Starbucks and Starbucks

"Starbucks and Starbucks", or "The corner of Starbucks and Starbucks" is a local (and somewhat scornful) nickname for an intersection in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. The intersection in question is Thurlow and Robson streets in the West End, where two of the corners have Starbucks coffee shops on them, owing to the great demand for trendy coffee joints in yuppy-rich Vancouver. They are both constantly full of people.

Interestingly, a few years back during the struggle among Starbucks employees to unionize, one of the stores was unionized and the other was not. Briefly the clientele was polarized - union supporters on one corner, random people on the other - but now it's back to the semi-random distribution of "Which side of the street am I on?"

The explanation given for 'Starbucks and Starbucks', by an employee of one of the two stores, is as follows:

Once upon a time, there was a Starbucks on a corner in the West End of Vancouver, and it was very popular. However, for one reason or another, it had to close down temporarily, to do some renovations or something of the sort.

While it was closed down, an entrepreneur/profiteer decided to fill the west-end's (small) non-caffinated gap in the map, and opened up a Starbucks - across the intersection from the original.

When the first store opened up again, however, it was discovered that there was more than enough busines for both of them (this is Vancouver we're talking about), and so they've happily coexisted ever since.

Incidentally, if you're a fan of holography and semi-related miscellany, there's a neat hologram shop next to one of them. It has no relation to Starbucks and Starbucks though, except that that's how you find it.