Gloria Jeans
In the first coffee shops is ever appeared in my hometown years and years ago happened at our local mall. It was kind of a scummy dive with loud music being plays on me stereo system by raging hormone filled as teenagers, and over steamed milk, and espresso shots that were either pulled is too long or too short and a food selection that looked like it was pulled off of the USS enterprise, taken down from the frozen dry goods. And we all loved it! We could not get enough of this foreign land; it wasn't quite a diner, and it wasn't quite a bakery and it certainly wasn't like anything else in our town at the time, but that first Gloria Jeans coffee shop found its way into all our hearts, minds, and pocketbooks. Even now look at me with all the worldliness I have, I still have a soft spot in my heart for good old Gloria Jean.
Gloria jeans coffee shops were found in strip malls and retail conglomerations and shopping malls all over the country. It was an interesting idea that was loaded ahead of its time, probably robbed from the West Coast and the success of the place called Starbucks was beginning to have and supplanted in the East Coast in the suburbs where we all could marvel at it and poke at it and wonder. It would only be a few years later when Gloria jeans would close your doors forever (at least in my hometown) and the great siren would heed the call.
But in the meanwhile Gloria jeans coffee shops did relatively well for a while. Gloria jeans coffee beans were an interesting variety of moods, levels, and blends. Gloria Jean had no reason to think or coffee beans or anything much different than anyone else's, as a cookie cutter homogeneity of her stores made any kind of individuality problematic.
But we continue to go back to Gloria jeans; it was the only place we had outside of the diner. It was a place for week ago in being adults in the place we could go and meet the people have conversations rather than just screwing around smoking cigarettes and that booth, Gloria jeans changed us all. I don't know if there are any more Gloria jeans today. Probably the Gloria Jean's business model died away years ago. But maybe, in somewhere, in some town, in some mall, somewhere, there is a place where Gloria jeans is open active and thriving. And for that I say drink on my fellow Americans, drink on!