Starbucks and Communal Space
This is a piece about Starbucks in the present day, but let me start in a different place and time before I circle back.
A few years ago I was browsing used books at downtown LA’s The Last Bookstore, and I stumbled upon a book called “Once Upon An Isle: The Story of Fishing Families on Isle Royale.”
The book by Howard Sivertson is a series of vignettes accompanied by paintings that depict the lives of the people who lived on the islands of Lake Michigan back in early 1900’s.
The work was hard- fishermen spent 18 hour days at sea, women lugged copper barrels of water up from the river to wash clothes by hand. The families lived in relative isolation from each other in cabins on different islands.
But “Boat Days” were different. On Boat Days a large steam ship would visit from the US mainland, and all of the people on the surrounding islands would gather to meet the boat.
As Sivertson describes it:
For us youngsters, we got a chance to see kids from other islands that we ordinarily didn’t get to play with. We got together to pick berries and to fish under the huge Booth Dock fish house, famous for giant speckle-trout. Women talked about pies, which berries were ripe, and everything else while sorting out the mail. The fishermen loaded their fish on the ship and exchanged lies about how many fish they were catching.
Sivertson says that from the late 19th century on into the 1940’s, “Boat Day was the only chance for many of these fishing families, isolated from the mainland and from other harbors and coves, to connect with each other and with civilization.”
But this would change in 1944 when the large 119-foot boat was replaced by a competing firm’s smaller 65-foot boat.
These new boats were more efficient than the older steamships:
With their smaller size and better maneuverability, they landed at each fisherman’s dock, giving individualized service… News and mail were exchanged. Groceries, gasoline, empty boxes, and ice were off-loaded and fish were loaded on. The event was over in just moments, as the boat left for the next dock and so on around the island.
In theory, the advent of smaller boats should have made life better for the families- for as Sivertson notes, “it was more convenient for fisherman.”
But the time savings for fisherman families came at a steep price: the loss of a naturally-occurring gathering point where the fishing families could see neighbors and friends and experience a sense of community.
And this loss was very real. It’s not as if fisherman families compensated for the loss of community time by planning new communal experiences in their place. Those weekly gatherings just stopped happening.
Innovation at the price of community. Was that a fair trade?
The Costs of Innovation
The trade-off at play in the Lake Michigan fishing islands a century ago is something that always goes on, even today.
Which brings me back to Starbucks, whose ongoing evolution of Starbucks provides a good example of this phenomenon.
When it rose to prominence in the 1990’s, Starbucks presented itself as a new European-style coffee house and emphasized its status as your “third place” — the venue where you could spent most of your time outside of home and work. The experience of Starbucks “the place” was emphasized just as much as the commodity of coffee being sold- they were offering something in a similar vein to the “boat day” that brought people together.
You can really see this emphasis on community if you go back to the year 1983, when a young Howard Schulz (later to become Starbucks CEO) walked the cobblestone streets of Milan while attending a coffee trade show.
As explained on the Starbucks website:
The 1983 trade show was unremarkable. Schultz, however, found his daily walks to and from the event to be life changing as he visited several espresso bars along the way.
Schultz found a full-sensory experience greeted customers who stepped through the doorways of Milan coffee houses. Italian opera played as baristas ground coffee, steamed milk and pulled espresso shots in graceful, powerful motions as if they were conducting an orchestra. He noticed the baristas were celebrated professionals who seemed to know each customer they served.
“In each shop I visited I began to see the same people and interactions, and it dawned on me that what these coffee bars had created, aside from the romance and theater of coffee, was a morning ritual and a sense of community,” said Schultz.
As Schultz recalled: “I was overwhelmed with a gut instinct that this is what we should be doing.”
They would go on to do this very well, if in a fairly subtle way. A Starbucks can provide a place run into friends or converse with friendly strangers, but one of the most valuable dimensions of cafes is that they can offer a sort of midway point between the public and the private. You can sit at your own table and be part of a community while at the same time retain the solitude that is conducive to getting work done, reading a book, or just thinking.
It’s a good middle ground- and Starbucks was an innovator at creating this space. (In fact, the reason tables at Starbucks are round is because there are no empty seats at a round table, enabling solo coffee drinkers to not feel conspicuous in the way one often does while dining alone in a restaurant.)
A Disturbing Trend
Yet these days Starbucks has embraced a new model for many of its stores. They’ve added drive-thru features to many of their new stores, and sometimes Starbucks isn’t not even bothering to build indoor seating at all- the “coffee shop” is just a drive-thru with a small walk-up outside window.
These new “drive-thru only” Starbucks stores represent a gain in time for busy people, but they also represent a loss in communal space.
In fact, these new stores might be better described as “commodity Starbucks” store models, and they stand in stark contrast to the traditional “community Starbucks.”
The goal of a “commodity Starbucks” is simple: to shrink the amount of time it takes people to get their coffee. The Starbucks experience at this point is entirely about operational efficiency, which is why indoor space with tables and chairs is sacrificed for a long drive-thru queue and the provision of extra parking spaces beyond code requirements.
It’s true that in urbanized areas they continue to follow their traditional model, and there continue to be attractive new stores. But in more suburban areas they are putting in these commodity Starbucks- even in neighborhoods where city planners and community advocates are trying to create more places for community and a walkable environment that isn’t solely tailored to cars.
They just did this in my own neighborhood. The new Starbucks store does have an inside space, but if you want to sit outside on the patio you have to endure the exhaust emanating from a long line of cars idling in the drive-thru queue.
Some of the consultants who work with Starbucks to get these new commodity Starbucks built have told me in so many words that the coffee chain is only doing “what our customers are asking for,” citing a 70/30 revenue split for drive-thru vs. in-store purchases. And it’s true- you only need to look at the long lines of people at their drive-thus to know there is a market for convenience.
But do we really know what we want? Do we see the real trade-offs going on here?
Just as I doubt the fisherman families of Isle Royal fully knew what trade-off they were making when they opted for the individualized boat service over the large steamboats and boat days, I think we often don’t fully understand the stakes at play when we opt for coffee efficiency over a coffee community.
The market will do what the market does, and time saved is something we clearly value. But we also value places, and in particular places that offer meaningful community.
To this end, I think it might be helpful if we found a better way to convey the importance of community in a way that resonates as strongly as a hot latte put into your hands quickly.
The zoning tools to ban drive-thrus are easy- they are used all the time in dense urban corridors where planners are looking to promote pedestrian-oriented development. But it’s the message behind “why” banning them is a better move for less urban neighborhoods, and in particular areas that aspire to be more pedestrian-oriented but are currently not, that is much more challenging.
We can’t save boat days for the fishing families on Lake Michigan. But if we can talk more persuasively about what makes for better communal places, we just might be able to get better Starbucks.
See an overview of the other things I’ve written at the link here.
