Coffee Shop Sociology

An article in today's paper describes the importance of the neighborhood coffee shop as a social hub of the community. Our lives are increasingly spilt between work, home and consumer purchases at stores and restaurants, and rarely do these cross over. Serendipity is a casualty of the modern condition - we don't run into our neighbors and mingle by accident much anymore, and our lives are a series of appointments managed by cell phone and email.

Hence the looming significance of what sociologists call "third spaces" - places where we can linger after a purchase and occasionally run into people without an appointment. Places like coffee shops.

The article mentions two - one in the booming exurb of Mason, and the other in my city neighborhood, Pleasant Ridge. And therein lies the contrast. What goes unmentioned in the article:

• These places are fewer and fewer overall. Large companies buy up the commercial real estate developers, and they have performance goals. Despite all of the warm fuzziness on the Olive Garden commercial it's all about volume and paying off the expensive capital outlay, and there are hungry customers who want your seat.


• Conversely, when these places do exist, they are more likely to be locally owned. The teenager at the Barnes and Noble Starbucks doesn't care about you -- despite the motivational poster in the break room -- but the lady who owns the coffee shop (the one on the verge of going out of business) has a very genuine incentive to remember your name.


• And when these places do exist, they are more likely to be in neighborhoods - the older commercial zones where neighbors out walking the dog can bump into people leaving a restaurant. That never happens in the exurbs, where the automobile is the primary tool for managing a compartmentalized life.

Again - I've said it many times on this blog, before - there are benefits to living in these subdevelopments in the outer communities. But it's the liabilities - the creeping isolation and the sense that life is reduced to a series of transactions - that's a part of the trade off that is involved.

A story that might be relevant: I get my hair cut at Gil's Barber Shop in the same city neighborhood mentioned above, Pleasant Ridge. It's a couple of blocks from my house. The place is packed every Saturday, and there's always lots of talking. And almost every time I ever go there, in addition to all the locals, there there is at least one man getting a haircut who used to live in Pleasant Ridge and who now lives in an exurb like Mason. Why don't they get their haircut at one of the places near where they live? The answer may not be simple, but it's certainly clear that if you're going to get in your car anyway, why not drive to a place where they know your name - and where everything hasn't yet been reduced to staged interactions at a point of sale?

[HT Cincinnati Blog]