Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  When I tell some people about how Starbucks manufactures a sense of belonging, they sometimes cringe. Others look disappointed, like their friendly barista wasn’t really their friend after all. But most see the conversations at the Starbucks counter for what they are and value the weak ties that they get from the company, with their simultaneous closeness and distance, inclusiveness and exclusiveness.24 “I like that they recognize me,” my former dean explained to me, “but also I like that I don’t have to talk when I don’t want to.” Maybe we can call this customer-controlled belonging. “I don’t work for Starbucks,” one regular wrote on the online discussion board starbucksgossip.com, “but every time I’m in there . . . the baristas greet me cheerfully and always without fail, compliment something about me: my hair, my outfit, my jewelry, my purse.” With a touch of modesty, she continued, “there’s nothing exceptional about me, but they seem to go out of their way to make me feel good. I always leave a little happier than when I arrived.” Maybe it’s part of the ‘sell,’” she acknowledged, “but I don’t care. A kind word goes a long way.”25 These pleasantries—corporate-generated recognition and banter—kept her coming back to Starbucks, singing the company’s praises, and paying the premium. Weak ties, even manufactured ones, have value, and people will pay for them.

  Still, neither weak ties nor the coffee shop turned into an office or private meeting place was what Oldenburg had in mind when he talked about third places. For him, third places had their own sort of weak tie to Jürgen Habermas’s weightier ideas about public spaces. The influential German philosopher defined the public sphere as a place where individuals who won’t meet in other situations come together at a site, like a club, tavern, or coffeehouse, outside the influence of the state and away from the private realm. But they need to be doing more than just sharing space. Gathered as carpenters or artists or coffee drinkers, they must start to talk, then connect, and then meld together into a public. After this happens—and for Habermas this was the real payoff—they become capable of debating politics and talking about the larger civic good. Democracy, Habermas argued, can’t function without vibrant public spaces, spaces that do not serve primarily as sites of buying and selling, but as places for thinking and talking.26 Oldenburg would basically agree, although he is more interested in smaller-scale community than the more grandiose project of democracy. But, he would concede, the process of bringing people together is similar. In third places that work, people who wouldn’t otherwise meet get to know and eventually trust each other. For this to happen, there has to be conversation; there has to be talk.

  Sociologist Elijah Anderson shared similar concerns and hopes. In a tight and perceptive essay, he developed a model that is perhaps closest to how a Starbucks might work as a public space or third place. He called such a location the “cosmopolitan canopy.” These were sites where different kinds of people gather and feel safe enough to let down their guard and open themselves up to new music, new food, new experiences, new ideas, and even new people. This takes some repetition. Usually the same people come over and over again to these kinds of places, and the people working there are also the same each time. This familiarity creates a sense of security and gives these places great potential for meaningful talk. Sharing a table and then a conversation with, say, an African American man can encourage a white man—to imagine one example suggested by Anderson—to rethink his thoughts about race. Maybe through this interaction he revises his belief system to feel that not all young black men are criminals; then the next time that he approaches a young black man on his way to work, he doesn’t automatically cross the street. But this change of heart and newfound tolerance requires not just observing the other, but talking and exchanging stories, news reports, gossip, rumors, and, maybe most important, theories for why things happen the way they happen. Unregulated talk, then, is absolutely essential for Anderson, as it is for Oldenburg, Habermas, and anyone else interested in cosmopolitan canopies and third places.27

  For about nine months, while I was doing research for this book, I spent, on average, ten to fifteen hours a week at Starbucks. On only a dozen or so occasions did I speak to someone I didn’t already know. However, on any number of occasions, I have seen teenagers, sometimes from the same school and sometimes from different schools, gather there and take advantage of being away from their parents to try on slightly new personalities and talk to each other, exchanging ideas, secrets, gossip, and phone numbers. Moreover, I have heard stories from others about meaningful talk among adults at Starbucks, about people over twenty making connections there beyond their usual social circles.

  My friend Sarah Igo told me, for instance, about a New Haven Starbucks on the edge of Yale’s campus, where students and locals, professors and the unemployed gather around a chessboard to play, talk strategy, and swap stories. Wright Massey, the 1990s Starbucks store designer, told a similar story. These days he stops by a Starbucks store near his home in suburban, strip-malled Orlando every morning. When he walks in the door, he sees the same people, sitting in the same places. They are his coffeehouse friends. He talks with them about politics, the weather, business, whatever. His mornings at Starbucks provide him with a connection—a hard thing to find in Orlando, a large, fast-growing, and spread-out place with seemingly more tourists than full-time residents and few walkable neighborhoods anchored by corner bars and diners.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Kathleen Dalaney lived in a place like Orlando— the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, the placeless sort of place where Starbucks seems more likely than in the cities to become a central meeting spot. In 2005, she had just had a baby. Her husband worked long hours, turning her into a stay-at-home mom who couldn’t get an Elmo song out of her head. “It can be so isolating sometimes,” Dalaney admitted. Looking for connections, she logged onto meetup.com, “a web site where people with similar interests can find likeminded people close by.” Pretty soon, she discovered other area stay-at-home moms. They started to meet at a Starbucks. Now, she says, she has someone to talk to about the daily pressures in her life. The women are even planning a cruise someday—without their kids or their husbands.28

  Yet Igo’s, Massey’s, and Dalaney’s stories seem to me to represent the exception rather than the rule.29 I have been to plenty of Starbucks with-out much talk. Most times when I have talked with people I didn’t know at Starbucks, my kids were involved. I have seen this with others as well. With a four-year-old by your side, you are marked as safe. Twice outside the United States, I talked with people I didn’t know—other Americans. Another time, I was sitting in the tiny Starbucks in Margate, New Jersey, a shore town a couple of miles south of Atlantic City. A man started talking about his plans to develop condos in Atlantic City. But he blurted out he would have to sell them to New York Jews, not Philadelphia Jews, because Philly Jews, he bellowed, knew all about Atlantic City, a city I understood him to say with an African American majority. Then he asked everyone in the coffee shop if they agreed. Two did, and one wasn’t sure. I didn’t vote. I didn’t know what to say or how to raise questions about the proposition on the table with people I didn’t know. Most of my Starbucks interactions, then, were one-off deals, even at outlets where I often went and sat for a long time. The conversations never lasted long, or involved a lot of back-and-forth, or got renewed the next day or the day after that—a key for Oldenburg and Anderson.

  Judi Schmitt of Northern Virginia went searching for a third place at Starbucks and didn’t find it, either. For three years, she said over e-mail, she and a friend played weekly, two-hour long Scrabble games at a local Starbucks. “We kind of hoped to start something,” she noted with regret, but “we have not . . . started a trend.” Not a single person ever asked to join them, though a few customers looked up from their “babies, laptops, [and] school books” and shared “fond memories of playing Scrabble.” But that’s it.

  In search of that elusive third place, I went back to the busy wedge-shaped Starbucks on Dupont Circle I had visi
ted in DC before I talked with Philadelphia reporter Alfred Lubrano and declared Starbucks “a perfect third place.” This time it was a crisp but comfortable January night. Again, a diverse crowd of people came and went and kept the store packed. Students sat behind laptops and stacks of papers. Friends talked to friends. Businessmen barked instructions into cell phones about delayed orders and discounts. Lovers whispered to each other. A few customers exchanged hellos and the occasional “How are you?” with the employees. But no one talked with anyone they didn’t seem to already know or hadn’t come there to meet. None of the talk was addressed to anyone else. For my part, I couldn’t find a way to enter a dialogue with anyone.

  I left and came back the next day. Again the place was crowded and thick with chatter. I looked around, but I didn’t recognize anyone from my other visits. Still, this time I was determined to talk to someone. I sat on one of the comfy chairs in the back of the room. My knees just about touched the knees of the guy next to me. I made eye contact with him. But not a word—a nod, but not a word. I suppose I should have said hello, made a comment about the Tony Hillerman mystery he was reading, but I didn’t know how to start the conversation. Or maybe I knew— and he knew—not to talk at Starbucks. We had been trained into silence, into recognizing the coffee shop as a place with boundaries. If you are there by yourself, you are off limits. I went back to the Dupont Circle Starbucks again later that day and the next day. Never did I find a conversation that I could easily—for me—join in. Again, maybe I should have tried harder.

  Not long after my very unscientific and unsuccessful Washington-based third place experiment, I went to a Philadelphia Starbucks and pulled out my copy of Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, the book where he first introduced the term third place. Reading it again and thinking about my own Starbucks experiences, I realized that Howard Schultz had cited and put into practice only part of the third place idea. Third places certainly function, Oldenburg says, as spaces to hang out between work and home, something Schultz and other Starbucks officials point out all the time, but they remain, the sociologist insists, so much more. For starters, they are idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind hangouts. Each has its own feel and decor. Uniqueness gives them value to customers and gives them the chance to become agents of cohesion and community. But, again, it is the talk that happens in these quirky third places that matters. Oldenburg is not simply romantic for a lost urban past of mom-and-pop corner stores and manly neighborhood taverns, although he can come off this way at times. To him, third places serve not just as refuges or hideouts from the world or as steady producers of weak ties, things that Starbucks does quite well. They are not about the individual; they are about the collective. They are not about passive participation; they are about active engagement. This is key for Oldenburg, just as it is for Anderson. Like cosmopolitan canopies, third places perform a vital public service: they bring people together who would not come into contact with one another in any other setting. They do this not just for commerce but also for the larger social good.

  Not long after I reread his book, I went to talk with Oldenburg. Thin and graying, with a bad back that made him move slower than he might have for his age, the retired professor blended into the early-morning crowd at a Pensacola pancake house. Starbucks, he told me, had once asked him to work for the company. He turned down the offer only to have an executive lecture him in the back of a limo about the true nature of third places.

  While Oldenburg admitted that Starbucks has done some “good things,” he scoffed at the notion of Starbucks as a third place. “It is an imitation,” he said as he took a bite of his ham and eggs, adding, “It’s all about safety for them.” Fully realized and functioning third places, he insisted, must have wide-open doors, a whiff of danger, and a hint of uncertainty. They must value easy access for everyone over predictability. In Oldenburg’s mind, owners play a key part in creating the unique, transformative character of a third place. Standing behind the bar or the counter day and night, they are a constant presence, not a shift worker like a Starbucks barista, fit into a complex and ever-changing schedule. More important, the owners set the tone for the place through their jokes, political commentary, wall hangings, jukebox choices, and gruff or gentle gestures. They welcome strangers and bring them into the community by introducing them to the regulars. And they don’t do this for money alone; they do it for themselves, out of a desire for social connections and in service to their town or neighborhood. “Would Starbucks,” Oldenburg asked me, “give a guy who is down on his luck a job?”

  Essentially, Oldenburg continued, third places are conversational zones, places to talk freely and openly, sound off and entertain, experiment with ideas and arguments. With its “overriding concern for safety,” predictability, and reassurance, Starbucks “can’t achieve the kinds of connections I had in mind,” Oldenburg concluded.

  Beau Weston is also skeptical about Starbucks’ third place claims. Like Oldenburg, Weston is a sociologist. He teaches at Centre College, a tiny, academically rigorous private school in rural Kentucky, perhaps most famous for hosting the 2000 vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. Over the last couple of years, during the school’s J-term—a short session of courses between fall and spring semesters—Weston has offered a class with readings from Oldenburg and Habermas on coffeehouse culture and the making of public spaces. When the coffeehouse works the way it ideally should, it is, according to Weston, “a place in which strangers can talk to one another” and debate the issues of the day. When Weston conjures up this image, he uses the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse as his model. Every day, shop-keepers and bankers, ditch diggers and lawyers—just about anyone— came to these places for coffee. There were certainly gender filters at work at the coffeehouse, but few class filters. Everyone sat next to every-one else, and together they talked business and heard the latest news. Someone would literally read aloud from the papers. Because the coffee cost only a penny and because the coffeehouse served as an informal place of learning, observers dubbed these institutions “penny universities.” When the newspaper readers finished, the noisy, cantankerous debate started. Intellectuals damned the government. Conservatives damned the intellectuals. And wits spread rumors and gossip and made fun of everyone. Over time, the coffeehouse, as a result, became a gathering spot for men from all walks of life, but also a sort of classroom— not just for sharing ideas but also for learning how to discuss and debate pressing issues with strangers.30 “Informed men, some educated and some not,” Weston continued, “would come together and talk about stuff”—literature, poetry, the economy, and politics. “Having a place to do that enriches a culture. It takes us out of the cocoon of private life and into the public world. Cafes are important for creating a public life, particularly in a democracy.”31

  At the center of the coffeehouse world stood the “Coffee House Man.” He is both a maven and a connector. In his “dark” history of coffee, journalist Antony Wild described this figure, who in many ways resembled Oldenburg’s chatty counterman and a more intellectually engaged version of Sam, the bartender from Cheers, as “energetic, self-motivated, political, practical, reformist, well-connected, cultured, and philanthropic.”32 Part teacher, part showman, he brings people together, starts conversations, and keeps things rolling. He made the coffeehouse of old hum with talk, but he also made it a broadly civic institution.

  As the coffeehouse crossed the ocean and moved into the twentieth century, it took on other forms and other traditions. By the 1950s, mods in bright jackets and motorcycle boots and beatniks in baggy work pants and dark sunglasses took over Greenwich Village, North Beach, and London coffeehouses. As cool cats like Charles Bukowski read prose poems over a Charlie Parker soundtrack, beret-wearing hipsters clicked their fingers and sipped espresso from chipped porcelain cups. But here, too, talk linked politics to art, cool to civic life. As th
e singers sang and the audiences talked, they attacked Cold War conformity and the sub-urban ideals of heterosexuality, monogamy, and keeping up with the Joneses. They talked politics without discussing presidents and senators, foreign policy and congressional appropriations. They emphasized freedom and pushing past social constraints. Jazz played as the sound-track of the 1950s coffee shop. By then outside the mainstream, jazz— specifically, bop—stood out for its spontaneous, improvisational splendor and sparseness. The abstract art hanging on the walls echoed these musical themes. Rejecting straight lines and conventional representation, it also spoke the language of freedom and individualism. All this happened at the coffeehouse.

  The 1960s brought in the GI coffeehouses. These places also turned on politics and talk. Set up near military bases, these spare storefront operations were usually run by radicals and pacifists trying to educate soldiers about the Vietnam War—or, more accurately, to get them to oppose the war.