When I was a lad in Los Angeles there was a restaurant called "The Good Earth." Good health food kind of stuff. Even my meat loving brother liked the place. It was one of the few places my grandmother would actually eat a good quantity of food (she was a coffee lover, food hater). They were successful. So they started spreading. More and more of them cropped up. They spread like crazy.

Then they crashed and burned. They disappeared faster than they spread until even the original one disappeared. I think some survived on the margins of the LA/Santa Barbara food scene, but I hadn't seen them for years.

Then, last time I was in LA, I noticed they were back in Westwood where I first encountered them. More or less the same as when my grandmother took us there as teenagers.

Starbucks will survive. They grew with the economy...now they are crashing with the economy. I suspect they will weather it, particularly since they still seem to be doing fine in places like Park Slope where people still have some money. But they may never again be the Borg of coffee houses.