When Winter answers the phone, he is on the road, somewhere between Barstow, Calif., and Las Vegas. He is on the road so often, it's almost like a natural habitat for him. His mission? Visit every Starbucks in the world.
This, as you might imagine, gets a little complicated. Take his journey from Bakersfield to Barstow, which would take most people about two hours.
"I went from Bakersfield east, because there's a Starbucks in Tehachapi, then I deviated off of Highway 58 to go down to Victorville, where I had two new Starbucks to visit - about a 40-mile detour down U.S. 395 - and then I got on I-15 and hopped on back up to Barstow," says Winter, which is his legal name (for a variety of reasons, he prefers not to disclose his birth name). "To this moment, there's only one store in all of California that I haven't visited. But that'll change tomorrow." Where's that store? In Ukiah, about 115 miles north of San Francisco.
You don't have to be a geography major or have a map in front of you to get the gist of this: When Starbucks is opening stores in places like Tehachapi, a town of about 12,000 at the edge of the Mojave Desert, it's hard for Winter to keep up. And yet Winter's mission, which is going on its 10th year and has taken him to more than 6,800 stores in the United States and abroad (and was conceived at a Starbucks in Plano, Texas), has earned him a lot of media attention. He's been on many national newscasts and newsmagazines. Now he's the subject of a documentary, "Starbucking," which debuted Tuesday on DVD. (Although it probably won't be available in stores, you can order it through Netflix and Amazon.com.)
"Starbucking" director Bill Tangeman found out about Winter through a "Washington Post Sunday Magazine" article in 2004 and decided to make a film. He didn't quite know what to expect, and he wasn't quite prepared for what he got.
"He takes what he's doing as seriously as most people take going to work in the morning," Tangeman says. "There's no relenting. He's just busting (his rear) to get to every Starbucks possible. That's the only thing he's thinking about, and he couldn't really care less about most other things."
Tangeman got an idea of just how focused Winter is when he rode along with him during the film. When Winter was westbound and passed into a new time zone, he celebrated the extra hour that he would have to visit Starbucks locations. During one grueling sequence in the Los Angeles area, Winter - who usually tries to set a pace of 10 stores a day during his trips - tries to break his record of 28 stores in one day.
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