Reports of the Third Place’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated

For years, a local Starbucks coffeeshop was a welcome respite for students, freelance workers, and others seeking a comfortable hangout with a clean bathroom. While Starbucks is a private business, it was once common for patrons to sit for hours while making only a couple of purchases. This made Starbucks and its ilk a valuable ‘third place,’ a communal space separate from home or work where social interactions happen.

“These places could be anything from neighborhood watering holes to bookstores, barbershops, community centers or even stoops,”write James Rojas and John Kamp in Strong Towns. By 2022, Starbucks and other businesses are shifting to a new model: “Across the country, cozy lounge chairs were replaced with metal stools — where seating wasn’t done away with altogether. Bathrooms, outlets and tables also disappeared. The company even departed from its 1990s ethos and promised to outfit 90% of new locations with “state-of-the-art” drive-thrus.”

The authors quote Nathaniel Meyersohn, who wrote that Starbucks is “choosing the transactional over the experiential,” explicitly redefining the third place to include digital technology, reducing the importance of the physical space. “The Starbucks where you studied for finals with your classmates, recovered from that awkward first date, won a chess match and took that job interview no longer exists. It’s now a conveyor belt where speed rules and the ideal customer experience is spending as little time in the store as possible.”

While this could seem as a harbinger of doom for other third places, Rojas and Kamp note that other urban cafes, parks, and pocket plazas, many created during the pandemic, are thriving; “the appetite for traditional, physical third places hasn’t disappeared.”