In my hometown of Portland, Ore., Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) is seen as the interloper, even though the company's headquarters are only a few hours' drive away. Starbucks gets none of the important descriptors. It's not "local." It's not "independent." And it's very, very not "hippie."

Coffee People, on the other hand, has historically received all of those storied monikers. Founded in 1970s as a booth in Eugene, Oregon's Saturday Market (oh you have never known hippy until you've known the Eugene Saturday Market), the owners burst in the coffeeshop scene in 1983 with a store in the very center of hippy Portland hip-ville, NW 23rd Avenue. When I was a teenager, Coffee People was a mecca of caffeine and I, too, sipped Black Tiger milkshakes (full of ground-up chocolate-covered coffee beans) and munched on Hippie Cookies.

In 1999, Diedrich Coffee Inc. bought Coffee People and the hippiness slowly began to drain away. Quality diminished and the chains lost much of their verve. On Thursday, Starbucks announced it had purchased every last one of the Coffee People retail stores, 40 total and 15 in Portland, for $13.5 million. Deidrich is exiting the company-owned retail business entirely, but will retain the Coffee People brand names, including Black Tiger espresso, its Gloria Jean's Coffee brand, and the franchising arm of 168 retail locations.

As it has with so many other acquisitions, Starbucks plans to conduct rapid-fire conversion, keeping all 40 locations open even though it will mean a bit of cannibalization in some neighborhoods. Coffee People stores will be converted to Starbucks in a few months' time and the hippieness will be lost forever. Good thing Coffee People founder Jim Roberts is still hippy-happening at the little Jim & Patty's Coffee in NE Portland. Will Starbucks soon own every single chain coffee store in the U.S.? It seems not a bit unlikely. And the very antithesis of hippie.

Starbucks buys Coffee People stores, hippies mourn originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.