Halfway to a Third Place

Starbucks had to destroy third places in order to save them

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. As often happens, it probably became necessary to finally name the third place because it was disappearing from the American landscape—but also starting to reappear in a new form via Starbucks, already 50 stores strong in the late ‘80s and in the process of distilling the warmth and community of the neighborhood coffee shop into a commodified resource and corporate brand pillar. 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. If you grew up in the suburbs in the ‘90s, there’s a decent chance Starbucks introduced you to the concept of a business where you weren’t just allowed to hang out but invited to do so. Later on, it would become a place where you knew you could get free wi-fi, even if you didn’t buy anything. And finally, at least in New York, it became a place where you knew you could find a public restroom, also without buying anything (although the line for that was often longer than the coffee line). This was also true of McDonald’s, but Starbucks had always implied that they actually wanted you to be there. Until they didn’t.

Just as Starbucks created (or recreated) the contemporary third place, they eventually had to destroy it—the recent bookend to the company’s original brand strategy. 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: It’s better to streamline transactions and keep people moving, a shift that the pandemic broadly encouraged as well. “Starbucks found it could reduce labor costs and increase order volume by running a mostly drive-thru and take-away coffee business.” 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.” This, of course, merely formalizes what had been clear for a long time: that Starbucks was less a destination than a transactional liminal space that happened to tolerate your extended presence, not unlike any other fast food chain—contrary to its original brand, the artifice of which this arguably exposes.

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.” This new ethereal third place, which follows us as we hurry between our first and second places, and is no longer confined to a “box,” might indeed be supported by a different infrastructure, experiencing an afterlife on our phones. Serendipity, that essential urban amenity, requires friction: If you never stop moving, and if everyone gets the hell out of your way, you’re less likely to have any unexpected encounter, although you will check off your to-do list more quickly. 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.

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• Aaron Gordon’s long-awaited NYC starter pack—a superb list of nonfiction books about New York City, organized into tiers to help you prioritize.

• Delia Cai argues that the way we post to Instagram today is less about self-aggrandizement and more like a prayer for cosmic protection. “The real aspiration being constantly cultivated and displayed on Instagram is not toward moral authority nor wealth nor even beauty, but toward an assurance…of luckiness.”

• A.S. Hamrah reviews Emily Nussbaum’s book about the history of reality television, affirming what should already be obvious: that reality TV sucks. An eloquent corrective to poptimism run amok.