A downtown Kalamazoo staple since 1984, Something’s Brewing will brew its final cup of coffee on West South Street just prior to the Christmas holiday this year.

Owners Heather Turner and Cindy Galbraith announced on social media late Wednesday, Nov. 8, that the shop would be closing. Turner talked to MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette on Thursday morning about the decision.

The mother-daughter duo just opened a small Vicksburg location last weekend they initially intended to supplement the Kalamazoo store, but they’ve since decided to close their Kalamazoo location, Turner said.
It was far from an easy decision, she said, citing changes brought on by the pandemic, downtown construction and becoming a “victim of cancel culture.”
“We had seven glorious years and then COVID hit,” Turner said. “After that point, the stuff that happened was kind of unbelievable. It was just rapid fire, one thing after the next.”

For starters, Turner’s coffee shop, which she purchased with her mother in 2012, was a target of vandalism during the rioting that took place downtown in 2020. That led to the business being boarded up for a time.

Turner said she felt they had become “victims of the cancel culture mob” for showing support for their friends in law enforcement. The granddaughter of a retired Michigan State Trooper who died in 2020, Turner had put a sign in the window stating that the business supported police.
“People were pissed about our timing, but it was done as a tribute because we had just lost him,” she said.

That move caused massive backlash, she said, leading to threatening obscenity-filled phone calls, people calling them “bootlickers” and people leaving zero- and one-star ratings online.

The bricks on their building were also spraypainted and their windows written on in sharpie with sayings including: “Black Lives Matter” and “ACAB,” the latter which means “All Cops are B*ds,” she said.
Turner said she was falsely accused of being racist by people who had known her for years.

“I have no problem with people’s political views (being different), but they made me into that person,” she said. “I’d hear, ‘She only deals with these people.’ That’s not true at all. If you are a good person, I like you. If you are good to me, I’m good to you.

“We fully believe that everyone has the right to their belief system, to live whatever life they want to live.”

Still, her own belief system led to losing support of some longtime patrons and fellow downtown business owners who began to boycott her, she said.

Turner has never been shy about her feelings on mask mandates with children in schools, the overarching COVID shutdown or her support of police. In addition to having signs in the window that support police, she also still displays a sign that reads: “Unmask our kids!”
During the shutdown, Turner said she received numerous cease-and-desist letters and calls from the state stating that people had seen customers inside the coffee shop who shouldn’t be. She admitted to letting one 85-year-old regular, who lived nearby, come inside and warm up each day.

“He was dying of lung cancer,” Turner said. “He’d get here and he couldn’t breathe. So, we’d pull up a chair. He said ‘COVID doesn’t scare me. I’m dying. I’m old. I have nobody.’ We were all he had. I’d get a call (from the state) about it and say, ‘You’re right, I did.’”

Turner said the business gained new customers who recognized what they were going through — a lot of people who weren’t happy with how COVID mandates were handled.

In the post-COVID world, however, she said the business isn’t even close to recovering.

“We are operating 80% down from what we were,” Turner said. “We have depleted our savings, waiting for everyone to come back, but they just haven’t come back. We are a shop that exists on people that work down here. Probably 80% of our customer base was people that worked here. Now, they all work from home and the people that did come back to work are pinching pennies.”
If that wasn’t enough, Turner said, downtown businesses are bracing for years of road construction.

“Now we’ve got the bike lanes and the construction and all of this stuff and people don’t want to deal with it,” she said. “We’ve got a massive homeless problem and no one wants to come down here anymore. We’ve already been through hell and back and now what are we supposed to wait for?”

So, when the time comes, in the days leading up to Christmas Eve and Christmas when the shop would normally close for the holidays, this will be it for Turner and Galbraith downtown.

The coffee shop will continue to be open from 7 a.m. until 1 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 7 a.m. until 11 a.m. on Fridays until it closes.

Prior to the pandemic, Something’s Brewing would be open and busily serving until 5 p.m. But now she rarely sees a customer after 10 a.m., Turner said.

 

“I just hope that people see that small businesses are not OK right now,” she said. “They need to really focus on that. I mean, Amazon is so popular and I feel like after COVID, everyone needs to have something delivered, they want to go to a drive-thru. Nobody gets out of their cars anymore.

“Everyone was alone for so long, I thought that we should’ve come back for community, but we didn’t. We can’t compete with the Biggbys and the Starbucks and Grub Hub. I just want people to be conscientious.”

When asked if someone stopped in tomorrow and offered to invest in the coffee shop to keep it going, Turner said she was unsure what she’d do.

“It’s really hard to say,” she said. “I’ve kind of lost a lot of hope, and respect, for downtown. We don’t feel supported by the city. We don’t feel supported by a lot of the things going on. I don’t feel like it’s going to turn around soon. It sucks.

“My dad did a ton of work in here, my kids grew up in here. They were here since they were 4 weeks old.”

Once Something’s Brewing stops brewing in Kalamazoo, Turner and Galbraith will move all of their equipment to their espresso bar in Vicksburg, which opened at 126 S. Main St., inside Silo Chic Boutique on Nov. 4.
The new location is open from 6:30 a.m. until 10 a.m. Mondays, 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. on Saturdays. The hours will expand once the Kalamazoo store is closed, Turner said.