Give Peet’s Evanston a Chance

A profitable store. A historic location. A community that’s showing up. And today, just as the store’s business has been on an upswing, we have learned it is scheduled to close at the end of January - in less than 2 weeks!

This location is not just another café. It was the first Peet’s Coffee outside of California. It became the front porch of downtown Evanston. For more than two decades, Peet’s Coffee on Chicago Avenue has been a daily ritual for thousands of Evanston residents — families, seniors, students, faculty, and workers from many surrounding businesses.

We are asking Peet’s Coffee to do one simple, reasonable thing:

Keep the Evanston café open through the end of the year and give this community a chance to show what it means to us.

Every day, this café quietly serves a cross-section of Evanston that few other places can:

• Seniors from the assisted-living building across the street who rely on it as their daily outing
• Northwestern University students, faculty, and staff who use it as an informal campus commons — it’s the closest coffee shop to campus
• Construction crews building Evanston’s future
• Remote workers, parents, and longtime residents who depend on it as a third place between home and work

For many of us, this was:

• The first coffee we had when we moved to Evanston
• The first stop the morning our child was born
• Where we studied for finals
• Where we waited for a friend
• Where we went just to feel less alone

On a typical morning, you’ll see construction workers in reflective jackets, Northwestern staff on their way to work, NU students grabbing coffee before class, and older neighbors meeting for their daily ritual. In the afternoon, it continues to bustle — laptops, study groups, job interviews, conversations that don’t fit into a 30-minute Zoom call.

This store is not struggling.
It is not empty.
It is not forgotten.

Closing it now would erase not just a café, but a piece of Evanston’s civic fabric — at a moment when both the neighborhood and the store itself are clearly still alive and growing.

We are asking Peet’s Coffee to pause this decision, keep the Evanston café open through the end of the year, and let the people who rely on it prove its value — not just in dollars, but in daily life.