Man Visiting Every Starbucks Hits Snag

A man who embarked on a journey to visit every single Starbucks in the world is hitting a snag, and the economy is to blame.

Since late last year, the coffee chain has shuttered hundreds of stores due to the weak economy, and it's causing 37-year-old Winter a bit of stress. Since 1997, Winter has been slowly going down the checklist of all of the Starbucks in the world, and according to his Web site , he's visited 8,414 stores in North America and 664 internationally. His journey has been documented in the film " Starbucking ."

Last month Winter learned that a store in Prince George, British Columbia, would be closing the next day. He spent $1,400 to get to the store from Wisconsin just for a cup of coffee.

"If the store closed before I visited, I would lose another piece of my soul," Winter told the Wall Street Journal .

On his Twitter feed , Winter has had several posts in the past couple of months that express his panic. Starbucks usually doesn't reveal which stores will shutter until right before they do. "I live in continuous fear that one or more of the Starbucks I have not yet visited will close down," he wrote last November.

So he's now making it his main mission to tackle the stores that are facing impending doom. As store closures were being announced last July, Winter attempted to visit all of them, driving 25,000 miles through California, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Miraculously he got through all of them except for one in Hillsboro, Ore., because his mapping software on his laptop sent him to the wrong one. But missing that one store broke Winter's heart.

He's repeated this kind of trip several times now, to Hawaii, Canada and along the Mexico border, spending hundreds on airplane tickets and sleeping in cars.

Despite the adverse conditions, Winter, who works as a software contractor, says he believes he has found a purpose in his life. "People should be out doing something rather than just existing or surviving. Even if you think that what I'm doing is meaningless, it is a purpose, at least," he told the Journal . "I feel not just satisfaction, but genuine relief when I visit a store before it closes."

Watch a video about Winter from WSJ.com:

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