Back during the pandemic, I wrote about Starbucks’s pivot away from making the stores nice places to sit and lounge, and towards pickup and drive-thru business. (I liked my headline, “Third Place at the Drive-Thru,” too.)

I quoted this bit from a company exec from a 2020 article, which is absurd (and yes, a Starbuck’s exec’s last name was Brewer! That’s always fun, like the Nintendo of America president whose last name is Bowser):

When I ask Brewer about where the third place is going, she says it’s being redefined. “We’re learning that our customers really feel that experience isn’t just sitting in the store. It’s when you hand off that beverage, and the interaction between the barista [and customer] . . . that can happen at the drive-through, or the entryway pickup. We feel like we’re creating a third place, just in a different venue.”

But recently, Starbucks announced that they’re planning to roll out new design/furniture/etc. to make the stores more inviting and welcoming: basically, signaling that they no longer want you out as fast as possible. There’s no rule that you can’t sit with your laptop or meet a friend for hours or have a Bible study or whatever, but the design has shifted in recent years towards making that less enjoyable. (One big example is covering or turning off the outlets, to prevent people from charging devices.) The trend of for-profit chain stores being less hospitable to hanging out felt, for awhile, like of a piece with a whole bunch of other trends in the general direction of little perks and niceties being squeezed out of everything.

This, and the larger issue of “third places” in America, is the subject of my latest American Diary column over at Discourse Magazine. There are not that many restaurants or stores which feel like places you can just kind of relax and exist in. Barnes & Noble has kind of resisted that, and Panera has a bunch of legacy locations that are designed for lingering—newer ones, not so much. Of course, lots of independent cafes and coffee shops are still quite nice places to hang out. But Starbucks is, due in part to their pre-pandemic marketing, the big name people associate with “third places.”

Of course, the business of business is business, and lounging around without spending money isn’t really business. And maybe third places shouldn’t be given to us or taken away at the whim of shareholders anyway.

I do think Europe probably does public space and relaxation better than America. We Americans seem to need to be working or moving or hustling in some way in order to let ourselves relax. So I also say that it’s basically fine if a lot of our public spaces are actually private and for-profit.

This bit, expanding on how something about our culture pushes against the leisurely use of public space, is one of the things I keep thinking about:

We Americans love buying and consuming, and we also love self-reliance, or at least the idea of it. A professional-grade soft-serve machine, or an automatic espresso maker, or a car full of screens that functions as an entertainment system on wheels—all of that stuff lights up both our passive-consumption and self-reliance desires. It takes a little bit more work to refuse something like that. Some might even look askance at this whole third place business as a little too, perhaps, “European.” By which I mean a tendency in American culture to idolize hustling, climbing, being on the move—on looking at people in plazas and piazzas and cafes, doing nothing in particular, and seeing laziness or lounging instead of something deeply human. Perhaps, however, Starbucks as possibly America’s most iconic example of the third place is itself quintessentially American.

There’s another point in this piece, however, which is more central. It’s this: if some chains are already, after the supposedly permanent car-centric and app-centric shift brought on by the pandemic, returning to comfy, pro-lingering stores as a selling point, then, like, we’re still human. The pandemic didn’t really end things. Even all-you-can-eat buffets, which many analysts were sure has been permanently diminished, have bounced back.

Another thing I want to think about a little more is this bit:

Dalrymple writes:

[I]nfinite soft serve ice cream is now within my grasp. But getting a soft serve machine at my house would almost surely lead to a lonelier existence. I’d have fewer things to do for date nights with my wife, or on outings with my kids. I’d spend less time in “third places,” or those places that aren’t home or work but which provide opportunities to interact with other people. The simple flânerie of sitting with and watching strangers would be replaced with scarfing down 10,000 calories of soft serve by myself at 2 a.m.

We Americans love buying and consuming, and we also love self-reliance, or at least the idea of it. A professional-grade soft-serve machine, or an automatic espresso maker, or a car full of screens that functions as an entertainment system on wheels—all of that stuff lights up both our passive-consumption and self-reliance desires. It takes a little bit more work to refuse something like that.

Is ice cream vs. coffee a good example here? Ice cream is more special, while coffee is a daily thing for a lot of people. I wonder which types of businesses or spaces in general are most conducive to being/serving as third places?

Curious what folks think about all this. Leave a comment!

Related Reading:

Apartments, Ownership, and Responsibility

A Lament For Open Borders

Floating In The Air

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