Halfway to a Third Place

There was a time when Starbucks offered the option to sip your coffee out of a ceramic cup and eat your Danish off a ceramic plate. Two perfect details that helped bring the company’s belief to life in the place between work and home. But ceramic crockery is expensive to maintain and Starbucks did away with it, favoring the more efficient paper cup

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To give you an example of what I mean, think about the old strategic insight that drove Starbucks’ success, which they called “The Third Space”. This was their term for “the space between work and home”, where you’re in a more comfortable and relaxed environment than the office but are still being creative and productive. This is what they wanted t

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Everyone is always posting about how third spaces are dead, and that we’re living in an era of unprecedented social isolation and anomie. Well, in SF we have a third space, and it’s called Dolores Park. If you live in a city with at least one bookstore and one music venue, they probably host these things called events? Where you can meet people? An... See more

So what’s replaced hangouts in the city? In many cases, I’d consider them ersatz third places: establishments that are either too expensive for the average American or apparently designed to disincentivize lingering. Think carefully curated faux dive bars that serve $15 beer-and-shot specials, or parks like New York’s High Line that are built to be... See more