The Stepford Coffee Shop -- i.e. the new "local" Starbucks is fucking creepy

You know that film Coraline about that girl who enters a seemingly perfect alternate universe only to discover she's been lured into a godless, distorted succubus of all that is good and pure?

That's what the new Starbucks on 15th Ave is.  Or rather, "Fifteenth Street Coffee and Tea."  

At first, the coffee shop seems to good to be true, in the way that Stepford Wives or Metropolis or Nazi Germany also may have seemed too good to be true at one time.  Endearingly hand-drawn signs. Rustic wooden tables.  

And while the people behind the counter wanted to sell me coffee, they also seemed just as happy to talk to me about local bands and street art and homemade aphrodisiacs made out of hemp.  It was heaven, if heaven used its wall space to promote local womanist paintings.     

And yet.  And yet.  

Something also seemed a little off.  

On closer inspection, that effortlessly edgy barista -- the one with the frosted tips and nose ring -- looked suspiciously like that corporate kool-aid drinking tattletale that worked at the Starbucks that was there, like, last week.  

Are handwritten menus always so ruthlessly neat and accurate?

Come to think of it, is it necessary to put a sign on a table reminding you, in case you didn't already know, that "this table is reserved for the community?"    

Then I realized: this was faker than pre-ripped jeans.  Or pretending Rachel Leigh Cook is doggish because her hair is in a ponytail. Starbucks is manufacturing local neighborhood culture, in all its endearing imperfection.  That isn't just evil. It's cartoonish super-evil.  

I'm not being melodramatic, but it's clear that Starbucks will stop at nothing short of world domination and the procurement of your first born.

Granted, I'm not what you would call an "activist."  I may not care about "education" or "justice" or "my own family."  But I pride myself on taking a stand where it matters.  And when I'm feeling petty jealousy toward people more successful than I. But I digress.

People: avoid the pseudo-indy, rustic, 100% organic dystopia on Fifteenth street.  Just walk right by.  Otherwise, before you know it we'll be drinking watery "victory lattes," your entire family will be "disappeared" the next time they go out for a Frappuccinno and never heard from again, and the last four immortal words of 1984 will have to be updated to read "He loved Uncle Howard."