By Charlotte Mikos / Columnist and News Reporter
Every Wednesday, Harpeth Hall girls carry coffee cups from Starbucks to first period and sip away. Before coming to the Hall, I would occasionally stop at the Belle Meade Starbucks and would always see Harpeth Hall girls. They were in line to order, waiting for drinks, hanging out, doing homework; basically, they were everywhere. I knew this Starbucks was special to the Harpeth Hall community, but I didn’t really know exactly how popular it was.
As a STEM nerd, I decided to perform an experiment. On November 20th, I dragged myself out of bed and forced myself to drive to the Belle Meade Starbucks. Once I got there at around 8:05, I ordered a peppermint hot chocolate (because coffee is disgusting), found a seat, and started doing my math homework. I didn’t actually do the homework though, because, one, it was really hard, and two, I needed to keep a tally of how many Campbell plaid skirts I saw. At 8:30, I left, with my tally of students in hand. So, how many HH students stopped by during those 25 minutes? 27 students. That means more than one student per minute; that means around 783 Starbucks trips by HH students from 8:05-8:30 on late start Wednesday this year from the Belle Meade location alone. Woah.
The first person I saw as I walked into the shop was Semipe Adejumobi, aka my editor. Although she doesn’t frequent the Belle Meade Starbucks as much as many of our classmates, she says that she always sees someone she knows whenever she goes. Later, I asked her if she was surprised with how many students I had seen in the store, and she agreed that it was a very high number, but she wasn’t surprised. I also asked her what Starbucks was the most popular, and, shockingly, she didn’t say Belle Meade. “The Hill Center,” she responded.
The Hill Center Starbucks opened in April of last year, according to Starbucks’s website, and it’s a 6 minute drive from The Hall. It’s a nice location, featured next to other popular destinations for bears, like Whole Foods and Green Hills Nutrition. It’s also on the way to school for a lot of the kids who don’t live in Belle Meade, like me.
I also mapped the distance from the Belle Meade Starbucks to Harpeth Hall, and found (at least according to Google Maps) that it’s six minutes away as well but is also in the opposite direction as the Hill Center.
Since they’re on polar sides of HH, I assume that they cater to people from different neighborhoods, and I don’t think anyone from Belle Meade is deliberately avoiding the Belle Meade Starbucks and traveling the extra time when they could have been sleeping to get an identical drink from the Hill Center.
I believe that the Hill Center Starbucks is more crowded than the Belle Meade Starbucks because people are choosing to come to this new location because it’s on the way to school and closer than other locations like the one at the mall, the one across the street from the mall, the one at Lipscomb, and yeah, you get the point. Also, the Hill Center Starbucks is becoming a Harpeth Hall hangout ground. I don’t feel as if this has taken away from the popularity of the Belle Meade Starbucks; rather, I think it’s helped the Starbucks chain profit even more from our excessive ordering of expensive drinks. By pulling in more caffeine-needy students on their way to school, the Hill Center Starbucks is making itself a fun destination for HH girls.
Besides that, in 2023, the Harpeth Hall community received shocking news: the beloved Belle Meade Plaza, home of the Belle Meade Starbucks would be closing. The Belle Meade Starbucks was once the place to go to find Harpeth Hall girls, but since the plaza has started closing, students have ventured elsewhere for their grande strawberry acai lemonades with no inclusions (the most popular drink, according to Semipe).
So, in conclusion, the Belle Meade Starbucks, a favorite hangout spot for our bears, is becoming a thing of the past. But don’t fret: the brand new, centrally located, Hill Center Starbucks, is here for you. So feel free to sip away in your new favorite coffee shop whose interior may be different but whose coffee tastes the same.