A scruffy-looking man with bloodshot eyes and manic, shaky movements parks his car — flashers on — in the middle of Lake Avenue in Lake Worth, Fla. He leaps out, camera in hands, and runs across the street, hurriedly snapping photographs of the Starbucks on the corner. He watches helplessly as the soft glow of sunlight filters away, replaced by little blips of starlight and the quiet darkness of night.
His name is Winter (and only Winter, as decreed by a judge in Texas). He’s 34 years old, and he’s on a quest to visit every Starbucks in the world. Never mind if that means sleeping in his car, getting harassed by the cops, wondering where his next paycheck is coming from and never really knowing the intimacy of a long-term relationship; this is his quest, and he foresees no end.
“In my teenage years, I guess I had no clue about my place in the world,” he says. “I was just living, like, living the way that most people live. I was existing, really, instead of acting with purpose. Since that time, I’ve been determined to act with purpose.”
Out of that, years later, grew the Starbucks Quest.
6,550 Starbucks behind him
At first glance, it is a mission destined to fail: Winter is a modern-day Sisyphus, rolling his boulder to the top of a steep hill, only to have it career back down. After all, Starbucks opens corporate-owned stores at a rate of 2.8 per day in the United States alone (some days 15 or more locations spring up — not counting the licensed locations found in airports and Barnes & Noble bookstores, which Winter doesn’t visit).
But here he is, nearing the end of an 18-day road trip — jittery, back spasming, head aching, liver metabolizing caffeine and acetaminophen, bladder reaching capacity every 30 minutes — checking off a new round of stores that have opened since the last time he rolled through Florida.
By the end of this 14-state trip he will have reached 6,550 of the 7,102 worldwide locations that existed as of Jan. 18.
On this day, Winter has already visited 15 South Florida locations, consuming more than 60 ounces of Starbucks’ coffee (nearly half a gallon) and ingesting one double shot of espresso.
He walks inside the Lake Worth store and asks for a supervisor. When he gets one, he launches into a short, rehearsed spiel, talking so fast his words smoosh into one another “HimynameisWinterandI’monamissiontodrink fromeveryStarbucksintheworld.”
His fingers are on the counter, body rocking back and forth as he speaks. He tells them about the documentary, “Starbucking,” starring him, that’s due out this spring. He mentions international stops — England, Japan, Mexico, Hong Kong, Spain, France and Taiwan — then asks if he can please have a free sample of coffee.
The baristas turn to fill a 4-ounce sample cup (the minimum he requires himself to drink at any location). He walks to the mini-bar and dumps in single packet of raw sugar, stirring before he sips.
By the end of the night, he’ll have visited four more stores in Palm Beach County, including stops in West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter (no new locations have sprung up in the Treasure Coast). At each, the baristas will give him a free cup. One, though, will grin incredulously, as if unsure whether to believe him. Another will recognize him from an older store she had worked at when he last came through town. One more will say, “Dude, you’re awesome,” then ask for his autograph.
The story would be better, perhaps, if it were clear what drives him. You can ask Winter a thousand different ways, and he’ll just say, “I wanted to do something unique.”
The idea came to him in the summer of 1997, while he sat at a Starbucks in Plano, Texas. He was struggling through depression brought on in large part, he says, by a 60- to 70-hour-a-week job where he created order forms for online catalogs. With baristas at the store (they knew him well, as he often spent six- or seven-hour stretches at the store), he talked about the chain’s astonishing growth. The quest came to him in a flash, goal clearly defined . . . but purpose murky.
Purpose of living
There are hints, though. A Mary Chapin Carpenter quote on his site, www.starbuckseverywhere.net: “Friends,” it reads, “will take our side, enemies will curse us, but to be alive is to know your purpose.”
“If you don’t know your place in the world, why are you doing anything?” he asks. “Why are you getting up in the morning? I think most people go through their lives without any inkling of their place in the world. If you’re not questioning [it], you’re essentially no different than a cow.”
Simply declaring one day that you plan to visit every Starbucks on the globe isn’t enough, particularly if funds are low, and housing not assured.
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Winter, who spent nearly $4,000 on gas last year, does it by slowly selling off the comic book collection he has amassed (at one point he had some 20,000), collecting donations that trickle in through his Web site and by taking contracting work as a computer programmer anywhere from eight to 10 months out of the year.
He was supposed to start work in New Jersey two days after leaving Palm Beach County on Jan. 7. He wasn’t even sure where he was going to live, planning, as he often does, to find a room on the fly, using online classifieds.
He doesn’t have health insurance. He doesn’t have a permanent residence. And his parents aren’t particularly fond of what he’s doing.
His father is a chemical engineer and his mother a retired nurse. They live in Houston, where Winter — who has been referred to as Rafael Antonio Lozano (his given name) and John Winter Smith in various media reports — grew up. From the start, he was a class clown, a player of kickball and marbles, a Lego enthusiast who showed an early predilection for collecting: baseball cards, stamps, coins and his beloved comic books.
“My father thinks it’s a waste of time, and I think my mother is pleased with the fact that there’s a movie and all of these articles about me, but she’s still worried about my future,” he says.
When he’s on the road, visiting Starbucks isn’t a leisurely activity; it’s a concentrated, mechanistic enterprise. He drives his $11,000 Hyundai Accent fast, parks in “questionably legal” spots, photographs the outside of buildings, runs in for his coffee and moves on. His record is 29 stores in one day.
On the road, there are no cushy hotels, Jacuzzis or soft, white slippers. He sleeps in the driver’s seat at rest areas, Wal-Mart Supercenters, apartment complexes, or, if he has to, on residential streets.
The later it gets, the less he drinks — still visiting stores, but hoarding the coffee so he can drink it in a groggy stupor when he wakes to use the restroom. Eyes bloodshot, body heavy, fatigued, he reclines his seat and sleeps under the buzz of parking-lot lights.
Diagnosis: `Extreme hobbyist’
In the summer of 2004, another thirtysomething, Bill Tangeman, read about Winter’s quest in a reprinted Washington Post story.
A lawyer practicing in Lincoln, Neb., he had always talked about making a documentary, and something about Winter’s story struck him.
“My first thought is, `What the hell are you doing?'” he says. “`This guy’s a complete idiot.’ But . . . I didn’t want to judge.”
And so, after an e-mail courtship, he flew to New York where Winter was at the time. It was the start of “Starbucking,” with filming that would go on for a year and a half, Tangeman always trying to answer the eternal and elusive question: Why?
“There was a whole period early in college when some of his friends thought he had gone nuts,” Tangeman says. “He changed his name. He had some very bizarre theories and beliefs. . . . He had some issues with depression and some mental-type issues. He talks about how he starts doing this project and most of these problems went away. I don’t know exactly what happened. It’s almost like it’s an antipsychotic.”
At one point during the film (due out on DVD on April 24), Tangeman interviews students from a college psychology class, who have been assigned the task of assessing whether Winter is mentally stable.
And certainly, it can seem sometimes as if he’s not — particularly when he’s juiced on Colombian Narino Supremo. Once, a doctor diagnosed him with mild hypomania, a euphoric, high-energy, sleepless condition, coupled with mild depression. Even today, he talks loudly in babbling, stream-of-consciousness-like riffs. He’s unable to sit still. He does three tasks at once.
“I think in the end, they were OK calling him, instead of an obsessive-compulsive, an `extreme hobbyist.’ But certainly, they think he skirts the line,” Tangeman says.
As many as 25,000 copies of the DVD will be printed by Heretic Films, an indie distributor in San Francisco. For the first time, viewers will see the doggedness Tangeman captured.
“In Vegas one day, I’m thinking, let’s hit the slots a little bit,” he says, “but [Winter] is just single-minded in a way that most people aren’t. He has calculated down to the second, can he make it to this store? Sometimes, he has driven 100 m.p.h. Hattiesburg, Miss., we were blasting there at 100. He’s looking at his watch. I’m pretty much holding on for my dear life.