“Buy something or leave, Starbucks says” said a headline on the BBC news this morning.
In North America (so, the USA and Canada then) the policy now is that you can’t just linger in Starbucks, or use the loo, or plug your laptop in, without buying a coffee (or whatever it is you’d actually consume in Starbucks). You will be asked to leave.
It’s weird this. I’ve got mixed feelings. On the one hand it feels like a cold-hearted swipe at people who chat, work, do community, and are desperate for a wee. On the other, it sort of makes sense for a business to make a profit, and I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone who’d just turn up at a restaurant and use the plug sockets. That would be poor form indeed. So, what’s the difference?
Well. Culture’s the difference. Coffee shops are predicated on a culture that’s grown over three decades. It’s hard to change that kind of thing.
What I would say though, Starbucks, is maybe consider meeting us halfway. If you’re going to make your staff ask us to leave because we haven’t got a Frappuccino steaming up our spectacles (and let’s face it, that’s a tough ask for them isn’t it?) … maybe make your environment a bit more cosy, and a bit less like a minimalist Swedish warehouse.
While that’s all happening of course, the richest men in the world are changing the culture of social media. If anything, they’re making those platforms less and less ‘cosy’, which feels a bit like addicting everyone to drugs in the mid 2000s, and then gradually reducing the supply on purpose until we’re all paying subscribers to a high of fewer and fewer returns.
We get takeaway Starbucks every time. Though, increasingly I stand there in front of those iridescent boards, trying to work out what I can get that isn’t pumped with sugar, lactose, or caffeine.
There’s a particular irony in there, isn’t there?
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