Winter has what he calls a collector’s mentality. The freelance computer programmer has collected coins, stamps, comic books—even Peanuts trading cards. It’s the same impulse that motivates the quest that has consumed his adult life: visiting and documenting every single Starbucks in the world.
“Starbucking,” as Winter refers to his never-ending journey, has been his main focus for nearly 30 years. Career, friendships, and relationships have all taken a back seat to this singular, quixotic quest. In the process, Starbucking has taken Winter to 70 countries, bankrupted him, and turned him into a minor celebrity.
In the pursuit of his impossible goal, he will visit as many as 20 Starbucks locations in one day, and sleeps in his car so he can roam more freely. He orders the same thing every time: a small sample cup of drip coffee. Every visit is diligently documented on his website, StarbucksEverywhere.net, and he has even written a memoir about his journey. The book, fully written and seeking a publisher, will—according to a query letter published on his website—cover his “extremely unusual hobby” and “will be framed within the context of my highly unusual life and the philosophies that guide me and my quest.”
Winter’s mission has grown and changed as the years have passed. In the early days, he would ask baristas for recommendations on where to visit next, look up stores in phonebooks, and use physical maps to pinpoint their locations. Now, he has developed his own software that tracks openings, closings, and stores that he has yet to visit.
Winter’s relationship with coffee has also evolved. At this point he doesn’t drink Starbucks coffee for the taste—he calls it a chore. He now spends almost as much time visiting specialty coffee shops as he does Starbucks locations, which are also carefully chronicled on his website. But he is still constantly on the move, always driving and planning his next Starbucks visit.
Falling in Love with Starbucking
“I like challenges and puzzles,” says Winter, who legally changed his name to a mononym in 2006. “I’ve always been like that since I was a child.”
He is speaking to Fresh Cup from an auto repair waiting room while his car gets an oil change—a necessity, considering the number of miles it racks up. Over the course of our conversation, he will visit at least one Starbucks. Winter is a thoughtful and eloquent interviewee, a far cry from when he was the twitchy, overcaffeinated subject of a 2006 documentary about his journey.
Winter’s Starbucking journey started in Dallas, Texas. After he graduated from college in the mid ’90s, he would hang out with his friends at his local Starbucks. He enjoyed his visits, and appreciated the “third place” environment—the welcoming social space between home and work—that the company made a key part of its appeal in the 1990s.
One day in 1997, he asked a barista how many Starbucks locations there were. “They reached under the counter, pulled out a list, and said, ‘Approximately 1,500,’” he says. “And all of a sudden, a lightbulb went off in my head. Would it be possible to visit every Starbucks?”
With no store locator on the company’s website, and Google Maps almost a decade from launch, Winter’s quest was originally distinctly analog—and had yet to develop into a full-blown obsession. “At that point I was not yet committed; it was just an idea that was percolating in my head,” he explains. His first Starbucks-specific adventure was during a road trip to the West Coast in the summer of 1998, although visiting coffee shops was not yet his main focus. “I wanted to see some concerts, I wanted to gamble in Vegas for the first time, I wanted to go out to Alaska and see the midnight sun,” he recalls.
However, he soon found that driving through suburban strip mall parking lots to check another location off his list was more interesting than sightseeing. “The process of Starbucking is what I fell in love with, specifically the challenge of discovering new stores, finding them using paper maps, traveling to new places—the process of road tripping,” he says. “All of that combined to make me fall in love with the project, and at that point, I was committed.”
Analog and Digital
As of this writing, Winter has visited nearly 20,000 Starbucks locations around the world, spending $180,000 to do so. His freelancing career allows him to work either on short contracts or remotely, and lets him travel around the U.S. as he moves between jobs. And although he spends most of his time stateside, he is not confined to one continent—his quest has taken him to at least 70 countries, from China to Oman to Austria.
He tracks every part of his journey using a vast custom database that helps him organize and plan his progress. It’s so big that he must use keywords to bring up specific information. “I live on queries,” he says. “Queries to find the stores that I haven’t been to, queries to find stores that have been renamed, queries to find stores that have been closed. It’s just query, query, query, because the dataset is so large.”
According to Winter’s website, Starbucks has nearly 40,000 stores currently open, although with stores always opening and closing, he estimates that the company has opened at least 50,000 locations over its history (he only visits corporate-owned locations, so those licensed stores in airports or Target don’t count). Winter says he spends a lot of his time confirming whether a store he wants to visit is open or not. This can involve talking with the company’s customer service or district managers, or sometimes even calling a business across the street from a planned Starbucks to check whether it has finally opened.
“I don’t think anybody who’s read an article about me realizes how much work goes into Starbucking before I even hit the road,” he says—it isn’t as simple as just driving and hoping to see a new Starbucks. We spoke just as he was contemplating his next travel plans. “I’ve got to do a comprehensive refresh of Washington State, just in case something new opened up in some remote town here, and I’d want to do that before I start driving out towards Seattle just so I don’t miss it.”
A Changing Purpose
Winter calls the early 2000s the height of his Starbucking obsession. He’d take every free moment to visit stores, using as much vacation time as possible, and sometimes putting relationships at risk—he even declared bankruptcy in 2003. “That was when Starbucking could have legitimately been called an obsession, in the sense that it was interfering with my life in detrimental ways,” he says.
They reached under the counter, pulled out a list, and said, ‘Approximately 1,500.’ And all of a sudden, a lightbulb went off in my head. Would it be possible to visit every Starbucks?
Even before he began Starbucking, he had some credit card debt, and once the journey took over his life, things got progressively worse. “It might have been manageable if I had not discovered Starbucking,” he says. Near-constant travel is expensive and he was also working less, cutting hours to spend more time traveling. All of this “led to the debt accumulating to the point where I could no longer manage it.”
That 2006 documentary shows Winter during the peak of his over-caffeinated quest, all manic energy and singular focus, racing from location to location with no concern for anything else. But as the years have passed and he has grown older—he is now in his early 50s—his perspective has shifted and he has slowed down. A short VICE documentary from 2019 offers a glimpse of this more mature, philosophical nature.
He’s also found more of a balance between Starbucking and the rest of his life. Part of that has to do with the fact that Winter will never complete his mission: Starbucks has exploded in size in the nearly 30 years since his local barista told Winter the brand had 1,500 locations. He knows that he will never visit every single Starbucks in the world—the company plans to open an average of eight new stores every day until 2030—but he’s okay with it.
Where once he would drop everything and spend thousands flying to Chile to visit a soon-to-close location, now he tries to balance Starbucking with his other interests. “One of the benefits of being older and more mature, you accept your limitations,” he says. “It is more important right now to be able to speak to an audience about the importance of finding a purpose in life, finding balance, and I can accomplish that without actually having been to every single Starbucks.”
His life and interests have also matured. Outside of his quest, Winter enjoys running and plays competitive Scrabble. Along the way, he discovered a world outside of Starbucks—specialty coffee—and spends much of his non-Starbucking time exploring each city’s third-wave scene.
Winter first became interested in specialty coffee in 2011 in Portland, Oregon. He visited a cafe in the city that was serving Stumptown Coffee and was immediately hooked. “Instantly, [I knew] it was better than probably any cup of coffee I’d ever had at Starbucks,” Winter says. This inspired him to begin exploring other Portland stalwarts, like Heart Coffee Roasters and Coava Coffee Roasters. “[T]he coffee was just incredible,” he says. “It was like night and day.”
Winter has an analogy that he likes to use to describe this moment: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. This allegory, part of Plato’s “Republic,” concerns a theoretical group of people who have spent their lives chained in a cave, mistaking the shadows projected on the wall in front of them for the whole world. Plato ponders what might happen if one prisoner were able to leave and discover just how limited their previous experiences had been.
The process of Starbucking is what I fell in love with, specifically the challenge of discovering new stores, finding them using paper maps, traveling to new places—the process of road tripping. All of that combined to make me fall in love with the project, and at that point, I was committed.
“I came to feel that, for a decade and a half, I’ve been like one of those people chained up in Plato’s terrible cave,” Winter says. “What I was experiencing was only a shadow of coffee, in drinking Starbucks for that long. Only when I discovered craft coffee was I actually, truly experiencing coffee, in the way that the people unshackled from the cave go out and actually see the real world.”
A Starbucking Community
Winter’s quest has attracted significant attention over the years. There is a page on his website dedicated to tracking his many media appearances: He has been featured on local, national, and international television and radio, as well as in countless newspapers, magazines, and websites. He appeared on “The Wayne Brady Show” in 2002 (alongside Richard Simmons), which resulted in Brady giving Winter a trip to London to visit his first overseas Starbucks.
Starbucks itself has been less interested in any cross-promotional opportunities. The company got in touch a couple of times when he first went viral in 2002, and Winter says it sent him a signed copy of “Pour Your Heart Into It” by then-CEO Howard Schultz. Since then the only contact he has with the company is with its customer service line.
Winter’s notoriety has helped the practice of Starbucking spread, and now there are other Starbuckers around the world. Sebastian Birr, whom Winter refers to as his German protege, has visited more than 6,000 stores. Winter also knows of a few people trying to visit 5,000 stores in Japan or, trying to visit a Starbucks in each of the country’s 47 prefectures.
Others might dabble in Starbucking, but most move on to pursue other interests. For Winter, Starbucking is something more, and something that he will continue doing for as long as he can. “I see it as my purpose, and my identity,” he says. “I don’t want to give up because of what it brings to my life. It puts me in contact with people all over the world.”
Winter’s quest tends to divide observers: Some consider it pointless (just look at the comments on any story or social media post about Winter), while others think he’s simply crazy. But he also has built a community of fans, and everywhere he goes, people ask for selfies and autographs. He travels the world untethered from much of what is generally considered a normal life, but he’s also completely free.
At the end of the VICE documentary, Winter explains his philosophy succinctly: “A lot of people do believe that real life is having a job, getting married, buying a house, having kids,” he says. “I see that as fairly arbitrary … When somebody says Starbucking is pointless, I turn around and say, ‘Point to something, anything, that other people are doing that is not pointless.’”
And in the end, his journey has touched so many others. The first thing that most people do when they hear about Starbucking, he says, is go to his website to see if he has visited their local Starbucks (he probably has). “In fact, I have friends who travel with their kids, and they send me messages saying that one of the first things that their kids ask whenever they go to a Starbucks is, ‘Has Winter been here?’”
