Photo by Reid Beels

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is put a kettle of water on the stove to make tea. Unlike Captain Picard’s preference for Earl Grey, I stick mostly to green tea to keep me caffeinated. I suspect that most of you have a similar ritual whether you reach for your morning Mt. Dew, tea, coffee, espresso, or a tall, skinny, half-caf, no whip, caramel machiatto from the local coffee shop.

The western obsession with caffeine has some interesting roots. On the NPR Science Friday podcast this week, Steven Johnson talked about how Age of Enlightenment in England coincides with the arrival of caffeine and the growing popularity of coffee shops as places where people with different backgrounds, like Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, came together over coffee and tea to talk about issues and new ideas. The coffee houses also introduced caffeine as a daily habit in people’s lives. At the time, one of the only other safe beverages was alcohol, since the water quality was poor, so some people went from being drunk by mid-morning every day to being caffeinated and alert throughout the day.

The collaborative history of coffee and tea is also interesting, particularly to web workers. Many of us spend our days working in home offices and other places with few people, but the local coffee shop can provide an alternative where we can meet people with diverse interests and different backgrounds. I have a couple of local coffee shops where other web workers tend to gather during the day, and I’ve found myself in interesting conversations with people who work in areas very different from my own. For example, earlier this week, I had an interesting discussion about podcasting with a couple of friends where we were sharing ideas and tips for hosting our video podcasts. I recently had a discussion with another friend about consuming RSS feeds within location based tracking applications.

In many ways, applications like Twitter and FriendFeed are allowing us to have similar cross-discipline discussions with interesting people online acting as at least a partial replacement for the coffee shop. I run across so many links and new technologies as a result of friends posting about them that I would have most likely missed without these applications.

These cross-discipline discussions can inspire new ideas and innovation, just like a science podcast about the invention of air inspired me to write this blog post for web workers.

What are your thoughts on coffee shops as a shared space for interesting discussions? What role does caffeine play in your life as a web worker? What would society be like if caffeine ceased to exist tomorrow?

I mean, having a Starbucks on practically every corner in some cities is the kind of convenience that we’re all used to getting online where if one Web site or Web app isn’t exactly what we need when we need it, another is only a few mouse clicks away. A few steps to the next street corner is only slightly more strenuous than those mouse clicks. And now, we’ll have to actually walk whole blocks to get to a Starbucks that hasn’t been ripped from our streets in the name of improved profit margins for the ubiquitous coffee haven. Well, what about our profit margins as Web workers? Without those 600 Starbucks, how will we survive?

To get everyone through these tough times, I’ve come up with a 5-pronged strategy to ride out the shake-up but also to make sure that we don’t get caught back in the vortex of coffee chain market oversaturation and end up feeling the same pain. Here are my tips:

1. Diversify. Are you a one-Starbucks kind of guy or gal? You need to identify several Starbucks in your area within a reasonable distance from your home base in order to ensure that you have a backup location in case another one closes down. A Google Maps search will help you pinpoint the prime locations.

2. Act Locally. Better yet, stop by some of your locally-owned mom and pop coffee shops that actually offer free wifi versus the pricey AT&T or T-Mobile online access that many Starbucks provide. I tend to split my work time away from the home office rotating between several locally-owned establishments for my caffeine fix, free wifi, and relatively quiet workspace.

3. Visit Globally. Why not enjoy the Starbucks experience while you are on the road for business? It turns out, according to CNNmoney.com, that the company is “still opening a large number of stores in overseas markets like Western Europe, where growth is slowing down and profit margins are lower.” So you may be in luck if your job takes you to Western Europe this year.

4. Really Diversify. These days, wifi isn’t relegated to the ol’ coffee shop. After toggling between two locally-owned (and woman-owned, by the way) coffee hang outs in town, I’ve added a natural foods restaurant to the mix. Wifi is everywhere including libraries, gas stations (and truck stops if you are literally on the road driving to another town for business), even laundromats. What could be better than getting your online work done while taking care of the laundry? Talk about multi-tasking!

5. Raise Your Own Profit Margins. What’s the real bottom line here? You’ll see a lot greater profit from your efforts in Web working at the end of each year if you make your own coffee at home. You can even throw in a little bit of Tip #2 by buying coffee from local roasters. Making your own coffee daily instead of buying an overpriced cuppa joe can save you upwards of $1000 annually, and that’s if you only partake in a single cup per day. Those of you with a heavy caffeine habit could buy a small car with your profits. Maybe even a hybrid.

So you see, my five-pronged strategy for surviving the Starbucks closures could not only help save you some of your hard earned cash but could also help to save the world.

This post was somehow inspired by this one by Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed.