Starbucks Brews Opposition in a Montana Town

The restaurant was in a location so prime only a death-dealing global sickness could lay it low. It sat right off Exit 333 at the junction of Interstate 90 and U.S. Route 89. Everyone going to the north entrance of Yellowstone National Park drove by—and often through—that Arby’s. Many also went in search of caffeine to downtown Livingston, where there are a dozen independent coffee shops. On a still summer’s day, Main Street smells of coffee.

The Arby’s site lay shuttered and forgotten until the Livingston Enterprise splashed a scoop on its front page on Feb. 4: “Starbucks Moving Into Old Arby’s Building.” The store, the paper reported, would employ 20. The news sent a shudder through Livingston.

Michael Boise,

a local sound recordist, was alarmed enough to start a Change.org petition to try to stop the store from opening. “It’s cultural,” he says, as we sip a hot brew at one of the town’s small cafes. “You’ve come to Livingston to get away from those kinds of things.” There’s a place for Starbucks, he concedes. “I just don’t believe it’s here.” His petition, titled “Keep Starbucks Out of Livingston,” has 3,725 signatures, a number that’s nearly half of the town’s head count. (One of them is mine, done as a test. So it’s conceivable that many of the signatories are out-of-towners.)

The battle is now quixotic or, put another way, performative. As Ms. Feigel of the chamber confirms, there’s no legal way to stop Starbucks: “It’s a private commercial transaction.” When I visit the site, I see men in hard hats. Starbucks is an unstoppable force. “We are proud to have the opportunity to join the Livingston community,” the company said in a statement to a local TV station. “It has a thriving coffee community that allows all types of businesses to exist together and customers will choose the coffee experience that is best for them.”

But

Cathy Johnson

isn’t buying that—particularly the “exist together” part. She owns Coffee Creek, a winsome little hut that dispenses coffee from two windows to two lines of drive-through customers. She’s located in the parking lot of the town’s supermarket—an

Albertsons,

part of America’s second-largest grocery chain—just a hundred yards from the Starbucks-to-be. Yellowstone-bound tourists are her staple in the summers, but she has a loyal year-round clientele. “It’s the tourists that help me make money,” she says, “but it’s the locals that sustain me.”

Arby’s wasn’t competition, but Starbucks could kill her business. Yet if she’s feeling downcast, she isn’t showing it. “Starbucks haven’t offered to come in and buy me out yet, but I might consider it if they did,” she says, seemingly in jest. She knows that she couldn’t sell her business to anyone else if her sales plummet: “Who’d buy it?” Longtime customers have sworn to remain faithful to her coffee. Some have even offered to picket Starbucks. She’s told them not to. One of her employees tells me, “We’re going to keep on trucking.”

In truth, the opposition to Starbucks in Livingston comes largely from longtime residents who have watched in some dismay as the town’s demographics have changed with Covid. People have flocked to the area from California and New York, often snapping up land and houses “sight unseen” (as a resident told me). There are now hundreds of

Airbnb

options in town, but few affordable rental units. And the tone of the town has changed. Ms. Feigel tells me that Livingston was, before Covid, a “laid-back libertarian place.” The influx from blue states has “brought a different set of values.” She describes how some nouveau Livingstonians are pushing to pave local dirt roads—at notable cost to taxpayers—so they can have bike paths. “If you want that, you can go back to the city,” she says, laughing out loud.

Ms. Feigel would, “of course,” welcome Starbucks to the Chamber of Commerce if it wants to join as a local business. And her accepting approach to the coffee behemoth has an echo in unlikely quarters. With the exception of Ms. Johnson—whose small business stands to lose the most—the town’s coffee-shop owners seem unfazed, even jaunty.

Lindsay Madding,

who owns Rx Coffee, says, “We have days here we’re so busy I wish Starbucks was open!” She bought her business on July 1 and is confident she’ll be fine. “Our coffee and food are superior.”

Sarah Faye

of Faye’s Cafe is dismissive of the stop-Starbucks petition. “It’s not my fight. I think people like to make a fuss about these things,” she tells me on her break. “I have a 16-year-old daughter who loves Starbucks.” Ms. Faye “wouldn’t mind if she worked there.”

No one is more forthright than

James Langteaux,

a writer and former producer of Christian TV shows who fled here from Los Angeles in March 2020. He owns Tru North, a thriving café on Main Street. “When I learned about Starbucks,” he tells me, “I panicked at first, thinking, ‘Oh gosh, they’re going to siphon off the tourist trade.’ ” And then he composed himself. “I said, ‘Just be better than Starbucks.’ ” To prove his point he offers me a drink “you won’t get there in a million years”: an iced mixture of milk, maple syrup (“subtle sweet, not Starbucks sweet”) and Yellowstone espresso with cold foam and a rim of heavy cream. A bellyful, but delicious.

Mr. Langteaux read

Ayn Rand

when he was 13. “This is a free-enterprise system,” he says. “I respect the fact that anybody can do anything they want any time in America.” To try to fight Starbucks would be ridiculous. “Because it’s antithetical to who we are as a nation.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society.