Everything but the Coffee (15 page)

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.”
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(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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 meet
ing 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.
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Yet Igo’s, Massey’s, and Dalaney’s stories seem to me to represent the exception rather than the rule.
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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.