So close and yet so far

Once upon a time, for a very long time, there was a bean field. And the bean field was good, and more often than not it yielded beans of a soy-type nature, or so I assume. But, being located between a highway and clusters of subdivided houses, the field was as ripe for development as it was for harvest, and thus the farmer cashed in. And therefore over the past year or two, nothing has grown in this former bean field except a strip mall, and another strip mall (still empty), and an Arby's, and a Walgreens (unfinished in May, perhaps now open), and, of course, a Starbucks. In a former bean field, out by the side of a highway.

"Apparently they ran out of places to put them." That's all I could think up, between the bean field Starbucks and the one in the steel mill town down the road, the most un-Starbucks-y place around. But whatever, they're everwhere, doesn't matter much to me, not being a coffee drinker, except upon rare occasions such as three or four o'clock in the morning in the middle of a Relay. But yesterday, a few months belatedly, I discovered that Starbucks is now selling Top Pot doughnuts--a doughnut worth the flight to Seattle, if you ask me. Now, of course, way out here, it wouldn't really be the same, but it might be nearly good enough, and it's loads more convenient--the bean field is at the end of my school year commute. Except now the Starbucks people, once known for their real estate savvy, have realized to their chargrin that they opened stores in steel mill towns and bean fields, and mere months later, are going to close them. Heavy, heavy sigh. They can keep their coffee, but a Top Pot doughnut was nearly motivating me to go to work. Perhaps instead I'll take a trip.