(2024-07-26) Halfway To A Third Place

Drew Austin: Halfway to a Third Place. In 1989, Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe something that had already existed for a long time: social settings other than home and work (the first and second places), such as cafes and bars and community centers

Starbucks didn’t invent the third place but did make it fungible and scalable, thereby restoring it to an environment from which it had receded.

the concept of a business where you weren’t just allowed to hang out but invited to do so...

This was also true of McDonald’s, but Starbucks had always implied that they actually wanted you to be there. Until they didn’t.

A recent CNN article describes how the rise of mobile and drive-thru ordering, which account for a combined 70 percent of Starbucks sales, have encouraged the embrace of fast food logic

Removing furniture from stores or making that furniture less comfortable has also increased throughput, removing obstacles to customer flow along with opportunities to linger. Or, as Nolan Gray put it, Starbucks “went from classic ‘third place’ to the cutting edge of hostile architecture in a span of like a decade.”

Rather than formally renouncing its “third place” status, Starbucks reminds us that the third place is less a physical space than a spiritual condition, a state of mind. “Starbucks says that it’s evolving its third place model from being a physical store to a feeling,” the CNN article says. Ordering a frappuccino on the Starbucks app is its own kind of third place, apparently. “Third place is a broader definition,” says Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan. “The classic definition of third place—it’s a box where I go to meet someone—it’s frankly not relevant anymore in this context.” wtf?!?

Paradoxically, the internet, which has eliminated so much friction from the physical world, has also introduced its own kind of friction: All that time we spend staring at the screen is an alternate version of the loitering we used to do in person, voluntarily or otherwise. Unlike Starbucks, the social media business model requires our time, measured in eyeball-hours, so the digital platforms will at least set out the furniture that Starbucks got rid of.