduced an entirely new way of shopping, living, and experiencing each other. 

Even at its most ordinary for the era, Empire Records is wrought with the personal inexperience of heartache that today's youth find largely online. Who of a certain age does remember, even relish in, that one we let get away or tried and lost, all without the passivity of dating apps and text messages? Even the worst experiences of our time are beautiful lessons and rosy memories that can't be challenged by today's coldly isolated technology. 

We don't love Empire Records for its cheesy sub-plots and dialogue, not literally (though we do love the music). We love it because it represents a place we once experienced that has yet to be replicated. Like the coffee shops synonymous with other '90s classics like Singles and Friends, we watch Empire Records and see a kind of engagement that's gone. We used to hang out at the record store, day or night, drinking coffee or a Big Gulp or from a flask. We related to each other universally outside the confines of texts, SnapChat, or Facebook. It's a type of casual relationship that's been near-completely lost to Tinder, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Who walks into a bar or coffee shop hoping to bump into a friend, not knowing if they'll be there? More so, who goes to a store hoping for the same, and then just hangs out with the staff? 

There is something strong, almost baser, about the excitement of never knowing and the need for this kind of dynamic interaction.

We were called "slackers" because we hung out in record stores, coffee shops, and bookstores, apparently waiting for life to happen. But we weren't: we were soaking up the buzz of life constantly happening around us, all the time, everywhere. We invented the term "people-watching" because people are the most interesting things to watch.

And can anyone really call us slackers in the face of a generation that prefers Amazon and GrubHub to walking to the corner store to interact with someone, all so they can spend more time binge watching the same show the watched last week? The only thing our successors have managed to prove is how lonely laziness and convenience can be, and in the face of an Empire Records' Broadway revival, that a lot of people long for the kind of interaction we have all since discarded. 

Happy Rex Manning Day!

In case you don't get the reference, April 8th, 1995 was the day that the aging fictional pop sensation arrived at Empire Records in the movie of the same name. Kind of a cross between Barry Manilow and your dad's bowling buddy, Rex Manning was the antithesis of the counter-culture that Empire Records set out to define.

But there was just one problem, the generation had been exhausted and no one watched the movie. For the last few years, the media has delved into the rifts between Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. From BuzzFeed to CNN to the Onion, each generation has been blamed for all of the world's ills, and each done their share of the blaming.

Boomers didn't do enough, Generation X didn't bother, and Millennials are too busy looking at their iPhones to realize there's something to do. The debates are futile, a way to fill articles and create quizzes, and the arguments echo similar sentiments aimed at and from The Greatest Generation that bore the Boomers.

What's unique about Empire Records is that it represents a real demographic within an undefined generation. To those too young to grab coffee at Central Perk and too old to remember internet in our dorm rooms, Empire Records accidentally - and perfectly - defined the flannel-clad misfits too hopeful for Reality Bites but not ready to embrace the vapidity of Clueless, a movie that would lay the groundwork for the next twenty years. 

In a way we were posers. We were proud, but when it came to pop-culture, all we really had was Empire Records. We listened to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but not with the angst to truly embrace them. We danced to Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, but recognized them for the crap that they were. To those of us who graduated high school between 1994 and 1996, we were the characters in Empire Records. 

Our little sisters had cell phones "for emergencies," we used pay phones. Our older brothers  read poetry at coffee shops, we got stoned and laughed. We bounced around from culture to culture, re-appropriating 60s fashion and music throughout high school and listening to the 54 soundtrack on repeat in college.

We embraced the best - or at least the most popular - of earlier counter-cultures, but had little to call our own. Despite the fact that Empire Records' success was lost, it was embraced by our nameless generation as the one piece of pop culture that recognized - deliberately or not - the rift between Gen X and what Y2K would bring. 

As "Happy Rex Manning Day!" fills up Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on April 8th, Empire Records has found good company. Along with movies that defined definable generations - Sixteen Candles, Bring It On, and Mean Girls - Empire Records has found an audience amongst the classics.

Ten, twenty, or thirty years later, each generation has proven itself as capable as the former in their own unique ways. Boomer, Gen X, or Millennial, we were all once in that penniless place where nothing mattered but friends, late night coffee, and a youthful optimism that allowed us to detach from the cynicism that lied ahead. 

Perhaps that's why we're so quick to criticize the generation ahead of us. They haven't yet been crushed by the weight of the world, and their blind optimism is a scapegoat for our own insecurities. But critiques are useless. 

Like those wedged between Gen X and Millennials, Empire Records has proven that, to time, generations mean nothing. The truth is, we were all ass holes when we were in our teens and twenties, and a generation doesn't need a name to know that. 

Sure, I get annoyed by a liberal use of text messages, but there are too many productive Millennials who know no world without a laptop and smartphone to ignore the world we live in. Fixating on "why my generation is better" is only going to make the future seem weirder than it's already going to feel.

Culture changes and evolves, Empire Records closed, and Rex Manning didn't age well. Enjoy a classic for what it is, but it's history.

For now, let's just enjoy how hot Johnny Whitworth was...

Happy Rex Manning Day!

Philly Mag's Beef with Baby Boomers

A recent Philadelphia Magazine cover calls out to Baby Boomers, asking them to drop dead. With one article, Janine White has managed to transform a decent regional magazine into the opinionated afterbirth of the hipster's Bibles. I can't even imagine Philadelphia Weekly or Philadelphia City Paper publishing something so socially irresponsible, certainly not on a cover.


This is the kind of hypocritical selfishness that stains my generation. White accuses Baby Boomers of selling out their mid-century idealism for Volvos and suburbs, but whether you're an X or a Y, the Baby Boomers sacrificed the LSD and free love to raise us. Many worked full time at K-Mart to make sure that art school drop outs were entitled enough to demand high paying jobs that don't exist.

If Baby Boomers are guilty of anything it's for raising us under the delusion that we can do anything we put our minds to.


Baby Boomers took the flaws of their parents and in spite, conceived a cultural Renaissance.


What did we do with the indiscriminate acceptance we inherited? Invented Gentrification and then bitched when the real estate market collapsed. And well into our 30s or 40s, we're still stomping our feet and blaming our parents when the world doesn't go our way.


In her rant, Write blames her parents' generation for everything from the Global Recession to illiteracy. Anyone who's taken Anthropology 101 can tell you a single generation can't be blamed for evolution. Baby Boomer, Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire explained that 22 years ago, and at the time we got it.


Our parents fostered a cultural tapestry that transformed the world forever, and somehow found time to raise us. We licked the icing off the cake of diversity like the fat, greedy sociopaths we are, then accused the most influential generation in modern history of not doing enough for us.


We've been voting since the late 80s. Generations X and Y are as accountable for any current crisis as our parents, or their parents. In fact, had we the foresight and ambition of the generations that preceded us, perhaps we could have been carrying on their legacy instead of tuning into The Jersey Shore.


I don't know why Philadelphia Magazine is calling for Baby Boomers to drop dead. Without them, who will its editors blame for their mistakes?