We rushed back out onto the street and started gunning north, at 85 mph, trying to make Mays Landing by closing time. "I don't understand why my contact in New Jersey never told me about this," Winter said. "Something . . . very suspicious is going on here." He changed lanes, sped up to 90, and then in resolute silence, we pressed on toward store No. 7793.
FOR THE PAST SEVEN YEARS, John Winter Smith has been floating about the country, "Starbucking," as he calls it. He has been working freelance computer gigs of two to six months -- in Princeton, N.J., and Atlanta, Seattle and Austin -- and assiduously saving his money. Once he has $2,000 or so in the bank, or has sold a sufficient chunk of his prodigious comic book collection, he quits his job and begins touring, very systematically. He visits only cafes owned by Starbucks Coffee Co.; he eschews what he calls "fake" Starbucks, cafes that bear the familiar green-and-white logo but are owned and operated by conglomerates such as Barnes & Noble bookstores and Albertsons supermarkets. (There are eight Starbucks stores of that type in Atlantic City.) He typically avoids visiting a store more than once, and he almost categorically forgoes sightseeing. Instead, he cleaves to the commercial strip in each town, hitting the Safeway, the Subway shop, the Exxon, the AM/PM, the 7-Eleven, the Quik Mart. He is always in a hurry. An excerpt from the daily log that he keeps on his Web site (Starbuckseverywhere.net) : "I stopped at the Kinko's in Chattanooga and then drove around town for a while. Downtown was very brightly lit, if smallish and not very exciting as I would have expected." Chattanooga, check. He drove on, exercising extreme parsimony.
Winter sips his java outside the Starbucks at 16th and K streets NW.
(Photograph by D.A. Peterson)
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Winter almost never pays for his coffee. Rather, he begs for it, by showing baristas news clippings about himself. He scarcely eats while traveling. He subsists on about 1,000 calories a day and is careful never to gorge himself; that might expand his shrunken stomach and thereby increase his hunger. When he gets, say, a plate of rice and beans, he will eat only half the meal at first and then save the leftovers, in hopes that they'll keep in the back seat of his car. Hotels? Never. Even when it was 16 degrees in Denver one Christmas Eve, Winter says he slept in his car, shivering beneath a couple of thin blankets.
In the summer of 2002, when Winter drove more than 20,000 miles, a jagged, counterclockwise loop around North America, to visit 420 Starbucks, he did so on a budget of just $1,640, gas included. He lost about 10 pounds from his spare 5-foot-10 frame, and he also endured two minor car crashes, a parking ticket, two speeding tickets, six blown fuses and two police officers knocking (on separate evenings) on his car window. Why does he torture himself so? "I have the collecting mentality," Winter told me as we pulled away from Mays Landing. He spoke carefully, plucking the words out of his brain one by one. "Once I start a collection, I have to have everything complete. I have collected baseball cards, basketball cards, comic books, stamps, coins. I am one of those people who makes lists of lists. I have lists of all the restaurants I've visited, all the airports, all the cities. I have kept track of every expense I've incurred, down to the penny, since 1990. I have a goal right now to drive every mile of every U.S. interstate and highway. I'm collecting Starbucks -- and by mere coincidence, the project feeds a different part of my personality: I like attention."
Winter's Starbucks ventures have been featured in at least 11 newspapers and magazines, and four TV shows have followed him into the cafes. Last year, Wayne Brady, the host and namesake of a cable talk show, had Winter on air for roughly five minutes, then flew him to England for a week-long Starbucking spree. "I have an identity, a global identity," Winter told me. "There are almost seven billion people on the planet, and I'm the Starbucks guy. I'm recognized, and I like it that way. Why? I probably didn't get love as a child. Maybe I have attention deficit disorder. Maybe I have a strong ego or a high level of testosterone." Winter looked over at me, shrugging, as he slalomed through drivers going the speed limit. "It's an important question," he said, "but I don't have an answer."
WINTER KEPT DRIVING. He and I gazed out the window at the bland scenery -- the grassy median, the gray overhead bridges lit up by streetlights -- and we listened to National Public Radio. Winter listens to NPR while traveling, but sometimes his mind drifts off toward Scrabble. He is trying to memorize all 8,636 of the game's legal five-letter words and trying to improve upon his best-single game score: 556. He studies up to 25 hours a week and competes almost every weekend, in locales as far-flung as Philadelphia and Newport Beach, Calif.
But why Scrabble? Is he enamored with the splendor and plenitude of the English language? No, Winter is drawn to Scrabble, he says, because there are so few serious players; he believes that one day he could actually capture the national title. "I like winning," he says.
Winter placed a disappointing 43rd in his division at the National Scrabble Championship earlier this month in New Orleans. He is convinced he can do better next year, if he sheds his deep dread of losing. His fellow Scrabblers concur that Winter needs to loosen up on his defense, so as to make the occasional, sparkling Big Play. Indeed, in a personal e-mail, 2002 national champion Joel Sherman recently assailed Winter for being a "paranoid bunny."
As a social theorist, Winter is a little more daring. For several years now, he has been honing an intricate worldview -- "my philosophy," he calls it -- that he hopes to articulate one day in a book. His outlook is utopian but not exactly humanist: He believes that people should put aside their emotions and act only on reason. He wants food to be free, everywhere, so that citizens have time to ponder life's higher questions, and he opposes democracy. Better, he figures, to leave voting to "people willing to dedicate as much time as necessary to studying the issues -- to go away on retreat and read, constantly."
In the early '90s, Winter was intent on implementing his philosophy, said his mother, Georgina Lozano. This is why, she said, he changed his name from Rafael Antonio Lozano. "He was going to become a leader," Lozano explained, "and he told us, 'I don't want to be associated with my family. I don't want you to suffer as a result of my actions.' "
"I have zero recollection of having said anything like that," asserted Winter, "and my mother has a notoriously bad memory." Lozano's son says that his becoming "Winter" had nothing to do with his old revolutionary aspirations. He dropped his "generic Spanish name," he said, simply to prevent his credit records from being confused with those of his father, Rafael Antonio Lozano Sr. He loves his new name, he said, because it jibes well with his philosophy. "The word Winter," he said, "has a cold, detached quality."
I wondered what Winter's Starbucks project had to do with his philosophy. "It has zero relevance," he told me, his words packing a certain mano a mano challenge. "Visiting Starbucks is just something I'm doing for myself."
Well, not just for himself. Winter hopes that one day he can produce a definitive work of art based on his Starbucking. It might be literary; it might involve the digital photographs that Winter takes at every Starbucks he visits. Winter doesn't know, but he is sure that the work will not be tainted. He will never take money from Starbucks. "Even if they gave me a million dollars, no strings attached," he said, "I wouldn't take it because I wouldn't want to even give the appearance of being compromised." When I offered to pay the highway tolls, Winter bristled. "If I let you pay," he insisted, "that would undermine the integrity of my entire project."
Howard Schultz, Starbucks founder and chief global strategist, would not give me a comment on Winter. Colleen Chapman, the company's director of brand management, said only, "I'm very impressed by Winter's tenacity." Still, Winter took special pains to stress that he exists in a different sphere than corporate spokesmen. He had unkind words for Jared Fogle, the doughy, bespectacled fellow who stars on the Subway sandwich ads, telling viewers that he lost 245 pounds by cleaving to a Subway-rich diet. "Jared is paid," Winter said. "Nothing he ever does will be construed as artistic."
