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...
There maybe is an old European style of coffeehouses but nut sure that's been hit on beyond a very local level.
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.
What are some examples of real third places in major US cities?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where though?
West coast and Gulf Coast where Ive lived have very few.
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).
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.
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.
As usual the direction of causation is a bit difficult to tease out
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Does Starbucks even exist?
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.
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
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.
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.
Ideas are useless without execution
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.
edit: thank you, mods, for changing the link.
> 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.
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).
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
- 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)
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.
"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.
