The word came today in my office that the Torrefazione Italia coffee shop in our building would be closing July 29th along with all the other Chicago locations. It turns out that “all the other Chicago locations” is really “both.” Starbucks got the 17 Torrefazione Italia stores nationwide in a 2003 purchase of the much-larger Seattle’s Best Coffee and now they’re shutting down all the Torrefaziones.

Sure, this isn’t going to impact Chicago as a whole much. Their coffee was terrible — it got the lowest score, 2.6/9, in the RedEye‘s coffee taste test last week — and there are only three locations, all downtown. But I’ve… got used to their terrible coffee over the last five years. And it’s so close. The evil empire had better replace my convenient coffee.