Howard Schultz, the well-known and long-time CEO of Starbucks - who has longed talked about running for president – is largely responsible for the misuse of the term third place.
Schultz read, or read about, Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book, The Great Good Place, and by 1995 Ray’s term was appearing in Starbucks promotional material. The annual report included comment from Schultz:
You get more than the finest coffee when you visit Starbucks. You get great people, first-rate music, a comfortable and upbeat meeting place, and sound advice on brewing excellent coffee at home. At home, you’re part of a family. At work you’re part of a company. And somewhere in between there’s a place where you can sit back and be yourself. That’s what a Starbucks store is to many of its customers – a kind of ‘third place’ where they can escape, reflect, read, chat or listen.
It was often used in connection with Starbucks during the years when the company was expanding in the US and around the world. A lot of people thought Schultz, a wildly successful businessman, had come up with the idea. The result was that everyone wanted to get in on this good thing: the great good place.
Almost overnight, third place was being applied, it seems, to anywhere humans are in proximity that isn’t an office or a house: parks, museums, street markets, libraries, and even public areas in property developments.
But Ray coined the term with a far more precise meaning, which readers recognized and related to: cafes, coffee shops, teahouses, diners, post offices, general stores, barbershops, beauty parlors, bars, taverns, and sometimes street corners. Third place was a description, not a concept. It means a certain type of place and experience. A third place is your place, the third leg of the stool, the essential, nurturing home away from home we all need.
As for Starbucks, as recently as 2018, Schultz was offering the same take:
In 1983 I took my first trip to Italy. As I walked the streets of Milan, I saw cafés and espresso bars on every street. When I ventured inside I experienced something powerful: a sense of community and human connection. I returned home determined to create a similar experience in America—a new ‘third place’ between home and work—and build a different kind of company. I wanted our stores to be comfortable, safe spaces where everyone had the opportunity to enjoy a coffee, sit, read, write, host a meeting, date, debate, discuss or just relax.
But by September 2022, all that was over. Chairs and tables were going. Yet Starbucks wouldn’t give up on the third place. Now, however, it was going to be a “virtual third place” as part of the drive-through experience. Here’s the release: “Reimagining the Third Place” and a few paragraphs:
The Third Place has never been defined solely by a physical space, it’s also the feeling of warmth, connection, a sense of belonging Starbucks. Digital technology is helping augment and extend that feeling of connection with customers – whether they are in Starbucks stores, in their cars, on their doorsteps.
One way Starbucks is doing this is through Mobile Order on the Starbucks app. Starbucks is enhancing Mobile Order to make it easier for customers to order, anticipate when their order will be ready, and make it easier and more efficient for partners to serve mobile order customers, eliminating some of the stress at peak times. Mobile ordering is also being extended to more licensed locations at airports and grocery stores.
"What is a 'Third Place' and Why do They Matter?,” at UMass
I told the Starbucks story as part of my lecture yesterday at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning: "What is a 'Third Place' and Why do They Matter?” The Zube Lectures are held in the Olver Design Building, which you can see below. I read with interest the details about the enormous wooden columns holding it up, especially because my 1868 house is held up by a bunch of tree trunks in the basement. Now I know why they do the job so well.
Robert Ryan introduced and mentioned my friendship with Sophia Mumford, whose husband Lewis Mumford was the architecture critic at the New Yorker for decades and one of the founders of the first US regional planning association. Sophie would have been astonished to see me lecturing in such a forum, since our conversations were almost always related to the literary world. I’ll bet she would have been delighted to think that I was carrying on the work. And the discussion with students and faculty was even better than I hoped for – very helpful as I finish the new version of The Great Good Place.
I showed a lot of photographs, many from around the world. This slide got the most attention. I don’t know if Starbucks, the coffee factory, is responsible for the barricading of baristas, but it’s quite easy to see why people so often say, “You mean like tavern” when they first hear the term third place. (These images are from The Miller in Great Barrington and Dottie’s in Pittsfield.)
Removing tables and chairs isn’t just at Starbucks, and the consequences of this change affect a lot of people without much money, including lonely teenagers longing for connection. The letter below comes from the archives, May 2023, but will be new to some of you:
Pull up a chair - if you can find one
The loneliness epidemic shouldn't be a surprise
A couple weeks ago I met a friend at an Au Bon Pain in New York City and was stunned to see only stools at high counters along the windows, no tables. It was, however, exactly what I’d been talking to Mark Wilson at Fast Company magazine about. He was reporting on the way chain restaurants are removing seats, reducing space, and focusing on mobile ordering. Fewer staffers, more profit.
Mark had called me to ask what effect I thought this would have on the people who’d come to depend on inexpensive chains as a place to hang out. His article is now out and you can read it here:
The Financial Times calls the decline of San Francisco, one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, a “doom loop.” I’m now wondering if the loss of seating at chain restaurants is part of the same process.
There used to be many places to hang out, commercial establishments that understood their important social role. Ray once listed them: inns, saloons, general stores, candy stores, soda fountains, coffee shops, diners, bowling alleys, skating rinks, barber shops, and hair salons, as well as beer halls, pubs, and bistros.
Street life is important, too, but in general a third place works best if it provides a roof over your head. Beyond that, not much is necessary. Most people like to have a table as well as chairs, and beverages are common (no wonder we often call our hangouts “watering holes”).
A third place doesn’t have to be fancy. It does need to be free or cheap if it’s going to be a place where everyone feels welcome. In times past, third-place activities could take place along side commercial transactions. Not all the men hanging out in a barber shop were there to get a shave. Fast-food restaurants didn’t mind having some slow customers, too - teenagers or older folk who’d buy cokes and sit for a couple of hours. I knew a local politician who held court at the McDonalds every morning.
But, as Mark Wilson explains, corporations are doing away with tables, taking away one of the few remaining third places in many communities.
Inspired by his own suburban life in Pensacola, Florida, [Ray] Oldenburg explored the role that restaurants and cafés, among other spots, play in our social fabric and civic life. He saw these third places appearing throughout history, from the agora (public squares) of Greek democracy to the taverns that fomented the American Revolution.
To create a proper third place, explains Karen Christensen, a writer and editor who enjoyed a multi-decade friendship and collaboration with Oldenburg, “you almost always need tables, some kind of food, and it can’t be too expensive.” She continues: “In third places, talking is the key, and if you’re worried about being pushed out the door or about the prices, you’re not going to relax.” Barbershops, churches, and libraries are all third places, too, and there was even a time in the 20th century when post offices were a popular hangout, Christensen notes. But as these sites recede—and U.S. cities remove benches from parks—the prospect of having a lengthy, inexpensive meetup with friends exists almost nowhere today but at low-cost restaurants.
And if those restaurants don’t have seats—if their app experience is more or less the only experience—they aren’t really a place for us at all. Swing by a Starbucks flooded with mobile orders, and you’ll see just how insignificant the third place has become. It’s why, earlier this year, when Schultz returned to Starbucks and announced a new initiative, an “authentic digital third place” of pixel-built NFTs and other digital rewards, Christensen rolled her eyes.
Longing for a mall
What’s left? A recent article tells us that Target stores are now a third place for pre-teens, even though they have to stand around or wander around, and presumably have to have their parents drive them there. The author writes:
My daughter and her preteen friends hang out at Target. Not to go shopping; they just walk its aisles in herds, cruise the place, look for other groups of preteens. Maybe get trinkets. The big red bullseye has become their social space. They will come of age right next to the shampoo and the affordable clothes and the TP.
I can’t tell you how sad this makes me. These kids have tech that makes Atari game systems look like cave paintings from the Mr. Belvedere era. Plenty of diseases have been eradicated or tamed for them. But their third places really, really suck.
This reminded me of the controversy in China when retired Chinese people discovered IKEA cafeterias. In the past, there were inexpensive eateries and even “hot-water” houses where residents could bring their own cup and tea leaves. But the concept of a third place is becoming known in China, as you can see from this photo, sent by the person working on a translation of our book.
Pull up a chair
San Francisco’s doom loop may be something distinct, but the loss of seating is a similar process: we have fewer places to gather, so we become less comfortable with strangers, more isolated, and lonelier, and in many cases more vulnerable to online and TV propaganda. I used to say “Bring back the trains,” but today I’m thinking about how to “Bring back the chairs.”
Here’s a bit from a marvelous, inspiring little book called City Comforts:
… we landed in Seattle. The sky was typical gray. It was a letdown to be back. I started comparing about how shabby the city looked and how Seattle’s built environment in no way measures up to the brilliance of its natural setting.
My friend agreed and then, in her absolutely sincere and comically perverse way, turned and said, “Which leaves us a tremendous opportunity to improve things. It’s not as though we live in Paris - what would we do then?”
The first nest of bluebirds has already fledged (flown). I knew the last baby was gone when I saw a wren going into the box. Bird housing, too, is in short supply, so I’ve put up a second bluebird box.