Sometimes, when you go back to visit a place from your past, you feel that maybe you should have left what you remember where it was.

Case in point: My old Starbucks.

See, back in the day, this particular Starbucks was a place where you could bring someone on a first date. It was a quaint little place where you could have a cup of overpriced burnt coffee and see if the person you met was worth the risk and cost of a second date and a potential STD.

A place where a budding writer like yours truly, used to come in with their reusable cups, order a Venti (which is Italian for “a medium beverage on steroids”) Iced Tea with extra sweetener, plug in their laptops, and spend hours working on what they think is the next Pulitzer Prize Book/Oscar Winning Screen Play/or the next best-selling book in the Mommy Porn genre.

Starbucks used to be the place where they had what I used to call “Comfy Chairs.” These were big, over-stuffed, comfortable chairs where you could bring in a book that you either borrowed from the library, got off Amazon, or paid too much for at Barnes and Noble and with a cup of that same overpriced and burnt cup of coffee, sit for hours in one of those fantastic chairs, lost in the pages of fiction, fantasy or non-fiction and escape life for awhile.

Alas, this is no longer the case.

Now, you go into Starbucks and first notice that the places are absolutely freezing. At first, I thought I was imagining it, but it’s the same with every Starbucks you visit. You could walk into any Starbucks, and it would still be colder than the average temperature of -49 degrees Fahrenheit in Oymyakon, Russia. In fact, I understand that Starbucks is one of the training centers that NASA uses to find out how people and things react to the coldness of space without having to send it them orbit.

Next time you go into one, ignore the nearly freezing astronaut trainee in the corner and notice the steam coming from the customers’ cups there. That isn’t from the coffee they are drinking; those are wisps of warmth coming off a cold Frappuccino. See how many people wear parkas worthy of an Arctic expedition on a summer day inside your Starbucks. Oh, and here’s a little-known fact: The manager gets a yearly bonus if they can maintain a functioning igloo in their lobby.

And why is it so cold?

Simple: They want you to get your drink and get out. Kind of like that angry greeter at Walmart that says, “Welcome to Walmart. Not get your crap and get out!”

Starbucks does not want you in their stores. Yes, they want a steady line of people ordering their product, but they don’t want you hanging out in their stores. They figure if you freeze the customer to the point they start losing feeling in their extremities,  they will buy a larger size of their overpriced and burnt coffee just to stay warm enough to slosh through the snow on the floor on their way to the exit.

But there is another reason they want you out of there so fast: Electricity.

I contacted a confidential source inside the Starbucks empire to confirm my suspicions. (Ok, it was a 19-year-old, rainbow-haired snowflake of a barista working on their liberal arts degree to teach Indigenous people underwater basket weaving in third-world countries). But a source is a source. Right?

On the surface, that may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. Starbucks doesn’t mind blowing money on electricity to freeze the place, so people will blow their kids’ college funds on the same overpriced/burnt coffee. But they do mind when they have to spend money on electricity because writers, like Moi, use their laptops with cords plugged into their outlets for hours on end and only spend a buck and a half on iced tea,  with free refills, and are there for 8 or 9 hours a day.

Where’s the profit in that?

And speaking of profits and laptops,  unless you have an energy source the size of the one in operation of the International Space Station,  you can’t spend your days working on your book at Starbucks anymore. Why? Because they have now covered up all the wall outlets. Thanks to their new “No-Charging Policy,” there is now no place on the customer side of the counter where you can charge your phone, laptop, or pacemaker.

Sorry, cardiac patients, no more freebie pacemaker recharging for you.

But my source tells me that in Corporate’s quest to squeeze every last penny of profit from each store, it wasn’t just the writers and people with heart disease they covered up the wall outlets for. It was the massive amount of homeless (whom I like to call “Street Creatures”) that would just come in to charge their phones and use the bathrooms as their own personal “cleansing stations.”

Before you start flooding my inbox with hate mail for my “insensitivity” regarding the homeless situation in America, hear me out.

There are people in this country who are genuinely homeless through events of not their own doing and are actively looking for help to correct the situation. They are making themselves available to government programs to get off the street and back to work. They are genuinely homeless and need our help.

I’m not talking about these people.

The people I’m talking about I call “Street Creatures.” People who want to live on the streets because they do not want to conform to society. People who would instead rob and steal for their next fix or toke from the crack pipe. You see these people on the street conversing intensely with 6 imaginary llamas and a unicorn. These people haven’t bathed in so long; their body odor is a natural bug-repellant. Street Creatures never have to worry about having a good dental plan because they have no teeth thanks to the crack pipe.

Yet these “Steller Members of Society” would come into Starbucks,  plug in their chargers for their free Obama phones, and stay for hours carrying imaginary or drug-infused conversations with the llamas as mentioned above, unicorns or something equally as bizarre, any member of Congress. Then, go into the bathroom and use the sinks to try and bathe in and/or perform acts upon themselves or others that shouldn’t be spoken about in polite society.

So,  given the fact that Starbucks is now being infused with street creatures who thought bathing and sanity was a passing fad, “Darlings of Society” who share a communal tooth when they eat corn on the cob. People who have lost so many of their brain cells that, in their minds, blinking both eyes at the same time is equivalent to solving the mysteries of the universe. Is there any wonder why no one goes to Starbucks for a first date anymore?

But you must credit the Street Creatures for one thing: They are still brighter and more pleasant to be around than Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Adam Schiff, and Hakeem Jeffries.

So, what does Starbucks look like now?

Gone are the comfy chairs. Gone are the outlets. Writers like myself have disappeared from the landscape. The Indoor Artic Conditions that any sane Eskimo would never think of living in are still there (and shivering astronaut trainees). A few hard wooden chairs and a table. Oh, and I forgot to mention this earlier: Blaring Hipster Music played with musical instruments that sound amazingly like someone is anal probing a cat. Street Creatures roaming outside looking for a plug to charge their Obama phones while having a metaphysical discussion with an imaginary unicorn. And maybe a few members of Congress. Now you know why my old Starbucks looks better in my memories than it does now.