i remember koramangala, 5th block specifically, mid 2023. that blue tokai outlet next to roastery was ground zero. half of early stage bangalore was working from there. two pm to six pm you'd overhear: investor calls, pitch deck review, even product teardown with some YC alum. no seats inside so i parked at the outside bench near the window. wifi barely reached there. next to me this guy's debugging something on a steamdeck looking devkit. i half glance over and ask if it's AWS creds, he goes 'nah, it's some edge TPU , google keeps timing out cold starts'. we start chatting.
turns out he's building vision for offline-first retail. he's got no frontend, just a python backend. i scribble something on a napkin about fast-booting wasm modules from disk cache. 3 weeks later he pings me on telegram saying they got boot time down from 14s to 2.8s using a variant of that.
never met him again. never even learned his startup's name. but that entire bottleneck cleared because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.
we maynot recreate that on a discord channel. there's no incentive to overshare when you're not spatially co-located. bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low
> bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low
Go a whole decade+ back, it was the Leela coffee shop which opened till 1 AM.
> we maynot recreate that on a discord channel.
IRC + freenode did the same decades ago, back in the day when the computers wouldn't fit in a backpack - people would just lurk socially and not really join a channel for a purpose.
Most of #linux-india was a third place after midnight, though not a physical one.
> because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.
There's also an undesirable side to coworking cafe low-OPSEC.
Funny anecdote about that...
I was meeting up with a startups friend, at one of the cafes that's popular for techbros.
Before we met up, friend mentioned this guy from the startups scene, who sometimes lurks at that cafe, to steal ideas.
So friend and I are talking at the cafe about an application domain we both know. And how we're surprised no one is doing X for it, because then you could do A, B, C, etc.
I look over, and some guy has moved from his table, to sit on the floor, close to us, and just has a cat-that-got-the-canary beaming look on his face. Yes, it was the noted lurker-stealer guy.
Shortly after, an organization he's affiliated with announced a big initiative/group to do X for that application domain. Maybe just a funny coincidence.
I'd be interested to see an update to this study in the coming years. Starbucks has been pivoting towards take out and mobile orders and removing tables and chairs entirely from some of its stores lately.
But in 2024, Brian Niccols pitched the "Back to Starbucks" plan, with point 3 of his 4 point focus being, "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."[1] He said, "Our stores will be inviting places to linger, with comfortable seating, thoughtful design and a clear distinction between “to-go” and “for-here” service."
Whether or not that's working is another story[2].
Long story short is that Scooters, Dutch Bros. and other brands are doing drive-thru better, and cafe attendance is down 22% since before the pandemic.
Consumer tastes have shifted. And given Gen Z's preference for online interaction over in-person, I'm not sure if Starbucks will be able to steer the ship.
If I were Starbucks, I'd strongly consider splitting the branding on the cafes and drive-thrus. Keep the Starbucks brand with the drive-thrus, then try opening a few new cafes as a new brand. Worst case scenario, you rebrand those cafes as Starbucks. I bet they've talked about it.
> "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."
What a load of corporate bullshit. Unlike any other community coffee house, this one made almost $10b in profit last year. I wonder how much the "community" really benefits from this.
>Unlike any other community coffee house, this one made almost $10b in profit last year. I wonder how much the "community" really benefits from this
That's around $60k per store. That sounds like a very reasonable number for an absentee coffee shop owner (which is basically what the shareholders are).
The word "profit" means that this is the money which is by definition not going to the store. Any money which goes to the store is not counted into profits.
When a company makes a profit, that doesn't necessarily mean they made anyone else worse off. In general, when in a competitive environment, and dealing with customers who are responsible adults (which both hold in the case of the restaurant industry), we should presume that everyone is being made better off by the transactions, that it's a win-win situation.
Well, a union is a form of cartel, it's an anti competitive organization of market participants who are colluding to set prices and extract other concessions from labour buyers. They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.
You're acting as if capitalists treat their workers well under the current system when the opposite has occurred. Nearly $50 trillion was stolen from workers [1] by the capitalists owners in the US. Income inequality is literally at worse levels than just prior to the French Revolution.
The first politician to offer $1 trillion in federal assistance to middle/lower classes (free healthcare, free university/vocational training, public housing, public jobs) will absolutely control the electorate at both sides of the aisles.
Remember that redistribution of wealth are very popular American activities. It swings both ways.
> They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.
Currently markets are not maximizing value for all participants, only the wealthiest and owners, so frankly I don't think anyone should give a damn about them
"Labour Buyers" should be counting their blessings if workers just unionize right now
This pivot to takeout-focused stores could completely invert the study's findings, as the core mechanism of serendipitous encounters that drive entrepreneurship disappears when physical gathering spaces are eliminated.
I don't dispute that there may be a trend but a lot of Starbucks have long had pretty scanty seating--and certainly tables where you can reasonably meet and talk. And it can be fairly difficult to find a table at more traditional cafes/coffeeshops. So there's reasonable debate over whether a lot of coffeeshops are really third places.
Probably not popular, but I like board game cafés. You pay an hourly fee to play one of dozens of board games while also enjoying food and drink typical of a coffee shop. I think the public library should be a great third place. They should have board games and computers in addition to books, but they're often unsatisfactory in terms of variety, cleanliness, or proximity.
For a lot of parents it's their kid's sports team events. At my local pool there are people who RV camp and grill during swim team events and the parents hang out all day, play spikeball, read, gossip, chill and otherwise hang out together while the kids compete in all-day competitions.
Agreed on both points. In my middle age, I've even considered starting drinking again so that I may have a reason to go to the only place where people hang out in my neighborhood, which is obviously a bar.
The one and only social activity that has saved me from this road so far has been a few meetup groups that I frequent.
You can hang out in a bar and not drink alcohol. Tell them to put your ginger ale in a rocks glass.
As we get older it’s more important than ever to avoid alcohol. We don’t have the organ margin we used to. All that bullshit about “a glass of wine a day is good for you” was fake.
Tell a long, rambling, and slightly depressing story about your friend Bec who had half her liver removed at age 17 every time someone tries to pressure you into drinking. Works okay for me.
I hang out at a bar downstairs in a resort area all of the time just to have casual conversations with random tourists who come in and the bartender who I’m friends with. I’m not a non drinker. But half the time I just get soda (free) or may have one drink.
There is no pressure. I just tell people I come down to socialize - mostly with couples and guys who show up. I am married and no matter what it comes off as creepy to start conversations with women and often their husbands are around.
Since I am friends with bartender and people see me talking to him and it’s obvious that we know each other , it doesn’t come off the wrong way.
I don’t know how to put it nicely, so I’ll say it as plainly as I can: it is an essential life todo item to learn to resist peer pressure. It’s easier than it seems. If people can get you to do things you don’t want to do just by repeating things at you, that’s a you problem, and a big one.
Also, separately, if the people you are hanging out with can’t take no for an answer, get better friends. Friends don’t pressure friends to poison themselves for camaraderie.
>The third places in the United States are almost exclusively churches and bars
I keep hearing this and completely disagree.
I assert that within an hour of any location in the entire united states not so remote that supplies have to be delivered by airplane (so excluding rural Alaska and outlying territorial possessions) there are numerous third spaces.
As a benchmark I use the small town of 400 that you've never heard of abutting Hoosier National Forest in VERY rural southern Indiana that my grandparents lived in, which I spent every summer for over a decade in.
Within a 40-ish minute drive of that small town there are:
* two astronomy clubs: Evansville Astronomical Society and Louisville Astronomical Society
* two amateur radio clubs: Clark County Amateur Radio Club and Bullitt Amateur Radio Society
* four public libraries: Crawford, Paoli, Harrison County, Washington Carnegie. The closest library (15 minutes) has a makerspace with an Epilog laser, Brother Needle Embroidery Machine, Roland Large Format Printer, BambuLabs Carbon 3d Printer, Elegoo Saturn SLA 3d Printer, Cricut, Sewing machine, and Serger. If you're like me and didn't know what a Serger is, it is a machine that sews borders and embroidery onto things.
Plus an Anime & Manga club (in rural southern indiana!??!) scrapbooking, sewing, and multiple book clubs.
* five conservation clubs: Duff, Huntingburg, Mariah Hill, Livonia, and Schnellville (these are shooting, fishing, and hiking clubs in case you're not aware)
* too many to list civic organizations like rotary clubs, elks, masons, veterans, and other civic clubs
* a volunteer fire department in every county and most medium-sized towns (all of which need members ALL of the time)
There is even a small community-run performing arts center if you want to audition for plays, hold a performance, or be a volunteer crewmember: https://www.hayswoodtheatre.org/support-hayswood
All of this in rural, impoverished, isolated Southern Indiana where the Amish and Mennonites own all of the stores, the grain drying bins of neighboring farms keep you up at night, and cellphone coverage tapers off to a teasing and deceptive worse than nothing.
I am a middle-aged man.
I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously.
I am also a bit of a dick: get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.
There is a group, doing something, who wants you to join them in every county of every state of the entire United States.
You are not suffering from a lack of opportunities; you are suffering from a lack of imagination and motivation.
Being a dick to people on the internet when you think they'll benefit from tough love (rightly or wrongly) does not translate into being a dick to new people who show up to their first club meeting looking excited and nervous.
I say this not to defend the self-confessed dick, but to encourage everyone else to show up to stuff. People are nicer when they're hanging out and doing something they love.
If neighborhood entrepreneurs would benefit from seating, cities can require a minimum number of chairs per square foot, starting with a non-zero number to address US Starbucks locations that have removed all chairs.
Or they can just get rid of Euclidean zoning and allow people to create small commercial enterprises in their actual neighborhoods so actual neighbors can easily spend time there.
Mixed use zoning is quite common in major American cities. It's much more complicated to implement than Euclidean zoning, though, so I assume it faces some adoption challenges in smaller cities.
Yeah it's mostly common in places where it has existed historically, and yeah there's been a new effort to reintroduce it.
Euclidean zoning is the obvious thing to do if you're planning from a 30,000 foot view, but planning should be done at the level at which humans exist!
Mixed use zoning is better than not allowing it at all but almost always results in the activity simply not being economically profitable due to the other restrictions.
The problem with that is that the "rich enough to have no real problems" people know that for every upscale coffee shop they like there will be five people doing heavier economic activity that they don't like and because they're the only ones with the free time to care they drive the conversation and they limit it to light consumer businesses which of course can't work because that hypothetical coffee shop or sandwich shop needs the foot traffic from all the other business (that doesn't exist, because it's not allowed) in order to actually turn a profit without insane prices. And so then nothing actually gets developed in the up-zoned area and it's still a glorified bedroom community.
The people who could actually provide the political will for a proper removal or liberalization of the zoning don't get involved, because they all have other shit going on that's more important.
This would be clearer if you actually described the relevant stakeholders directly instead of these oblique references. Really not sure who does what here.
It's certainly normal in the Middle East where coffee is a big part of the culture. In some countries, coffee kind of fills the gap where alcohol might normally where it's banned.
I for one haven't been to a Starbucks anywhere in the world that even tracks whether sitting customers have ordered anything. Is this a thing? Has anyone been to such a Starbucks?
Dublin has a big problem with 3rd spaces; no cafe is open for anywhere close to that, and we are all basically shoved to pubs..
I used to sit at cafes pretty late with a laptop — buying multiple ( >= 2 ) cups of coffee, often salads and sandwiches — in the countries I lived in, but there’s none of that in Ireland. Most non-chain cafes are not open past 17; and chains go on until 20.
British culture in general is pretty bad in this regard. Even in Central London, I find Leicester Square to be the only place that's a little alive at later hours. The pub culture, which I also like, might be to blame. If you start drinking at five on a work day it's pretty easy to call an early night. (there a lot of great third places if you stick to regular early hours, like the cafes of many of the museums.)
Germany I find even worse though. It's kind of ironic since they seem to have a more robust nightclubbing culture compared to the Brits.
1. This is actually a really cool idea for a website. Is this powered by NotebookLM or some such?
2. Coffee shops are probably my favorite Third Place in general. Here in northern Europe, I've heard of some attempts at Costco-like coffee shops where you pay a yearly membership fee, somewhere between $50-100, for the ability to purchase coffee from there, but the coffee itself is quite cheap. You can usually bring some number of friends or colleagues as well. I'd really like to see this model take off, if they can solve some of the adversarial concerns with it (e.g. it probably shouldn't become a replacement for a full time office, but regular 2-3 hour work sessions seem ideal).
Politely, on point 1 I disagree entirely. At a glance I thought it was a parking domain and closed it because I figured their site had crashed. Likely because the "Listen Now" looks exactly like a Google Advert and the jump in gradient for the other element.
Hey, yeah, the site name is great, I'll never judge that. And even as design goes it's not "bad", it's just not as great as the parent comment originally implied.
I originally mistook the site as an ad-website because of how it's designed, which lead to me leaving. The neat part, is that's pretty easy for you to fix, so best of luck.
That sounds more like a design issue than an issue with the fundamental idea behind the website. 3 to 4 minute audio clips breezing over interesting new papers still seems near.
"...tracts that received a Starbucks saw an increase in the number of startups of 9.1% to 18% (or 2.9 to 5.7 firms) per year, over the subsequent 7 years. A partnership between Starbucks and Magic Johnson focused on underprivileged neighborhoods produced larger effects."
This isn’t enough information about the study to tease out cause and effect. There may be a third confounding variable that positively impacts both entrepreneurship growth and Starbucks growth.
For instance, what if Starbucks only decides to move into neighborhoods that have reached a certain level of economic growth (ie number of households, number of business, etc…)? Neighborhood economic growth would likely attract entrepreneurs as well, and we wouldn’t be able to conclude that Starbucks had anything to do with entrepreneurship growth.
Said a different way, would adding Starbucks in the middle of the Atacama desert grow Peruvian entrepreneurs? I mean come on it’d be the only third space around!
I can’t read the full paper because I don’t have a subscription, but the fact that they don’t call this out in the abstract makes me doubt it’s a meaningful conclusion.
Or cities that were growing had a Starbucks join up? I highly doubt people get enthusiastic and start working because a “Starbucks” (specifically) opened up in the neighborhood.
What throws a big wrench into determining causation is that Starbucks tries to avoid opening where there isn't already a sufficient customer base.
Even if you do manage to tease out causation tech and other "sophisticated" industry startups are also just the tip of the entrepreneurship iceberg.
The bulk of the area under the curve of a city's wealth is the long tail of blue collar people who wouldn't voluntarily associate with the kind of people who go to Starbucks starting and making moves to grow businesses that HN snobs don't even notice.
Blue collar people drink starbucks, HN isn't a monolith of elite snobs. Please don't use unfounded or un-provable negative stereotypes to try to make a point.
If you read the article, you see that the effect was pronounced in lower income areas where a natural experiment was effectively run with Magic Johnson's intervention. Which kind of goes directly against what you are saying.
My snobbish take that always gets downvoted was that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC during the 1990s. [1] There seemed to be two or three Starbucks on most blocks, probably because they thought they could fool stock market analysts into thinking it was that way coast to coast (like Duane Reade?) Independent espresso bars, which you could find in any mid-sized city in a flyover state by then, were driven out and you were left with bodegas and Jewish delis that served terrible gas station coffee at best.
opened up a shop in Brooklyn and won an award for best coffee in the city, half because they have great coffee, half because they had no competition. It is better now, but the standard for gas station coffee is vastly higher thanks to things like
[1] An astonishing hotbed of conformity. Sitting out in front of the headquarters of Fox News I was told that my wife and I were the freakiest looking people they'd seen in NYC and we only had matching costumes of t-shirts, jeans, ALICE packs and boonie caps with plastic flowers.
At least in the US, SBUX was the primary 3rd place until they decided to remove themselves in lieu of drivethru and mobile orders... And removing chairs and tables.
To be fair, a proper 3rd place really can't be a company proper, since there's always the pressure of 'buy or leave'.
Even malls aren't sufficient, since many of them are incredibly hostile to under-18. I instead look at public libraries as the gold standard here.
It makes much more sense for cities to run the actual 3rd place, and businesses rent around the 3rd place. That way, coffee shops, restaurants, and the like can comingle as can the people.
Outside the USA, we see more of that in various areas. But folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city. One can wish for better community, but alas.
> folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city.
It is not socialism, the problem is the lack of that.
My city does a good job of running a 3rd place as part of their library, it is right outside the library in a big seating area meant for phone calls & talking in general.
But they have 3 full-time security staff, the police station is across the street and the social case workers have an office in the same building.
Outside of a decent coffee, the place has everything for me to walk in with my kids in the summer and work while they roam the hallways as if it was their own, meeting other kids from the same school district. There's even a no-cars allowed trail connecting the place for kids to cycle safely to.
However, take away the constant enforcement by security + social case worker hovering, this falls apart because it'll have the etiquette of a subway car.
The homeless are there btw, but they tend to be non-disruptive and mostly there to get help with something (like a cancelled EBT card).
But I didn't get into that discussion, but even that system was borne out of Carnegie, an earlier hypercapitalist. That's probably the only reason why libraries are publicly accepted. And in reality, many Republican jurisdictions, they aren't accepted and are being actively defunded.
Well, what I was getting to was more of a European piazza style open area with businesses surrounding it so that people can attend somewhere ever to whatever.
With an American-centric view, how do you deal with homeless people using them as shelter? Like, Korea/Japan have those cheap gaming booths, but that would never work in America because of the aforementioned issue. The want would be an exclusive third place that has the people you'd want to meet with.
> With an American-centric view, how do you deal with homeless people using them as shelter?
I don't think it's a concern, first of all. Second, store owners will kick out non-paying customers as they have since time immemorial. You might as well ask how someone deals with pan handlers at the intersection on the way to their drive-through Starbucks. If the person is just sitting in a corner not bothering anyone, maybe someone will buy them a coffee, or maybe they'll be annoyed that it's too loud and leave, or perhaps they just look homeless but they're just mistaken for your run of the mill startup founder?
There are also lots of homeless people in other parts of the world. How do people in Paris or London deal with them? I don't understand why this exists an American-centric view here for such a general concern. Homelessness isn't unique to the United States, yet virtually every country on the planet has coffee shops you can walk into.
It is a concern, clearly, the other commentor brought it up.
Kicking people out of anywhere, regardless of their housing status, is a relatively extreme conflict, compared to the normal happenings at a diner, cafe, or bar. Panhandlers aren't a good comparison because no one's trying to hang out at the intersection.
As to your question about the difference between America and Europe: If there even is much of a difference, I suspect it is influenced by socialized medicine and the significant differences in involuntary commitment[1]. In America you can be severely mentally ill, sleeping rough, and disruptive to the community, but unless you break a pretty serious law, no one can make you get help. And that's if you survive contact with the police.
Maybe in practice, it's not that different over there, but it seems like they have more tools and resources to handle mental health crises, which would lessen the rest of the population's assumption that unhoused = dangerous.
> It is a concern, clearly, the other commentor brought it up.
Bringing up something doesn't mean it's a valid concern, or maybe better put it doesn't mean it's a concern worth discussing.
> Kicking people out of anywhere, regardless of their housing status, is a relatively extreme conflict, compared to the normal happenings at a diner, cafe, or bar. Panhandlers aren't a good comparison because no one's trying to hang out at the intersection.
I don't disagree that the interactions are different, but maybe you haven't had a pan handler toss a drink on your car or bang on your window or scream at you in your face? In terms of concern, they are pretty close.
The problem with this conversation is that the OP is framing the conversation as "how do we deal with this random and rare hypothetical situation that only applies to urban environments" to cast doubt on the creation or continued support of people getting together in these third places. So just as much as they are worried about that, I'm worried about the pan handlers bothering me and throwing stuff at my car at the highway intersection. :)
Calling it an American-centric problem doesn't make sense either.
> As to your question about the difference between America and Europe...
It was a bit of a rhetorical question. There aren't any substantial differences in "how we handle the homeless" with respect to coffee shops in a city or whatever the "concern" is here.
> Maybe in practice, it's not that different over there, but it seems like they have more tools and resources to handle mental health crises, which would lessen the rest of the population's assumption that unhoused = dangerous.
It would be hard to really qualify but in my experience it's about the same, though I think homeless people* in the United States tend to be more aggressive with their pan handling or escalation toward violence. Some are on drugs shipped in from somewhere and even though we do provide services (perhaps they are inadequate?) to help, it doesn't appear to be enough. Part of the reason people believe that homeless == dangerous tends to be because of a few negative interactions, which can be quite scary and intimidating and make you avoid a place.
Ultimately, "uh oh what if a homeless person comes to the Third Place" is not a concern because those rare potential interactions don't get to dictate how everyone lives their lives and it's not a strong enough of a concern to matter in this conversation context.
* Homelessness exists in many forms, many of those hidden from us in day-to-day view and I think we should continue to provide support to people to help ensure they don't become homeless in the first place. But at the same time we can recognize the anti-social behavior of some and address that. In the context of this conversation there's no "worry" about a homeless person walking in to a coffee shop - mind your own business, but the worry is one who is aggressive or belligerent, or disturbing others who have a right to peace regardless of the situation someone else finds themselves in.
I'm the person you responded to originally. The biggest issue is "kick out non-paying customers". Mechanisms exist to do so, but:
1. What if someone bought a coffee? You face potential litigation for discrimination.
2. Minimum wage employees shouldn't have to play the role of enforcers. A mentally-ill/drug-addled person can snap and cause a dangerous scene. Getting the cops involved is possible, but time-consuming and a pain.
3. It's America-centric because we don't have a social safety net for people. In the UK, for example, the NHS has avenues for people to get treated. The homeless you do run into tend to pose a much lower risk, anecdotally.
We do have coffee shops, but as others have pointed out, many are getting rid of seating. I think a membership route is the only way to enforce something more exclusive.
Why would you kick out a paying customer? If they're being disruptive though it doesn't matter if they bought a coffee. Businesses can deny services and request that you leave the premises. There is very little potential for litigation for discrimination.
> 2. Minimum wage employees shouldn't have to play the role of enforcers. A mentally-ill/drug-addled person can snap and cause a dangerous scene. Getting the cops involved is possible, but time-consuming and a pain.
That's just life. There's no other answer here. You deal with uncomfortable situations and that's all there is to it.
> It's America-centric because we don't have a social safety net for people. In the UK, for example, the NHS has avenues for people to get treated. The homeless you do run into tend to pose a much lower risk, anecdotally.
It would be nice if you knew more about the social services that we do offer people in the United States before claiming something like this. Turn off the news and social media and do your own research instead.
Now that isn't to say (and I honestly don't know one way or the other) that social services in the United States couldn't be better, but that's tangential to the conversation in my opinion.
> We do have coffee shops, but as others have pointed out, many are getting rid of seating. I think a membership route is the only way to enforce something more exclusive.
I emphatically say fuck that. I will go to a coffee shop, buy coffee, sit down and enjoy the coffee, preferably with some friends, and if someone wants to come in and be belligerent and threatening then we'll call the cops or participate in physically kicking them out if the employees can't handle it. I will not live in a world where others are going to disrupt normal everyday experiences and ruin everyone else's lives just because they're assholes or drugged out. Nope. Not me and not the town where I live.
Why should some barely paid above minimal wage coffee shop manager do that work either?
There’s no magical distinction between a coffee shop manager and barista.
I’m not suggesting that a barista or even the manager have some sort of moral or legal obligation to kick some asshole out of a store. They don’t have to do it. There are options. But generally speaking we all experience uncomfortable situations and you just deal with them like an adult in the best way you know how.
The US has a wealth inequality and affordability situation orders of magnitude worse than other countries, I can imagine it being very different across the world.
Not many. But the existence of them in a place points towards a certain culture.
You see them not necessarily in places like wall street, but more in places with strong intellectual culture like universities and artsy neighborhoods.
I can use the existence of a country club as a useful signal about a place without being a member, or having any interest in it.
> First, we compare census tracts that
received a Starbucks to census tracts that expected a Starbucks but did not ultimately get one due
to administrative issues such as city planning, zoning board rejection, architectural board
rejection, or community mobilization. These ‘rejected’ Starbucks are a natural control group
because Starbucks Corporation also sought to invest in those neighborhoods.
This is a terrible control group cuz it probably means that the cities that rejected starbucks have idiotic zoning and permit policies that impact entrepreneurship. Like SF, any restaurant that has over 7 locations requires special permitting and can be easily blocked.
I really can't imagine how it could probably ever work. So one goes into Starbucks and start bugging other random people sitting there (with whatever topic, not just pushing their "elevator pitch" onto them)? If that happened people will start avoiding them just like they avoid places frequented by bums or beggars. No one wants that. People won't go where it is possible.
The entrepreneurial people I know are incredibly social. They don't mind having, or striking up a conversation they weren't anticipating, or learning about strangers. It frequently isn't about business, but leads to networking regardless.
It isn't like they are bugging people, its more like they overhear a conversation or see something of interest and find a way to jump in, in a way that isn't intrusive. "I can't help having overheard, but are you planning to open a Taco truck on 5th?" That kind of thing.
I have manned a booth at a trade show twice in my younger days. When you’re a little fish at a trade show, you get people chatting with you not because they’re interested in your product, but to gather more data about where the industry is and where it is going. We actually tried not to engage them too much because it distracts from other people who might actually be interested.
Typical mind fallacy. When I go visit places like this I do so with the explicit intention of meeting other people, otherwise I'd just stay at home.
Plus, isn't the claim literally that there is correlational evidence here? That lightly suggests your model of how the world works in this area is off.
It's not a cultural observation. No society founded upon good commerce could possibly get by without the mechanism OP is describing being encouraged in at least some public or semi-public spaces. You need to actually intract with people to trade with them.
You are right, but then they invented long distance electronic communications, like the telephone. Even pre internet you'd run a business, word of mouth via... phone calls, trade shows..., plus maybe advertising. It needs no public space for random people to meet.
I used to work as a barista, and we had several entrepreneurs/small business owners who worked at the shop regularly. Most were friendly with one another. I'm not sure if any actually did business together, but they definitely chatted here and there.
Yeah. If I'm going to meetup with someone outside of a conference room or whatever (probably associated with some other event), it will probably be a coffeeshop. But I'm not going to be inclined to strike up a bunch of random conversations at one.
In terms of the ratio of profitability to social good and positive economic externalities, coffee shops are in a category of their own. All the cities trying to attract businesses and stuff should just subsidize some coffee shops first.
On the website / app this is using - it looks like a nice approach to consuming these papers, but I really wish they'd also provide the link to the original source paper. In an age where you can't trust anything anymore, being able to jump to the source material is really important.
Edit: This comment was made when the post pointed to an audio form of the main article. I'll leave it here none the less as feedback to the audio sites maker.
No, this needs to be added before you post to sites like hacker news. how can anyone trust that this audio isn't a 100% fabrication from an AI? Flagging this post, hoping the mods remove this.
> Third space" redirects here. For the postcolonial term, see Third Space Theory. For the concept of informal shared public space in community planning, see Third place.
There’s a bookstore in Seattle called Third Place Books. Rarely did I encounter someone who knew why it was called that.
Like a church? A synagogue? A mosque? That fits the definition exactly. It seems like a substitute for a house of worship for people who do not believe in God.
Do religious people go to church daily and hold business meetings in church? Do religious people go to a church to do a casual date or catch up with friends and associates on weekdays?
I might be very misinformed about how church works, but I think that coffee shops fill a very different niche. History kinda supports this: coffee shops became valuable places of business and occupied the 'third place' role even in extremely religious places and times (I'm thinking of Lloyd's specifically, and 17th and 18th century coffee shop culture as a locus for business ventures in the Netherlands and England).
I would like to add what many non-religious people (and some "out to lunch" evangelicals) do ot understand about churches (I guess this applies to mosque and synagogue too).
The role of a church is social, not religious. There are religious elements of course, but churches would not be required if it were not for the communities they foster
My church is also my kids' school. We also don't have bus service. During the school year a large portion of the parish is in constant contact and communication because of this.
You do things at a place of worship other than socializing and meeting people, so while a church is a third space not all third spaces are very church like. A bar doesn't really have worship analogues right
I don't think that's true. All third spaces I can think of are based on some activity, around which some community (or individual social relationships) form which might or might not be so closely related to the activity.
All these have "a thing you do other than socializing and meeting people". You could (and do) go there specifically for the activity without socializing and meeting people (just like church).
Spaces that are "social-only" are pretty rare. Coffee shops are maybe closer to that as you're probably not going to consume many coffees, but people stay to read, work... it's a bit less structured than other third spaces (and personally I find that it makes it more difficult to socialise there)
But in a non-religious third place you may find people from any religion besides us atheists, which is not going to happen on places of worship. Your examples all seem more homogeneous to me.
That may be good or bad depending on what you’re looking for, but my point is I don’t think they’re as comparable as you do.
They are homogenous in terms of one shared belief. Places of religion can be just as varied in terms of most other things (industries, skills, politics apart from a few unacceptable things) and can be even more varied in some things (affluence of people there, and width of area they draw from).
I went to church as a kid and know what you mean. However, the shared belief usually implies a narrower heterogeneity, if that makes sense (in a way that’s proportional to how orthodox the beliefs are).
In a secular shared space it’s far more common to be exposed to people with radically different beliefs, sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views, to mention a few examples.
I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together (e.g., a “repair” meetup where people go get something fixed or help others fix things).
> sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views,
In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
> I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together
I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
>In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
Yeah, it was similar for me (only Catholic churches in my case), though politics were usually homogeneous per church (what I mean is: whether you leaned left or right, you'd find a Catholic community to welcome you, but I'm not sure it'd be easy to find one that would comfortably welcome wide political views). As for sexual orientation, this was not common at all, but bear in mind the last time I attended Church was in the early 90s so things may have changed.
> I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living, while in a third space, even in one with a common goal like the repair meetups I mentioned, you go there voluntarily and not because otherwise you can't put food on the table.
I think both will vary wildly. I also think my experience in the UK and Sri Lanka is very different from, say, the US.
Catholic churches, politically, pretty similar to the rest of society where the church was, with a left wing tilt.
Sexual orientation also varies with church. Obviously a gay friendly church (e.g. St Patrick's Soho a few decades ago, Farm Street now - both in Catholic London). For Anglican churches I would say St martin in the Fields where David Monteith ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Monteith ) was one of our parish priests.
> I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living
I agree, but by putting up with people you can come to like them, particularly if you are avoiding people because of things such as a stereotyped view of a group.
i remember koramangala, 5th block specifically, mid 2023. that blue tokai outlet next to roastery was ground zero. half of early stage bangalore was working from there. two pm to six pm you'd overhear: investor calls, pitch deck review, even product teardown with some YC alum. no seats inside so i parked at the outside bench near the window. wifi barely reached there. next to me this guy's debugging something on a steamdeck looking devkit. i half glance over and ask if it's AWS creds, he goes 'nah, it's some edge TPU , google keeps timing out cold starts'. we start chatting.
turns out he's building vision for offline-first retail. he's got no frontend, just a python backend. i scribble something on a napkin about fast-booting wasm modules from disk cache. 3 weeks later he pings me on telegram saying they got boot time down from 14s to 2.8s using a variant of that.
never met him again. never even learned his startup's name. but that entire bottleneck cleared because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.
we maynot recreate that on a discord channel. there's no incentive to overshare when you're not spatially co-located. bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low
> bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low
Go a whole decade+ back, it was the Leela coffee shop which opened till 1 AM.
> we maynot recreate that on a discord channel.
IRC + freenode did the same decades ago, back in the day when the computers wouldn't fit in a backpack - people would just lurk socially and not really join a channel for a purpose.
Most of #linux-india was a third place after midnight, though not a physical one.
> because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.
There's also an undesirable side to coworking cafe low-OPSEC.
Funny anecdote about that...
I was meeting up with a startups friend, at one of the cafes that's popular for techbros.
Before we met up, friend mentioned this guy from the startups scene, who sometimes lurks at that cafe, to steal ideas.
So friend and I are talking at the cafe about an application domain we both know. And how we're surprised no one is doing X for it, because then you could do A, B, C, etc.
I look over, and some guy has moved from his table, to sit on the floor, close to us, and just has a cat-that-got-the-canary beaming look on his face. Yes, it was the noted lurker-stealer guy.
Shortly after, an organization he's affiliated with announced a big initiative/group to do X for that application domain. Maybe just a funny coincidence.
Is the problem solved then? Is he making bank?
Ideas are useless without execution
Agreed about the importance of execution.
The anecdote is a funny way to raise awareness about OPSEC.
There's reasons that most companies don't air all their internal discussions and work publicly.
In a cafe, it can be easy to forget that.
And there really are people who actively exploit that.
> Is the problem solved then? Is he making bank?
I grew up ~20 minutes from the place you're describing, and you just made me very nostalgic :D
I miss blue tokai! So many fun memories and delicious cold coffees there
I'd be interested to see an update to this study in the coming years. Starbucks has been pivoting towards take out and mobile orders and removing tables and chairs entirely from some of its stores lately.
They had been!
But in 2024, Brian Niccols pitched the "Back to Starbucks" plan, with point 3 of his 4 point focus being, "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."[1] He said, "Our stores will be inviting places to linger, with comfortable seating, thoughtful design and a clear distinction between “to-go” and “for-here” service."
Whether or not that's working is another story[2]. Long story short is that Scooters, Dutch Bros. and other brands are doing drive-thru better, and cafe attendance is down 22% since before the pandemic.
Consumer tastes have shifted. And given Gen Z's preference for online interaction over in-person, I'm not sure if Starbucks will be able to steer the ship.
If I were Starbucks, I'd strongly consider splitting the branding on the cafes and drive-thrus. Keep the Starbucks brand with the drive-thrus, then try opening a few new cafes as a new brand. Worst case scenario, you rebrand those cafes as Starbucks. I bet they've talked about it.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/new-starbucks-ceo-brian-nicc... 2: https://intelligence.coffee/2025/05/back-to-starbucks-long-o...
> "Reestablishing Starbucks as the community coffeehouse."
What a load of corporate bullshit. Unlike any other community coffee house, this one made almost $10b in profit last year. I wonder how much the "community" really benefits from this.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SBUX/financials/
We're literally commenting on a scholarly article that describes how the community benefits from Starbucks locations.
Oh snap.
>Unlike any other community coffee house, this one made almost $10b in profit last year. I wonder how much the "community" really benefits from this
That's around $60k per store. That sounds like a very reasonable number for an absentee coffee shop owner (which is basically what the shareholders are).
Assuming that’s going to the store which I very much doubt.
The word "profit" means that this is the money which is by definition not going to the store. Any money which goes to the store is not counted into profits.
When a company makes a profit, that doesn't necessarily mean they made anyone else worse off. In general, when in a competitive environment, and dealing with customers who are responsible adults (which both hold in the case of the restaurant industry), we should presume that everyone is being made better off by the transactions, that it's a win-win situation.
It does when this is the same company that threatens employees who want to unionize.
Hard to extol the virtues of profit when it results in this. I'm sure the owner love it tho.
Well, a union is a form of cartel, it's an anti competitive organization of market participants who are colluding to set prices and extract other concessions from labour buyers. They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.
You're acting as if capitalists treat their workers well under the current system when the opposite has occurred. Nearly $50 trillion was stolen from workers [1] by the capitalists owners in the US. Income inequality is literally at worse levels than just prior to the French Revolution.
The first politician to offer $1 trillion in federal assistance to middle/lower classes (free healthcare, free university/vocational training, public housing, public jobs) will absolutely control the electorate at both sides of the aisles.
Remember that redistribution of wealth are very popular American activities. It swings both ways.
[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
> They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.
Currently markets are not maximizing value for all participants, only the wealthiest and owners, so frankly I don't think anyone should give a damn about them
"Labour Buyers" should be counting their blessings if workers just unionize right now
This pivot to takeout-focused stores could completely invert the study's findings, as the core mechanism of serendipitous encounters that drive entrepreneurship disappears when physical gathering spaces are eliminated.
I don't dispute that there may be a trend but a lot of Starbucks have long had pretty scanty seating--and certainly tables where you can reasonably meet and talk. And it can be fairly difficult to find a table at more traditional cafes/coffeeshops. So there's reasonable debate over whether a lot of coffeeshops are really third places.
> debate over whether a lot of coffeeshops are really third places
What are some examples of real third places in major US cities?
Probably not popular, but I like board game cafés. You pay an hourly fee to play one of dozens of board games while also enjoying food and drink typical of a coffee shop. I think the public library should be a great third place. They should have board games and computers in addition to books, but they're often unsatisfactory in terms of variety, cleanliness, or proximity.
For a lot of parents it's their kid's sports team events. At my local pool there are people who RV camp and grill during swim team events and the parents hang out all day, play spikeball, read, gossip, chill and otherwise hang out together while the kids compete in all-day competitions.
I've been seeing more breweries focusing on catering to parents of young children too by building playsets or having more child-friendly areas.
Public Libraries.
The third places in the United States are almost exclusively churches and bars. It’s sort of gross.
As a teetotaling atheist, I moved to Berlin for the universities and night clubs, as there are tons of social events associated with both.
Agreed on both points. In my middle age, I've even considered starting drinking again so that I may have a reason to go to the only place where people hang out in my neighborhood, which is obviously a bar.
The one and only social activity that has saved me from this road so far has been a few meetup groups that I frequent.
You can hang out in a bar and not drink alcohol. Tell them to put your ginger ale in a rocks glass.
As we get older it’s more important than ever to avoid alcohol. We don’t have the organ margin we used to. All that bullshit about “a glass of wine a day is good for you” was fake.
I do that sometimes, but I get peer pressured into drinking alcohol if I socialize. You can't win.
Agree with you about the benefits of avoiding alcohol.
Tell a long, rambling, and slightly depressing story about your friend Bec who had half her liver removed at age 17 every time someone tries to pressure you into drinking. Works okay for me.
I hang out at a bar downstairs in a resort area all of the time just to have casual conversations with random tourists who come in and the bartender who I’m friends with. I’m not a non drinker. But half the time I just get soda (free) or may have one drink.
There is no pressure. I just tell people I come down to socialize - mostly with couples and guys who show up. I am married and no matter what it comes off as creepy to start conversations with women and often their husbands are around.
Since I am friends with bartender and people see me talking to him and it’s obvious that we know each other , it doesn’t come off the wrong way.
I don’t know how to put it nicely, so I’ll say it as plainly as I can: it is an essential life todo item to learn to resist peer pressure. It’s easier than it seems. If people can get you to do things you don’t want to do just by repeating things at you, that’s a you problem, and a big one.
Also, separately, if the people you are hanging out with can’t take no for an answer, get better friends. Friends don’t pressure friends to poison themselves for camaraderie.
>The third places in the United States are almost exclusively churches and bars
I keep hearing this and completely disagree.
I assert that within an hour of any location in the entire united states not so remote that supplies have to be delivered by airplane (so excluding rural Alaska and outlying territorial possessions) there are numerous third spaces.
As a benchmark I use the small town of 400 that you've never heard of abutting Hoosier National Forest in VERY rural southern Indiana that my grandparents lived in, which I spent every summer for over a decade in.
Within a 40-ish minute drive of that small town there are:
* two astronomy clubs: Evansville Astronomical Society and Louisville Astronomical Society
* two amateur radio clubs: Clark County Amateur Radio Club and Bullitt Amateur Radio Society
* four public libraries: Crawford, Paoli, Harrison County, Washington Carnegie. The closest library (15 minutes) has a makerspace with an Epilog laser, Brother Needle Embroidery Machine, Roland Large Format Printer, BambuLabs Carbon 3d Printer, Elegoo Saturn SLA 3d Printer, Cricut, Sewing machine, and Serger. If you're like me and didn't know what a Serger is, it is a machine that sews borders and embroidery onto things.
Plus an Anime & Manga club (in rural southern indiana!??!) scrapbooking, sewing, and multiple book clubs.
* five conservation clubs: Duff, Huntingburg, Mariah Hill, Livonia, and Schnellville (these are shooting, fishing, and hiking clubs in case you're not aware)
* too many to list civic organizations like rotary clubs, elks, masons, veterans, and other civic clubs
* a volunteer fire department in every county and most medium-sized towns (all of which need members ALL of the time)
There is even a small community-run performing arts center if you want to audition for plays, hold a performance, or be a volunteer crewmember: https://www.hayswoodtheatre.org/support-hayswood
All of this in rural, impoverished, isolated Southern Indiana where the Amish and Mennonites own all of the stores, the grain drying bins of neighboring farms keep you up at night, and cellphone coverage tapers off to a teasing and deceptive worse than nothing.
I am a middle-aged man.
I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously.
I am also a bit of a dick: get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.
There is a group, doing something, who wants you to join them in every county of every state of the entire United States.
You are not suffering from a lack of opportunities; you are suffering from a lack of imagination and motivation.
>get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.
100% this (and it applies to 'the death of the internet' too).
> I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously
> I am also a bit of a dick
With an attitude like this, you realize you're part of the male loneliness problem, right?
How many times do people show up to your clubs and organizations one time and then never show up again?
Think on it
A big part of the "male loneliness epidemic" is that a lot of men are huge assholes for no reason
Being a dick to people on the internet when you think they'll benefit from tough love (rightly or wrongly) does not translate into being a dick to new people who show up to their first club meeting looking excited and nervous.
I say this not to defend the self-confessed dick, but to encourage everyone else to show up to stuff. People are nicer when they're hanging out and doing something they love.
If neighborhood entrepreneurs would benefit from seating, cities can require a minimum number of chairs per square foot, starting with a non-zero number to address US Starbucks locations that have removed all chairs.
Or they can just get rid of Euclidean zoning and allow people to create small commercial enterprises in their actual neighborhoods so actual neighbors can easily spend time there.
Mixed use zoning is quite common in major American cities. It's much more complicated to implement than Euclidean zoning, though, so I assume it faces some adoption challenges in smaller cities.
Yeah it's mostly common in places where it has existed historically, and yeah there's been a new effort to reintroduce it.
Euclidean zoning is the obvious thing to do if you're planning from a 30,000 foot view, but planning should be done at the level at which humans exist!
Mixed use zoning is better than not allowing it at all but almost always results in the activity simply not being economically profitable due to the other restrictions.
The problem with that is that the "rich enough to have no real problems" people know that for every upscale coffee shop they like there will be five people doing heavier economic activity that they don't like and because they're the only ones with the free time to care they drive the conversation and they limit it to light consumer businesses which of course can't work because that hypothetical coffee shop or sandwich shop needs the foot traffic from all the other business (that doesn't exist, because it's not allowed) in order to actually turn a profit without insane prices. And so then nothing actually gets developed in the up-zoned area and it's still a glorified bedroom community.
The people who could actually provide the political will for a proper removal or liberalization of the zoning don't get involved, because they all have other shit going on that's more important.
This would be clearer if you actually described the relevant stakeholders directly instead of these oblique references. Really not sure who does what here.
Turkish Starbucks and its local equivalents are usually open until 2am. Don't have an idea on the impact on entrepreneurship though.
Is it normal for people to be drinking coffee so late in the day?
It's certainly normal in the Middle East where coffee is a big part of the culture. In some countries, coffee kind of fills the gap where alcohol might normally where it's banned.
Yes.
I for one haven't been to a Starbucks anywhere in the world that even tracks whether sitting customers have ordered anything. Is this a thing? Has anyone been to such a Starbucks?
Dublin has a big problem with 3rd spaces; no cafe is open for anywhere close to that, and we are all basically shoved to pubs..
I used to sit at cafes pretty late with a laptop — buying multiple ( >= 2 ) cups of coffee, often salads and sandwiches — in the countries I lived in, but there’s none of that in Ireland. Most non-chain cafes are not open past 17; and chains go on until 20.
British culture in general is pretty bad in this regard. Even in Central London, I find Leicester Square to be the only place that's a little alive at later hours. The pub culture, which I also like, might be to blame. If you start drinking at five on a work day it's pretty easy to call an early night. (there a lot of great third places if you stick to regular early hours, like the cafes of many of the museums.)
Germany I find even worse though. It's kind of ironic since they seem to have a more robust nightclubbing culture compared to the Brits.
1. This is actually a really cool idea for a website. Is this powered by NotebookLM or some such?
2. Coffee shops are probably my favorite Third Place in general. Here in northern Europe, I've heard of some attempts at Costco-like coffee shops where you pay a yearly membership fee, somewhere between $50-100, for the ability to purchase coffee from there, but the coffee itself is quite cheap. You can usually bring some number of friends or colleagues as well. I'd really like to see this model take off, if they can solve some of the adversarial concerns with it (e.g. it probably shouldn't become a replacement for a full time office, but regular 2-3 hour work sessions seem ideal).
Politely, on point 1 I disagree entirely. At a glance I thought it was a parking domain and closed it because I figured their site had crashed. Likely because the "Listen Now" looks exactly like a Google Advert and the jump in gradient for the other element.
I definitely agree but as a poor graduate student, this was the cheapest domain I could find.
Just clarifying for thread (pretty sure OP understands) it's not the domain name that's sketchy, it's the page style.
Hey, yeah, the site name is great, I'll never judge that. And even as design goes it's not "bad", it's just not as great as the parent comment originally implied.
I originally mistook the site as an ad-website because of how it's designed, which lead to me leaving. The neat part, is that's pretty easy for you to fix, so best of luck.
That sounds more like a design issue than an issue with the fundamental idea behind the website. 3 to 4 minute audio clips breezing over interesting new papers still seems near.
The link points to the original paper now (https://www.nber.org/papers/w32604) so this discussion isn't applicable going forward.
Yes, I had the same experience. OP should refresh the design
Thank you. I deeply value the feedback.
You can look for 'anti-cafes", where crackers and coffee is free but you pay for the time you're there, it was somewhat popular a few years back
I love coffee shops but don't like coffee very much, and they usually don't prioritize tea. Wish tea were more popular.
Thank you. Previously it was NotebookLM but now I am doing the entire thing, music choice, dialogues editing.
Oh, that's interesting. Did you find NotebookLM's dialogue wasn't getting you the tone you were after?
Yes. And there is no music to make you feel the place.
What do you use to sound the back and forth dialogue?
Or, the kind of people who are likely to create startups are drawn to cities that are big on coffee shop culture.
As usual the direction of causation is a bit difficult to tease out
The brief summary on the actual paper (https://www.nber.org/papers/w32604):
"...tracts that received a Starbucks saw an increase in the number of startups of 9.1% to 18% (or 2.9 to 5.7 firms) per year, over the subsequent 7 years. A partnership between Starbucks and Magic Johnson focused on underprivileged neighborhoods produced larger effects."
Seems like third places have strong effects here.
This isn’t enough information about the study to tease out cause and effect. There may be a third confounding variable that positively impacts both entrepreneurship growth and Starbucks growth.
For instance, what if Starbucks only decides to move into neighborhoods that have reached a certain level of economic growth (ie number of households, number of business, etc…)? Neighborhood economic growth would likely attract entrepreneurs as well, and we wouldn’t be able to conclude that Starbucks had anything to do with entrepreneurship growth.
Said a different way, would adding Starbucks in the middle of the Atacama desert grow Peruvian entrepreneurs? I mean come on it’d be the only third space around!
I can’t read the full paper because I don’t have a subscription, but the fact that they don’t call this out in the abstract makes me doubt it’s a meaningful conclusion.
Or cities that were growing had a Starbucks join up? I highly doubt people get enthusiastic and start working because a “Starbucks” (specifically) opened up in the neighborhood.
I wonder if it's more free wifi and an air conditioned/heated room than anything else.
What throws a big wrench into determining causation is that Starbucks tries to avoid opening where there isn't already a sufficient customer base.
Even if you do manage to tease out causation tech and other "sophisticated" industry startups are also just the tip of the entrepreneurship iceberg.
The bulk of the area under the curve of a city's wealth is the long tail of blue collar people who wouldn't voluntarily associate with the kind of people who go to Starbucks starting and making moves to grow businesses that HN snobs don't even notice.
Blue collar people drink starbucks, HN isn't a monolith of elite snobs. Please don't use unfounded or un-provable negative stereotypes to try to make a point.
If you read the article, you see that the effect was pronounced in lower income areas where a natural experiment was effectively run with Magic Johnson's intervention. Which kind of goes directly against what you are saying.
My snobbish take that always gets downvoted was that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC during the 1990s. [1] There seemed to be two or three Starbucks on most blocks, probably because they thought they could fool stock market analysts into thinking it was that way coast to coast (like Duane Reade?) Independent espresso bars, which you could find in any mid-sized city in a flyover state by then, were driven out and you were left with bodegas and Jewish delis that served terrible gas station coffee at best.
Not long after, this Ithaca company
https://gimmecoffee.com/
opened up a shop in Brooklyn and won an award for best coffee in the city, half because they have great coffee, half because they had no competition. It is better now, but the standard for gas station coffee is vastly higher thanks to things like
https://concordiacoffee.com/products-tag/convenience-stores/
[1] An astonishing hotbed of conformity. Sitting out in front of the headquarters of Fox News I was told that my wife and I were the freakiest looking people they'd seen in NYC and we only had matching costumes of t-shirts, jeans, ALICE packs and boonie caps with plastic flowers.
I think you have to assume the ability to meet other people like that helps in founding start ups though?
At least in the US, SBUX was the primary 3rd place until they decided to remove themselves in lieu of drivethru and mobile orders... And removing chairs and tables.
To be fair, a proper 3rd place really can't be a company proper, since there's always the pressure of 'buy or leave'.
Even malls aren't sufficient, since many of them are incredibly hostile to under-18. I instead look at public libraries as the gold standard here.
It makes much more sense for cities to run the actual 3rd place, and businesses rent around the 3rd place. That way, coffee shops, restaurants, and the like can comingle as can the people.
Outside the USA, we see more of that in various areas. But folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city. One can wish for better community, but alas.
> folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city.
It is not socialism, the problem is the lack of that.
My city does a good job of running a 3rd place as part of their library, it is right outside the library in a big seating area meant for phone calls & talking in general.
But they have 3 full-time security staff, the police station is across the street and the social case workers have an office in the same building.
Outside of a decent coffee, the place has everything for me to walk in with my kids in the summer and work while they roam the hallways as if it was their own, meeting other kids from the same school district. There's even a no-cars allowed trail connecting the place for kids to cycle safely to.
However, take away the constant enforcement by security + social case worker hovering, this falls apart because it'll have the etiquette of a subway car.
The homeless are there btw, but they tend to be non-disruptive and mostly there to get help with something (like a cancelled EBT card).
> But folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city.
I think you're talking about a public library, there's typically plenty of rooms and tables to sit down at and talk with others.
I explicitly call out public libraries.
But I didn't get into that discussion, but even that system was borne out of Carnegie, an earlier hypercapitalist. That's probably the only reason why libraries are publicly accepted. And in reality, many Republican jurisdictions, they aren't accepted and are being actively defunded.
Well, what I was getting to was more of a European piazza style open area with businesses surrounding it so that people can attend somewhere ever to whatever.
In SF? Not anywhere I've been though. Cafes I see are full of friends catching up, families or caffeine addicts.
Check Four Barrel or The Mill. I'm sure there are others. For many years, Coffeebar played this role in SF - I was sad when they closed.
I’m pretty sure I would move to a city anywhere in the world based primarily on the availability of high quality 24 hour third places.
With an American-centric view, how do you deal with homeless people using them as shelter? Like, Korea/Japan have those cheap gaming booths, but that would never work in America because of the aforementioned issue. The want would be an exclusive third place that has the people you'd want to meet with.
> With an American-centric view, how do you deal with homeless people using them as shelter?
I don't think it's a concern, first of all. Second, store owners will kick out non-paying customers as they have since time immemorial. You might as well ask how someone deals with pan handlers at the intersection on the way to their drive-through Starbucks. If the person is just sitting in a corner not bothering anyone, maybe someone will buy them a coffee, or maybe they'll be annoyed that it's too loud and leave, or perhaps they just look homeless but they're just mistaken for your run of the mill startup founder?
There are also lots of homeless people in other parts of the world. How do people in Paris or London deal with them? I don't understand why this exists an American-centric view here for such a general concern. Homelessness isn't unique to the United States, yet virtually every country on the planet has coffee shops you can walk into.
It is a concern, clearly, the other commentor brought it up.
Kicking people out of anywhere, regardless of their housing status, is a relatively extreme conflict, compared to the normal happenings at a diner, cafe, or bar. Panhandlers aren't a good comparison because no one's trying to hang out at the intersection.
As to your question about the difference between America and Europe: If there even is much of a difference, I suspect it is influenced by socialized medicine and the significant differences in involuntary commitment[1]. In America you can be severely mentally ill, sleeping rough, and disruptive to the community, but unless you break a pretty serious law, no one can make you get help. And that's if you survive contact with the police.
Maybe in practice, it's not that different over there, but it seems like they have more tools and resources to handle mental health crises, which would lessen the rest of the population's assumption that unhoused = dangerous.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_commitment_by_coun...
> It is a concern, clearly, the other commentor brought it up.
Bringing up something doesn't mean it's a valid concern, or maybe better put it doesn't mean it's a concern worth discussing.
> Kicking people out of anywhere, regardless of their housing status, is a relatively extreme conflict, compared to the normal happenings at a diner, cafe, or bar. Panhandlers aren't a good comparison because no one's trying to hang out at the intersection.
I don't disagree that the interactions are different, but maybe you haven't had a pan handler toss a drink on your car or bang on your window or scream at you in your face? In terms of concern, they are pretty close.
The problem with this conversation is that the OP is framing the conversation as "how do we deal with this random and rare hypothetical situation that only applies to urban environments" to cast doubt on the creation or continued support of people getting together in these third places. So just as much as they are worried about that, I'm worried about the pan handlers bothering me and throwing stuff at my car at the highway intersection. :)
Calling it an American-centric problem doesn't make sense either.
> As to your question about the difference between America and Europe...
It was a bit of a rhetorical question. There aren't any substantial differences in "how we handle the homeless" with respect to coffee shops in a city or whatever the "concern" is here.
> Maybe in practice, it's not that different over there, but it seems like they have more tools and resources to handle mental health crises, which would lessen the rest of the population's assumption that unhoused = dangerous.
It would be hard to really qualify but in my experience it's about the same, though I think homeless people* in the United States tend to be more aggressive with their pan handling or escalation toward violence. Some are on drugs shipped in from somewhere and even though we do provide services (perhaps they are inadequate?) to help, it doesn't appear to be enough. Part of the reason people believe that homeless == dangerous tends to be because of a few negative interactions, which can be quite scary and intimidating and make you avoid a place.
Ultimately, "uh oh what if a homeless person comes to the Third Place" is not a concern because those rare potential interactions don't get to dictate how everyone lives their lives and it's not a strong enough of a concern to matter in this conversation context.
* Homelessness exists in many forms, many of those hidden from us in day-to-day view and I think we should continue to provide support to people to help ensure they don't become homeless in the first place. But at the same time we can recognize the anti-social behavior of some and address that. In the context of this conversation there's no "worry" about a homeless person walking in to a coffee shop - mind your own business, but the worry is one who is aggressive or belligerent, or disturbing others who have a right to peace regardless of the situation someone else finds themselves in.
I'm the person you responded to originally. The biggest issue is "kick out non-paying customers". Mechanisms exist to do so, but: 1. What if someone bought a coffee? You face potential litigation for discrimination. 2. Minimum wage employees shouldn't have to play the role of enforcers. A mentally-ill/drug-addled person can snap and cause a dangerous scene. Getting the cops involved is possible, but time-consuming and a pain. 3. It's America-centric because we don't have a social safety net for people. In the UK, for example, the NHS has avenues for people to get treated. The homeless you do run into tend to pose a much lower risk, anecdotally.
We do have coffee shops, but as others have pointed out, many are getting rid of seating. I think a membership route is the only way to enforce something more exclusive.
> 1. What if someone bought a coffee?
Why would you kick out a paying customer? If they're being disruptive though it doesn't matter if they bought a coffee. Businesses can deny services and request that you leave the premises. There is very little potential for litigation for discrimination.
> 2. Minimum wage employees shouldn't have to play the role of enforcers. A mentally-ill/drug-addled person can snap and cause a dangerous scene. Getting the cops involved is possible, but time-consuming and a pain.
That's just life. There's no other answer here. You deal with uncomfortable situations and that's all there is to it.
> It's America-centric because we don't have a social safety net for people. In the UK, for example, the NHS has avenues for people to get treated. The homeless you do run into tend to pose a much lower risk, anecdotally.
It would be nice if you knew more about the social services that we do offer people in the United States before claiming something like this. Turn off the news and social media and do your own research instead.
Now that isn't to say (and I honestly don't know one way or the other) that social services in the United States couldn't be better, but that's tangential to the conversation in my opinion.
> We do have coffee shops, but as others have pointed out, many are getting rid of seating. I think a membership route is the only way to enforce something more exclusive.
I emphatically say fuck that. I will go to a coffee shop, buy coffee, sit down and enjoy the coffee, preferably with some friends, and if someone wants to come in and be belligerent and threatening then we'll call the cops or participate in physically kicking them out if the employees can't handle it. I will not live in a world where others are going to disrupt normal everyday experiences and ruin everyone else's lives just because they're assholes or drugged out. Nope. Not me and not the town where I live.
> That's just life. There's no other answer here.
Yes there is. Management. It is the manager's job to do the unpleasant duties
What a naive dreamer am I. The less you are paid, the more unpleasant the task
Why should some barely paid above minimal wage coffee shop manager do that work either?
There’s no magical distinction between a coffee shop manager and barista.
I’m not suggesting that a barista or even the manager have some sort of moral or legal obligation to kick some asshole out of a store. They don’t have to do it. There are options. But generally speaking we all experience uncomfortable situations and you just deal with them like an adult in the best way you know how.
The US has a wealth inequality and affordability situation orders of magnitude worse than other countries, I can imagine it being very different across the world.
Third place doesn’t mean free. Churches and bars (the existing American third places) seem to have mechanisms for addressing this presently.
I question how many people would want to hang in 24-hour third spaces beyond spaces that are open to some reasonably late evening hour.
Not many. But the existence of them in a place points towards a certain culture.
You see them not necessarily in places like wall street, but more in places with strong intellectual culture like universities and artsy neighborhoods.
I can use the existence of a country club as a useful signal about a place without being a member, or having any interest in it.
> points towards a certain culture
Also points towards local labor law and market.
What do you mean? I’m not sure the implication is obvious
Labor law may constrain working hours.
In some countries, low cost of human labor enables staffing of low-volume businesses, including opening hours with low traffic.
Go to some clubs in Berlin sometime :)
Hell yeah same.
Where though?
West coast and Gulf Coast where Ive lived have very few.
Ktown in LA has a few
I've been to one out there but it was crowded as hell all hours of the night because theres so few late night coffee shops in LA.
Look near universities and in the weird/artsy neighborhoods.
> First, we compare census tracts that received a Starbucks to census tracts that expected a Starbucks but did not ultimately get one due to administrative issues such as city planning, zoning board rejection, architectural board rejection, or community mobilization. These ‘rejected’ Starbucks are a natural control group because Starbucks Corporation also sought to invest in those neighborhoods.
This is a terrible control group cuz it probably means that the cities that rejected starbucks have idiotic zoning and permit policies that impact entrepreneurship. Like SF, any restaurant that has over 7 locations requires special permitting and can be easily blocked.
Cafe hangout supremacy. The Yemeni coffee shops show the ideal model imo. Open late, lots of seating.
I really can't imagine how it could probably ever work. So one goes into Starbucks and start bugging other random people sitting there (with whatever topic, not just pushing their "elevator pitch" onto them)? If that happened people will start avoiding them just like they avoid places frequented by bums or beggars. No one wants that. People won't go where it is possible.
The entrepreneurial people I know are incredibly social. They don't mind having, or striking up a conversation they weren't anticipating, or learning about strangers. It frequently isn't about business, but leads to networking regardless.
It isn't like they are bugging people, its more like they overhear a conversation or see something of interest and find a way to jump in, in a way that isn't intrusive. "I can't help having overheard, but are you planning to open a Taco truck on 5th?" That kind of thing.
I have manned a booth at a trade show twice in my younger days. When you’re a little fish at a trade show, you get people chatting with you not because they’re interested in your product, but to gather more data about where the industry is and where it is going. We actually tried not to engage them too much because it distracts from other people who might actually be interested.
Typical mind fallacy. When I go visit places like this I do so with the explicit intention of meeting other people, otherwise I'd just stay at home.
Plus, isn't the claim literally that there is correlational evidence here? That lightly suggests your model of how the world works in this area is off.
Cultural observations are not instances of typical mind fallacy, you’re reading OP too literally.
It's not a cultural observation. No society founded upon good commerce could possibly get by without the mechanism OP is describing being encouraged in at least some public or semi-public spaces. You need to actually intract with people to trade with them.
You are right, but then they invented long distance electronic communications, like the telephone. Even pre internet you'd run a business, word of mouth via... phone calls, trade shows..., plus maybe advertising. It needs no public space for random people to meet.
I used to work as a barista, and we had several entrepreneurs/small business owners who worked at the shop regularly. Most were friendly with one another. I'm not sure if any actually did business together, but they definitely chatted here and there.
I think a more likely scenario is that you schedule meetups with people that have similar interests.
Yeah. If I'm going to meetup with someone outside of a conference room or whatever (probably associated with some other event), it will probably be a coffeeshop. But I'm not going to be inclined to strike up a bunch of random conversations at one.
Twenty five years ago, when I did Econ 101 I had it explained to me the theoretical underpinning for the fact that coffee shop chains are impossible
Does Starbucks even exist?
In terms of the ratio of profitability to social good and positive economic externalities, coffee shops are in a category of their own. All the cities trying to attract businesses and stuff should just subsidize some coffee shops first.
On the website / app this is using - it looks like a nice approach to consuming these papers, but I really wish they'd also provide the link to the original source paper. In an age where you can't trust anything anymore, being able to jump to the source material is really important.
Edit: This comment was made when the post pointed to an audio form of the main article. I'll leave it here none the less as feedback to the audio sites maker.
Thank you. I will definitely add that over the weekend.
No, this needs to be added before you post to sites like hacker news. how can anyone trust that this audio isn't a 100% fabrication from an AI? Flagging this post, hoping the mods remove this.
edit: thank you, mods, for changing the link.
This is not fabrication. Please unflag.
Provide a link to the source, please.
Can't believe this has to be asked on a front page article.
edit: thank you, mods, for changing the link.
Original paper link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32604
Thank you. (Wouldn't have read otherwise)
I am sorry, I did not follow the guidelines so link was rightly removed. Here is the audioform link: https://thetreeoflife.cc/demo
You people already turned every coffee shop into a wework and now you want a "third space".
They’re usually called “third spaces” not third places. Otherwise you’d confuse them with bronze medal winners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Wikipedia, the arbiter of all truth.
> Third space" redirects here. For the postcolonial term, see Third Space Theory. For the concept of informal shared public space in community planning, see Third place.
There’s a bookstore in Seattle called Third Place Books. Rarely did I encounter someone who knew why it was called that.
Like a church? A synagogue? A mosque? That fits the definition exactly. It seems like a substitute for a house of worship for people who do not believe in God.
Do religious people go to church daily and hold business meetings in church? Do religious people go to a church to do a casual date or catch up with friends and associates on weekdays?
I might be very misinformed about how church works, but I think that coffee shops fill a very different niche. History kinda supports this: coffee shops became valuable places of business and occupied the 'third place' role even in extremely religious places and times (I'm thinking of Lloyd's specifically, and 17th and 18th century coffee shop culture as a locus for business ventures in the Netherlands and England).
> Do religious people go to church daily
Some do. Do people people go to sufficiently sociable cafés daily? Most people go with and talk to people they already know.
>and hold business meetings in church? Do religious people go to a church to do a casual date
Not in church, but with people they meet in church.
> or catch up with friends and associates
A lot of churches do have some socialising after services. Just serving coffee or something afterwards
Even without that people chat on the way out.
> on weekdays?
If you go to church on weekdays
Yes, I am in agreement
I would like to add what many non-religious people (and some "out to lunch" evangelicals) do ot understand about churches (I guess this applies to mosque and synagogue too).
The role of a church is social, not religious. There are religious elements of course, but churches would not be required if it were not for the communities they foster
My church is also my kids' school. We also don't have bus service. During the school year a large portion of the parish is in constant contact and communication because of this.
You do things at a place of worship other than socializing and meeting people, so while a church is a third space not all third spaces are very church like. A bar doesn't really have worship analogues right
I don't think that's true. All third spaces I can think of are based on some activity, around which some community (or individual social relationships) form which might or might not be so closely related to the activity.
- Church/temple/mosque/etc: worship - Bar: drinking alcoholic drinks - Gym/sport: physical exercise - Volunteering: whatever you're volunteering for - Coffee shop: coffee? Reading, working?
All these have "a thing you do other than socializing and meeting people". You could (and do) go there specifically for the activity without socializing and meeting people (just like church).
Spaces that are "social-only" are pretty rare. Coffee shops are maybe closer to that as you're probably not going to consume many coffees, but people stay to read, work... it's a bit less structured than other third spaces (and personally I find that it makes it more difficult to socialise there)
> Bar: drinking alcoholic drinks
Also a feature of some churches - parties in the church hall, the university chapel I used to go to that had a church run bar in the same building!
More seriously, bars are primarily places to socialise that happen serve drinks so I think they are similar to coffee shops that way.
But in a non-religious third place you may find people from any religion besides us atheists, which is not going to happen on places of worship. Your examples all seem more homogeneous to me.
That may be good or bad depending on what you’re looking for, but my point is I don’t think they’re as comparable as you do.
They are homogenous in terms of one shared belief. Places of religion can be just as varied in terms of most other things (industries, skills, politics apart from a few unacceptable things) and can be even more varied in some things (affluence of people there, and width of area they draw from).
Absolutely!
I went to church as a kid and know what you mean. However, the shared belief usually implies a narrower heterogeneity, if that makes sense (in a way that’s proportional to how orthodox the beliefs are).
In a secular shared space it’s far more common to be exposed to people with radically different beliefs, sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views, to mention a few examples.
I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together (e.g., a “repair” meetup where people go get something fixed or help others fix things).
> sexual orientation (or even preferences), and political views,
In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
> I think it’s very important that people have places where they can be surrounded by others that, while different as you say, all share a very important core belief, but it’s also very important for a healthy society to have spaces where radically different people can coexist peacefully and even work towards some goal together
I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
>In the churches I have been to over the years (all Catholic or Anglican) I have met people with different sexual orientations and a very wide range of political views (everything except far right, as far left as outright communist).
Yeah, it was similar for me (only Catholic churches in my case), though politics were usually homogeneous per church (what I mean is: whether you leaned left or right, you'd find a Catholic community to welcome you, but I'm not sure it'd be easy to find one that would comfortably welcome wide political views). As for sexual orientation, this was not common at all, but bear in mind the last time I attended Church was in the early 90s so things may have changed.
> I agree. It does happen at work anyway though so I put less importance on this as a requirement for third spaces.
I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living, while in a third space, even in one with a common goal like the repair meetups I mentioned, you go there voluntarily and not because otherwise you can't put food on the table.
I think both will vary wildly. I also think my experience in the UK and Sri Lanka is very different from, say, the US.
Catholic churches, politically, pretty similar to the rest of society where the church was, with a left wing tilt.
Sexual orientation also varies with church. Obviously a gay friendly church (e.g. St Patrick's Soho a few decades ago, Farm Street now - both in Catholic London). For Anglican churches I would say St martin in the Fields where David Monteith ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Monteith ) was one of our parish priests.
> I think the main difference of a third space vs work is that, at work, we're forced to "put up" with people we wouldn't normally engage with, because we all have the common goal of making a living
I agree, but by putting up with people you can come to like them, particularly if you are avoiding people because of things such as a stereotyped view of a group.
Starbucks is my favorite place to worship
I am devoutly religious, but you are making chauvinistic assertions.
"House of worship" does not deserve the primacy you assign it. First came "third places" and human relations, and then came organized religion.
You're putting the cart of Churches before the horse of human interaction.