Coffee Traffic Grinds to a Standstill

It was gridlock in the Wild Oats parking lot Saturday. Peet’s Coffee and Tea, which has fueled a lot of late-night cramming up in Berkeley over the last 30 years, was about to open its first Southland store in Pasadena, and Cal alumni were invited to a pre-opening.

If you didn’t mind parking up to two blocks away from the Wild Oats Market complex (one doesn’t call something this artsy a mini-mall), your Cal cap was worth half a pound of free coffee, and a lot of Golden Bears were driving to the corner of Lake and California to take advantage.

There were alumni in blue jeans, in team jackets, in coats and ties. One sported a T-shirt printed with all the lyrics of the Cal drinking song, which made me feel that I had at last completed my education. (In my years in Berkeley, I’d never managed to learn more than the four verses beginning, “They had to carry Harry to the ferry/They had to carry Harry to the shore.”)

This Peet’s looks an awful lot like a Starbucks, with outdoor tables for cappuccino-sipping, shelves full of coffee paraphernalia, pastries, signs guaranteeing that coffee is brewed fresh every half-hour and emphasizing that the coffee grounds are suitable for composting.

The similarity is no coincidence. Peet’s and Starbucks have a common history.

It began in the middle 1960s, when “coffee” meant vacuum-packed percolator grind. For the preceding decade, the national coffee brands had been steadily debasing their product, incorporating an ever higher proportion of cheap, tannic robusta coffee beans. But then came a reaction: Two merchants, Zabar’s in New York and Peet’s in Berkeley, started marketing high-quality beans from specific countries, sometimes from specific plantations.

Between them, they educated a generation of coffee fanciers. Among the students were the founders of Starbucks, who studied the coffee business under Alfred Peet before starting their own Seattle company in 1971. Originally, Starbucks bought its beans from Peet; eventually, it bought his company.

Ten years ago, Starbucks founder Gerald Baldwin sold the Starbucks part of the operation to the marketing genius who turned Starbucks into a nationwide phenomenon. He kept Peet’s, which has 30 branches in the Bay Area and Sacramento.

And now this new shop in Pasadena, of course. It opens to the general public today. (Incidentally, another coffee outfit from up north is moving to the Southland. Coffee People, an Oregon firm that is sort of the Ben & Jerry’s of coffee, donating 10% of its profits to nonprofit organizations, opens a branch near the corner of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach this month.)

By the way, here’s a heads-up: Peet’s will have another special opening event for alumni this weekend, complete with a free coffee deal--this time for the people who have ordered coffee beans by mail over the years. There are more than 6,000 of them here in the Southland, and a certain number are sure to be claiming their free coffee.

Take my advice: Stay clear of the parking lot.