NO! Not my LOCAL!
Ok, so it's not a pub, but I've been a regular at my walking-distance coffee shop for almost exactly 10 years, now. It was huge, had windows on three sides so it was open and airy and bright and cheerful and a great place to gather. I found it when my daughter was just a week old, and I've been stimulating the economy there ever since.
It's GONE!
My writers' group happened to meet there every Monday (except the third of the month, when we have our official meeting) since last year. So when I showed up on March 31, I discovered a note taped to the door: "Dear Customers, we regret to announce that today is our last day of business, and our doors will be closed forever on April 1. This is unfortunately NOT A JOKE, and the news is as much of a shock to our staff as it is to you. Thank-you for your patronage at [this location] for the last 10 years."
And inside, everything comestible was free for the taking. I scored the last few truffles, as my daughter and I were due for another "Goth Day" there next week, a bag of whole organic coffee beans for my neighbour who gives me used coffee grounds (I don't drink the stuff myself, I'm a tea and steamed-milk person), and a few danishes for my husband. They were giving away whole cheesecakes. (Didn't have the means to get one of those suckers home, dammit.)
The other members of my writers' group didn't show up that night, the unlucky bastards.
It's GONE.
We have a zillion fast-food type coffee shops that sell sugar-bombs and syrupy caffeinated confections, with sodium-laden "meal" foods and chairs that are part of the tables, which are affixed to the floors and walls so we can't create a group. There is one other independent coffee shop in my town that I know about, but it's so cramped that we'd be asked to LEAVE if we met there, because we almost always have more than three people show up, and we linger for an hour and a half, well over their 20-minutes-only time limit. (Sods. Don't line a whole wall and a half with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and expect people to sit for only 20 minutes!)
No warning at all. It's GONE. And no one will lease the end of that row of shops as-is because it's too bloody expensive. It'll be divided into two shops, and one of them will be dark and dingy because it won't have any western exposure, and neither of them will sell GOOD food, just the fattening and filling type with the cheap desserts.
Fuck.
It's GONE!
My writers' group happened to meet there every Monday (except the third of the month, when we have our official meeting) since last year. So when I showed up on March 31, I discovered a note taped to the door: "Dear Customers, we regret to announce that today is our last day of business, and our doors will be closed forever on April 1. This is unfortunately NOT A JOKE, and the news is as much of a shock to our staff as it is to you. Thank-you for your patronage at [this location] for the last 10 years."
And inside, everything comestible was free for the taking. I scored the last few truffles, as my daughter and I were due for another "Goth Day" there next week, a bag of whole organic coffee beans for my neighbour who gives me used coffee grounds (I don't drink the stuff myself, I'm a tea and steamed-milk person), and a few danishes for my husband. They were giving away whole cheesecakes. (Didn't have the means to get one of those suckers home, dammit.)
The other members of my writers' group didn't show up that night, the unlucky bastards.
It's GONE.
We have a zillion fast-food type coffee shops that sell sugar-bombs and syrupy caffeinated confections, with sodium-laden "meal" foods and chairs that are part of the tables, which are affixed to the floors and walls so we can't create a group. There is one other independent coffee shop in my town that I know about, but it's so cramped that we'd be asked to LEAVE if we met there, because we almost always have more than three people show up, and we linger for an hour and a half, well over their 20-minutes-only time limit. (Sods. Don't line a whole wall and a half with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and expect people to sit for only 20 minutes!)
No warning at all. It's GONE. And no one will lease the end of that row of shops as-is because it's too bloody expensive. It'll be divided into two shops, and one of them will be dark and dingy because it won't have any western exposure, and neither of them will sell GOOD food, just the fattening and filling type with the cheap desserts.
Fuck.