Coffee shop, where art thou?

I received some wonderful news recently that made me jump for joy - Starbucks, the megalomaniac coffee chain is finally disappearing from our high streets. I cannot express how happy this made me - particularly since McDonalds is taking their customers.

It goes without saying that coffee shops are so far reachingly middle class nowadays. As a hot chocolate fan myself, yes, I am more than a little biased on this matter, but it's always baffled me why even our smallest towns need more than one in a short radius.

My local town is a historic one, with a medieval market and lots of shops where my Dad went when he was a school boy. There's a miniature sweet shop on the corner, where we used to call on our journeys to and from college. There was only one shop we never explored - the one coffee shop in town, which day in, day out, was filled with what we called disapprovings, sipping their coffee.

All of a sudden, the historic shops began to disappear - a music shop that had survived since the 50s, in which my Dad bought his first CDs, disappeared in favour of a Costa Coffee - just three shops up from the 'disapprovings'. A couple of months later, they demolished the pizza hut in favour of another one. The final blow came at the end of my college year when a book shop fell victim to the foul stench of coffee.

There was a book shop in town - the kind where you can be lost for hours in winding bookshelves, in the midst of titles you have never seen before and will never seen again. It seems odd to me they reduced this shop to a meagre coffee shop; particularly since it had a tea shop on the premises in the first place.

Coffee shops have always been of great confusion to me, possibly because my folks live on the stuff and so biased I may be, but I can't help but confess that the news of Starbucks' imminent decline brought a very large smile to my face.