The latest left-wing conspiracy, according to angry conservatives on the Internet, isn’t taking place at the FBI, but in your local coffee shop. Starbucks, to the horror of patrons who fear an influx of those they see as riffraff into their sacred latte-sipping space, has offered up its restrooms to the nonpaying public.
This outrage is overblown, but the Starbucks story is about much more than coffee. From the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia location that set off these reform efforts to the “third place” policy the company announced this week, it’s about the decline of community in the United States.
The phrase “third place” is probably familiar to longtime Starbucks fans, and to sociology students. Ray Oldenburg popularized the concept of gathering spots separate from the home and the office in the late 1980s, arguing they are essential to community-building and civic engagement. Starbucks Executive Chairman Howard Schultz, enamored of espresso bars he encountered in Italy, agreed — and struck out to create the consummate American meeting place. The mission wasn’t just to serve a flavorful dark roast. It was “to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”
That is, of course, lofty language for a corporate chain. Answering for society’s decline into disconnectedness was an equally lofty goal. April’s arrests underscored the reality that, if Starbucks had created a third place at all, it had done so chiefly for a specific segment of the population that fit the image of the ideal coffee-shop customer. That mostly meant the same upper-middle-class, white contingent who commute through the suburban sprawl that writers such as Oldenburg and “Bowling Alone” author Robert D. Putnam fault for weakening our human-to-human bonds. It also meant their well-heeled (perhaps even better-heeled) urban equivalents.
The third-place theory, Starbucks-style, assumed an America free from the ills that plague our city centers. But people who lack a first or second place have to depend on a third one. Libraries and other locales that try to function as societal living rooms encounter the same issues that inspired some Starbucks stores to require restroom-users to purchase a beverage or slice of coffee cake before they use the restroom, or before they loiter at a table.
Public bathrooms are scarce in most places across the country, and sheltered public spaces with seating aren’t so common either. The homeless need somewhere to wash up. The addicted need somewhere to shoot up. The mentally ill, too, avail themselves of services where they can find them. When that place is the nearby Starbucks, it can be bad for business.
Starbucks won’t solve racism — not in its own employees, and certainly not in the nation — by loosening its rules around restroom access. But the company has removed one area where bias can assert itself, and it has also reaffirmed its founding credo. The shift may have been motivated by a desire to polish a tarnished image, yet the pushback from baristas and some customers reveals the power of the force Starbucks is fighting against.
“It sounds like Starbucks is turning their stores into homeless shelters. Their coffee is strong but their management is weak,” one man, who has now sworn off Starbucks, told the Wall Street Journal.
The callous attitude among critics of the altered policy — the franchise ought to rebrand as “Starbums,” one Reddit user suggested — showcases the same societal division that prompts calls for third places to begin with. Starbucks has set out, just as it did when it first opened, to address a deficit that exists far beyond its doors.
It’s hard to feel optimistic about a coffee conglomerate’s chances to solve our social woes. Starbucks may not even manage to keep up its policy, or to enforce it fairly. Already, the company has clarified that sleeping, alcohol and “disruptions” won’t be permitted in its stores.
More broadly, the notion of the coffee shop-cum-utopia is unrealistic when the world outside the plate-glass windows is anything but utopian. Until cities and states serve their citizens by providing bathrooms that anyone can access and ramping up support services for the homeless, and until the country addresses the conditions that send people to the streets to begin with, it’s naive to think any single place, no matter how you number it, can foster a real community.