Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  SECOND SPACE

  Lots of people, I learned from my many hours of observation, used Starbucks as a second place, as a work space and meeting room. Like everything at Starbucks, this reflected larger social changes and cutbacks in the Fordist social contract (i.e., the idea that employers take care of workers on and off the job), even for white-collar types. A job used to mean an office. Yet even in the business-first economic order that helped bring on the New Depression of 2008, stockbrokers, junior associates, and account executives got increasingly crammed into cubicles with corkboard walls and blinding fluorescent lights. The conference rooms down the hall weren’t so nice, either. In fact, some firms encouraged the outsourcing of the office. As early as 1995, Ernst & Young officials told investors it could save $25 million a year by getting workers to telecommute and do their jobs off-site.10 Office amenities declined, however, at the same time that public space shrunk. Where could people go to work away from their desks and still have a pleasant meeting? Hotel lobbies weren’t what they used to be. Parks might be too risky and unpredictable. The diner was kind of cruddy. The public library in many places was cutting back hours and attracted too many computerless types (a growing minority of the poor) and too many without other places to go. Knowing that it would help sell coffee, Starbucks leapt into this void caused by yet another offshoot of privatization and turned itself into an easily accessed office away from the office.

  Looking to get away from their cramped and sterile cubicles, nagging bosses, nosy coworkers, and the bleating of phones, faxes, and copy machines, secretaries and businessmen, grant writers and teaching assistants came to Starbucks to do paperwork and talk to clients. “Places like this,” commented an Oklahoma university administrator, “are . . . an extension of the office.”11

  In the last fifteen years, more Americans needed flexible office space. Thousands set up consulting firms. Like the telecommuters, these Web designers and health care specialists marooned in home offices occasionally need a break from the silence, the same four walls, and the monotony. They, too, come to Starbucks. Emre Ozcan thought she would like working from home. While she enjoyed the freedom of not having to go to an office every day, the quiet some-times unnerved her. “I like to feel the presence of people around me,” she told a reporter. “I like to watch people when I work.” A woman sitting next to her at a Starbucks added, “Maybe it’s me, but if I work for long hours in a room by myself, I feel like I’m missing something in my life.”12

  For many, though, Starbucks isn’t just a second office; it is the first office. This involved everyday economics. Say you live in New York or Boston or San Francisco, and you don’t have an office at home or work, but you need one. You could rent your own office. In the spring of 2006, Craigslist for New York showed a 785-square-foot office in Union Square for $2,000 per month. A 125-square-foot space in the Garment District went for $600. For $375 each month, a Web designer could get a desk, chair, and filing cabinet in Chelsea. Starbucks was even cheaper. Say you bought a grande drip coffee in the morning, a refill later, and maybe a pastry in between—that would cost you about six dollars. Throw in a dollar tip for the servers, and that comes to seven dollars a day at Starbucks. If you did this each week, Monday through Friday, it would cost you about $140 per month.13 For that modest amount, you have an office with fresh coffee, heat, air conditioning, music, and janitors at a fraction of the cost of a place down the street; and for some people, it beats a home office, with roommates and their boyfriends and the faulty heater making noise and the refrigerator creating disruptions all the time. In other words, Starbucks, as expensive as it is, isn’t a bad deal.

  That’s how Rick Goldberg figured it. With his messy dark hair, a couple of days’ worth of stubble, paint-and coffee-stained khakis, and a gray Michigan hoodie that might have fit once but now was a size too small, leaving his white T-shirt poking out of the bottom, he looks more like an unmade bed than a downtown lawyer.

  “I didn’t like putting on a suit every day, and I really didn’t like shaving every morning. I have sensitive skin,” he told me underlining the last sentence with a cheeky smile.

  So he left his office twenty-three floors above the ground to strike out on his own. Things were going all right.

  “I have a handful of really good clients and not much overhead,” he laughed.

  As he said that, he pulled out his office: two cell phones and a Dell laptop. The day was starting out OK, he told me. He pointed down.

  “I got a table, and it’s near a plug.”

  Then he got to work. His cell phone rang. He banged the computer keys. His phone rang again. He walked outside and talked. He came back and typed some more. Again, the phone rang.

  What happens when a client wants a face-to-face meeting? “Nothing,” he answered. “I just say, ‘Let’s meet at Starbucks,’ and they ask, ‘Which one?’ ” In fact, many of his clients make the suggestion even before he does.

  In part because of its predictability and in part because there is no other place to go in the United States, Starbucks has succeeded in becoming an all-purpose business meeting and work spot. At just about any outlet anywhere at any time, some transaction is going on. Executives talk with clients while they wait in line for lattes. Salespeople meet over coffee at corner tables. Real estate agents pore over maps and study listings with prospective buyers. Landlords get tenants to sign contracts over coffee, and dot-com executives interview prospective employees sitting face to face on soft chairs. In fact, Starbucks’ success as a second “second place” for many people sometimes makes it hard for a full-timer like Rick Goldberg. You don’t get priority seating and can’t make reservations at the coffee shop. No matter how much time and money Rick spends at Starbucks, sometimes he can’t find a table.

  As we talked, we both noticed one, and then another, thirtyish woman in a dark, stylish suit come into the store. Each got a drink and then sat down. They unfurled their portable offices—a laptop, a BlackBerry, and thick three-ring binders. Both went about their jobs, checking calls, looking up information, and sipping coffee. Fifteen minutes later they packed up and moved on to—Rick and I both presumed—their next sales call. So they were quick-hitters, but their visits pointed to another key dynamic at work at Starbucks—another dynamic that fills up the stores, keeps them busy most of the time, and earns the company a premium with customers.

  As we watched these women, I wondered where else they could have gone. Restaurants could be awkward if you wanted lots of room and not much in the way of food and drink. A bar wouldn’t work for most women: places that serve alcohol, especially in the middle of the day, skew as more masculine; and for women, they invite a kind of attention—often sexual attention—that these salespeople surely didn’t want. Perhaps a hotel lobby would do, but few hotels have spacious and inviting common spaces anymore. At Starbucks, though, the women in suits got what they needed: a clean, safe place—an almost desexualized place—to get ready for their next meeting or appointment. Most felt comfortable enough to leave their stuff for a moment to use the restroom. All they had to do to get this sense of security and a bit of work space was buy a cup of coffee. Clearly it was worth it. The same logic held true for women tourists and city residents looking for a break between outings, errands, and shopping. For all of them, Starbucks was a meeting room, workplace, and sanctuary, yet not really a third place or a place to meet other people from the town or neighborhood they didn’t already know.14

  Bathrooms represent another public void that Starbucks fills to its own private money-making advantage. They are, in many ways, an essential part of the company’s value proposition, especially for urban customers. Several times in New York, I have watched groups of women and men walk into a store; then typically, two go right to the bathroom, two get in the drink line, and two just stand there. By the time the friends reassemble, they have purchased a couple of lattes and a muffin. Starbucks, then, got eight dollars to rent out its bathroom.

  The bathroom
brigades usually head straight to Starbucks, bypassing McDonald’s and Wendy’s, the bus station and public library. Surely, they know from prior experience that the coffee company keeps its restrooms clean and well stocked. So did the editors of the Portland Phoenix. “We’ll come out and say it,” they wrote in the 2005 edition of the weekly alternative paper’s best of the year awards. “We don’t much like multinational corporations.” But when it came to grime and yellowy funk, they put aside their politics. They told readers:

  Starbucks has the cleanest bathrooms for us germaphobes. There’s just something pristine about those Starbucks bathrooms. Maybe it’s the fact that we don’t have to use our feet to flush the toilet, or that we’re not scared to touch the door handle—hell, we’d eat off it. Maybe it’s because when we walk out of Starbucks’ bathroom we don’t feel the intense need to disinfect our entire bodies. It’s not that their coffee is any better or their service quicker; it’s cleanliness, pure and simple. When we’re stuck on a long shopping excursion and we have to pee, our ideals fly out the window and we’re the first to suggest a quick trip to Starbucks. Yes, it’s weak and wholly hypocritical, but when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go (and sometimes, we don’t even really buy anything).15

  Paco Underhill studies bathrooms and how women and men use retail spaces. Trained as an anthropologist, he skipped out on academia and largely invented what some call the “science of shopping.” These days, he gets paid a king’s ransom to watch what people do in stores, how they move, where they stop, and what makes them move on. Bathrooms, he mentions, can be crucial. His research has taught him that most customers, especially women, will pay a premium for products paired with bathrooms “with a clean baby-changing table and a working sink and trash can that isn’t spilling all over the floor.”16 Clearly Underhill and Starbucks were on the same page when it came to bathrooms. With its spacious, sparkling clean, and nicely appointed bathrooms, the coffee company informs customers that it cares, even if it costs a little extra to keep these places spick-and-span. In this equation, customers repay Starbucks’ kindness with coffee purchases and word-of-mouth praise.

  Once again, Starbucks adds to its business as a result of the tattering of the older social contract. Rutgers University geography professor Wansoo Im maps bathrooms. Great cities, he told a New Yorker reporter, have lots of public toilets. Paris does, and so does Tokyo. And New York did. In the 1930s, officials constructed a wide network of public rest-rooms. By the 1970s, pushed and pulled by crime and a budget crisis, city leaders cut funding for these bathrooms. But visitors, workers, shoppers, and other pedestrians still need toilets, so they have to search for them in essentially private places, like Starbucks.17 A reporter once asked New York mayor Michael Bloomberg why the city doesn’t have more public bathrooms. We don’t need them, he responded. “There’s enough Starbucks that’ll let you use the bathroom.”18

  Starbucks, however, isn’t a public space any more than a mall is a public space. While it appears to offer equal access, in reality, it serves the needs of only some—another hallmark of the privatization of daily life and unequal distribution of resources that goes with these changes. People are always saying—often complaining—that Starbucks is every-where. But it isn’t. Going back to the New York example, a Starbucks store sits on just about every Midtown corner and along every Village square, but there is only one or two Starbucks in the overwhelmingly African American and Latino areas of the city above 125th Street, and there is not one in East Harlem or in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. More than 1.3 million people live in the Bronx, and Starbucks operates less than a handful of stores in that borough. Manhattan, on the other hand, has two hundred thousand more residents than the Bronx yet has two hundred more Starbucks. So it is the better-off who have the better access to Mayor Bloomberg’s quasi-public bathrooms.

  Even inside the stores, Starbucks isn’t so public. When I started my research, most of the Manhattan Starbucks locked their bathroom doors, although fewer seem to be doing so these days. To use the bolted bath-rooms, you had to ask for a key. This seemed to be no problem for people wearing suits and expensive ski jackets or white college professors like myself. We ask for the key, no questions asked. But for the homeless and for people of color, especially unattached men, things aren’t so simple and easy. Several times I have seen African American men go up to the counter for the key. Giving the man the once-over, the manager or the shift supervisor hesitates and says, “Have you bought anything? The bathrooms, you know, are for customers only.” Every once in a while, I saw a homeless person walk in and jiggle the bathroom handle. If it was locked, either he waited for the person to come out and grabbed the door before it shut, or he left. He didn’t waste his time asking for a key. Again, Starbucks doesn’t operate its stores for the public good. They in effect rent bathrooms to people who pay four dollars for a latte and who look to the baristas like they can pay that much for a cup of coffee.19

  Students and writers often have the look, if not the money, that gets them access to Starbucks as a second place. “The library is just too loud,” a New York University student told me when I asked him why he studied at Starbucks. Georgia and UCLA students said the same thing to me. One announced, “I just can’t go to the library. It’s too . . . I don’t know . . . old.” “It’s a place away from friends and distractions,” says another college student of Starbucks. “You have no other choice but to study.”20 (Think about this line later when we explore more deeply the third place dimensions of these outlets.) For others, Starbucks serves as a new student union, especially now that many universities can no longer fund these grand central meeting spots. Without these places, co-ed groups of recyclers and hikers gather at Starbucks and compete with Rick Goldberg for space in the late afternoons.

  One day I watched as five Baruch College students working on a marketing project sat in the back of an East Side store. Uptown, the members of the AIDS Walk coordinating committee from a private high school discussed logistics and fund-raising. One student told me that she goes to Starbucks all the time for meetings, and although she doesn’t drink coffee, she always buys something. “Seems like I should, right?” Starbucks, then, makes money renting out space, space increasingly unavailable anywhere else. Still, when I asked a student who studied at Starbucks over e-mail if she ever talked to anyone she didn’t know there, she responded with an emphatic “NO!”

  “Find a Sanctuary,” recommends one writer. That’s what Lizzie Skurnick, a Baltimore-based author, did. “Hordes of writers,” she explained, “have colonized every Starbucks.” But, she noted, this wasn’t about the coffeehouse tradition. “The bohemian ideal is dead,” she declared. It was again about economics. Not many of her fellow writers could afford a West Village apartment or a stool at the end of the bar at one of those nearby “wine-soaked salons.” Starbucks, she declared, represented “our last stand.” For four dollars a day, you could get a place to write, prompting her to conclude, “As far as I’m concerned the coffee is free.” What she really meant was that the tables and chairs were free when you paid for a drink.21

  Lawyer Rick Goldberg and writer Lizzie Skurnick, the women sales-people and legions of refugees from the office cubicles, the North Face customers and bathroom users have certainly adopted Starbucks as a “second place”—as a public work site and restroom. Some of the people at the tables around them surely use the coffee shop as a “fourth place,” a place to get online and talk with friends and strangers on MySpace, Facebook, and other virtual meeting rooms. But a third place? I didn’t see much of that going on at Starbucks. Different kinds of people definitely gather at the coffee stores and sometimes do connect, but more often they are there hiding out from the stresses of their private lives or banging away at a laptop fully engrossed by their own world and no one else’s. Rarely (though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen every once in a while) do these different people doing different things actually talk and exchange ideas, but talk and ideas are
crucial to the making of community, the coffeehouse tradition, and third places.

  WEAK TIES

  I spent a lot of time eavesdropping at Starbucks. When there is talk at Starbucks, it is largely between workers and customers. The ties that are made there, then, are generally weak ties, not really what Ray Oldenburg had in mind when he talked about third places.22 Still, that is not to say that Oldenburg and others won’t recognize the social and psychological usefulness of these kinds of weaker connections. “To be known,” Oldenburg says, “is important. It gives you a sense of belonging.”

  In many ways, Starbucks deliberately manufactures these weak ties and this casual sense of belonging. Company manuals and managers encourage workers to perform all kinds of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild so aptly called “emotion work.” Like the flight attendants she studied, Starbucks calls on its clerks not only to deliver coffee but also to create, through their tone, faces, and moods, “a particular emotional state in others.”23 The Green Apron book, a shorter, handier version of the company manual, reminds “partners” to be “welcoming, genuine, considerate, knowledgeable.” “It is a little forced,” one veteran worker admitted. “We are judged if we say hello. You have to smile and make eye contact.” If you want to go “above and beyond to deliver legendary service, you have to start customer conversations.” “You have to pretend you care,” she continued, “about their vacations plans and car troubles, what they drank yesterday and what they will eat today.” One time her shift manager scolded her for not smiling enough with her eyes. However, she recognized, as others do, that these conversations and facial expressions create relationships and a sense of belonging. That’s why they have value.

  In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow laid out his famous pyramid of needs. Once the basic needs of air, food, sleep, water, and sex are met, human beings, he argued, seek to satisfy higher longings. He laid these out in ascending order. After safety and security (things Starbucks surely pays attention to), he listed love and belonging as the next-highest needs. People, Maslow observed, seek a sense of belonging and acceptance from larger groups—families, neighbors, church members, business associates, peers, and the guys at the barbershop and the women at the beauty salon. Without these kinds of connections, we are susceptible to loneliness and social anxiety. No doubt familiar with Maslow’s ideas, Starbucks designers engineered a sense of belonging knowing that customers will pay extra for recognition, especially as community ties get weaker and nods and hellos are harder to find. That is surely one of the benefits of the corporate-created language. Only people in the know— the people who belong—can talk there. That is also why shift managers remind employees to smile with their eyes and remember everyone’s name in line.