Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately, Starbucks is opening “kiosk only” locations with no seating that, obviously, fail to function as a third place. My partner finished up a medical appointment and was waiting for me to arrive, and decided to stop in Starbucks. Oops, just a kiosk. The options left for a “third place” was a petrol station that had seating and a grocery store.

Somehow I don’t think petrol station seating areas will promoting a huge amount of neighbourhood entrepreneurship. I would probably look at more independent, locally-owned kind of establishments—particularly that do have seating.

I can think of a lot of critical meetings that happened in these sort of coffee shops, including a first interview for the person who is now our staff software architect, the first meeting I had with my now-business partner where we went over her product idea (admittedly that was a Starbucks), getting together to hash out ideas to solve difficult problems, and best of all, a random chance encounter because we were in a third place. This is in places as diverse as small heartland American towns, NYC, Tel Aviv, or Pennsylvania’s rust belt.

Fewer of these places means fewer of these good things happening. I don’t need a kiosk; I have an espresso machine I can operate at home or in the office.

> I don’t need a kiosk; I have an espresso machine I can operate at home or in the office.

You would probably enjoy the experience of a small, locally owned coffee shop then. Starbucks is optimizing for their profit. In my suburban city, Starbucks has closed most or all locations that were a few miles from the freeway. They built new locations with drive throughs and very little to no seating within a few blocks of every freeway onramp. This tells you what they are optimizing for.

Unfortunately, chances are encounters and warm fuzzies do not please the corporate overlords.

In LA, every small locally owned coffee shop has become totally overrun with folks buying one latte and proceeding to take a whole table to themselves and their laptops for the next 5 hours.

>every small locally owned coffee shop has become totally overrun with folks buying one latte and proceeding to take a whole table to themselves and their laptops for the next 5 hours.

That's what a third place is and what people are lamenting the lack of now.

No, that’s what a second place is. A third place is for socialization, a second place is for work. Just because you’re relying on some independent small business owner to pay rent for your desk while you prevent other customers from patronizing the establishment and don’t talk to anyone, doesn’t make it a third place.

Agreed, but with a caveat: It goes back into "third place" territory if they're engrossed in a laptop-hobby rather than laptop-employment, even though many of the external favors are identical.

There are solutions for this.

In Italy they charge you for the seat.

I have been to places where they charge for a laptop too.

In addition you can minimize cellular network reception and charge for wifi.

The last thing is not legal in the US. Marriott got in trouble with the FCC over this.

https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/03/travel/marriott-fcc-wi-fi-fin...

The FCC only has jurisdiction over active transmissions. They have no power to say that I can't build my hotel out of reinforced concrete that acts as an effective faraday cage.

Actively. You can however consider it when choosing a location (although obviously, the mobile network providers can make changes outside your control which might change your 'USP').

can always cover the walls and make it a Faraday cage?

In germany we have tapestry that blocks hf signals.

I could not find an English shop that sells it with nice pattern, but you can always use something like this :

https://consciousspaces.com/products/yshield-hnv100-emf-shie...

Not legally.

We love the look of those tin ceiling tiles so much we covered our walls with them too!

Are the owners not enforcing time limits or drink minimums?

>> Starbucks is optimizing for their profit.

Are we shocked businesses are optimizing for their profit? Isn't that their purpose?

Corporations were originally for some public benefit. It’s only recently that profit has become their sole aim.

When were corporations for public benefit? Even medieval corporations were for the benefit of the participants, and only tangentially the public at large.

If they're meant to serve no public benefit then perhaps they should be stripped of the legal protections they enjoy.

What kind of legal protections do you think should go?

BTW, say, your bedroom serves no public benefit; its point is to provide you some highly private benefits. Is it bad?

I'd say that any activity is fine, as long as it does not result in or intended for public harm. Providing a public benefit should be strictly optional; paying taxes should be enough.

>What kind of legal protections do you think should go?

Shielding people from liability is a good start.

>BTW, say, your bedroom serves no public benefit; its point is to provide you some highly private benefits. Is it bad?

I can't commit crimes in my bedroom and escape any and all responsibility for it.

Pretty sure you can commit crimes in your bedroom, and pretty sure a crime is easier to get away with when you have a private space to do it/hide stuff in.

Then why are we giving the owners limited liability? In exchange for what?

In exchange for taxing them twice. First with Corporation Tax, and then on salaries/dividends/capital gains/however the shareholders extract income from the corporation.

Benefit of the granting authority.

Every business is optimised for profit. This is why they exist. Difference is that Starbucks probably can be profitable operating as a kiosk but a mom and pop store can't because it lacks brand value.

Not necessarily. For now, every business is run by a human being, not AI, so all of the small mom and pop businesses optimize for the whims of the businesses owner. Got that one vendor with the sales person that they like more than the other vendor's because they were rude? Guess who's winning the contract with no oversight? Mom or pop tired today? They're not optimizing for profit, they're taking a nap. Mom feel bad for the customer who's pregnant and who's partner left them? She's not optimizing for profit when she undercharges them on lunch and dinner and breakfast.

Businesses everyone recognizes by name aren't run that way because the layers of capitalism serve to isolate people from the human aspect of their decisions, but there are a lot of businesses that people have never heard of.

If so, it is natural that those businesses go under.

No it’s not natural. Many of those businesses survive very well and still maintain their essential humanity.

Over optimized corps are usually going down sooner or later. Look at Bell or at the living corpses of IBM, Oracle and Boeing. The problem is they are getting propped up by governments around the globe and their fear of impeding doom if their old supplier shits the bed.

Lol - replaced by even bigger megacorps. Google, Microsoft, Nvidia.

It appears they have optimized a decent metric (profit) to such a degree that it starts doing harm.

The locally owned coffee shop is optimizing profits too, just going after a smaller, more niche demographic.

Inversely, if everyone wanted cozy shops, that is exactly what Starbucks would build.

Everyone may be wanting cozy shops, large apartments, free ice cream, and a pony.

Cozy shops bring in much less profit per $ invested. They cannot seriously compete with kiosks, when the majority of customers just want some competently brewed joe on the way to work (or even half-competently, since we mention Starbucks). Maybe a bagel with it. Next customer!

A cozy shop with seating for customers who want to sit there and talk for an hour over a $3 cup of coffee each, cannot compete. It can maybe run as a lifestyle business by somebody who loves the craft and does not need much money. But not as an efficient business chain.

If commercial real estate is cheap enough, an efficient business chain absolutely can do well with a cozy shop. A lot of people don't want a kiosk, and will simply skip it, but will go to a place if it's a cozy shop. Maybe this isn't so popular in modern America these days, but it is in many other places. Here in Tokyo where land prices are huge, all the Starbucks I've seen are still cozy shops, though they do tend to get rather crowded. I don't think a kiosk would work here at all; you can't bring coffee drinks on the train and eating on the sidewalk is rude. But Starbucks is immensely popular and always has a line (along with competing shops like Tully's).

So either Americans just don't care much about cozy shops any more, or American commercial real estate rent is too expensive, or some combination of the two are making it unprofitable to have a cozy coffee shop in American cities these days.

>If commercial real estate is cheap enough,

Yea, this is one of the primary problems. Commercial real estate prices are out of control, same with housing.

Seems like work from home should eventually make a dent in commercial prices.

> So either Americans just don't care much about cozy shops any more, or American commercial real estate rent is too expensive, or some combination of the two are making it unprofitable to have a cozy coffee shop in American cities these days.

It might also be more profitable to operate a location as a kiosk than as a larger cozy shop.

If you re-read my prior comment, my point is that it doesn't have to be this way, and isn't like this in other places. Cozy (but frequently crowded) Starbucks with sit-down seating are extremely common and popular here in Japan. They aren't turning them into kiosks. And this is the very same company that's doing so in America. So I think we should look at other factors instead of just whining about "evil capitalism".

To deal with this, Europe has "anticafes" that charge for time spent by the hour and offer unlimited free coffee (hence the "anti" part).

Ah, sounds a bit like that specific North American word... coworking? :)

That word also gets used, somewhat interchangeably (an anticafe will often also mention the word "coworking" in its description, but never the other way around).

Coworking places tend to be more like offices with some startups renting permanent spaces and some people dropping in for a day of work. They tend to have real desks and phone booths. Anticafes tend to be more like community spaces with cafe seating, board games galore, and maybe some cats. Both are filled with people on their laptops :)

Cats! It's a stroke of genius in changing the atmosphere.

A small coworking space closest to me is pretty informal, has tables, not desks, but you should bring your own coffee. If they had a cat, it would definitely be an extra attraction.

At this point, I feel like that kind of thing is an obvious consequence of, among other issues, most of the US going straight to "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" when it comes to mental health issues and the homeless.

> Unfortunately, Starbucks is opening “kiosk only” locations with no seating that, obviously, fail to function as a third place.

And when they convert an existing location to kiosk only, the prices do not go down.

There are two Starbucks locations in downtown Redwood City, about 250m apart. The one on the right side of the tracks has comfortable seating and tables. The one on the wrong side of the tracks, in the dying mall near the homeless camp, is kiosk only. Same prices.

It may be that they converted the location to kiosk to avoid raising the prices, given that California recently raised their operating costs by a significant amount. So the prices did go down in a sense.

I've been protesting the loss of starbucks seating in my grocery store by just making some seating out of whatever product is on display at that time. I haven't run into any entrepreneurs yet, but the community is amused.

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