What happened to our third places? Remember that term? It was bandied about throughout the rapid rise of Starbucks. People needed a place that wasn’t home and wasn’t work, to simply be: to gather with friends or work or sit alone to read a book.
Recently, Starbucks permanently closed a café following a series of violent incidents in a Winnipeg neighbourhood. For most of the past year, the Tim Hortons in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood has sealed its dining area off to customers, seemingly for similar reasons. What are these communities losing?
When I spent a day with a farm-labour activist, connecting with agricultural workers in towns like Leamington, Tim Hortons was the de facto meeting spot. That’s because there’s an unwritten social contract that, if you buy a cup of coffee at Tim Hortons and don’t cause trouble, you can spend as much time there as you want. Starbucks doesn’t quite have the same reputation — in 2018, an employee called the police on two Black men who were waiting for a friend. The chain closed down every location for an afternoon to conduct anti-bias training, but its image as a third place “for everyone” was tarnished, although that identity remained a core part of the company’s marketing strategy.
Still, there’s a difference between a rule and a norm. These are publicly traded corporations. Their responsibility is to shareholders, not the public. They are not obligated to provide a shared space.
I wanted to see the extent to which these businesses remain community hubs, so this morning I worked from a Starbucks.
Out of 32 seats, inside and out, only five are in use.
Four staff deal with the unrelenting coffee, breakfast-sandwich, and cake-pop orders from the river of Honda Civics and Nissan Rogues flowing through the drive-thru. Inside, a few people wait to order from the cashier at the back of the store. By the pick-up counter at the front, a crowd waits with DoorDash and SkipTheDishes bags.
Several more people sit down, but they’re waiting for to-go orders. Others come in to collect app-ordered hauls already sitting on the counter. They pick up cups labelled with their names and leave without speaking to a human. In and out without removing their sunglasses.
“The Third Place has never been defined solely by a physical space, it’s also the feeling of warmth, connection, a sense of belonging,” states a 2022 blog post on the Starbucks website. The post explains that the company’s mobile apps create a sense of community and that machines like the Clover Vertica will reduce the complexity of labour for their partners (employees), “enabling stronger engagement and connection between our partners and the customers they serve.”
I don’t see that in this coffee shop. This is not the once-promised third-place cultural nexus, nor is it some 3.0 utopia in which automation has freed workers from repetitive tasks, allowing them to devote their energy to service and community-building.
If anything, the store design clarifies that the value of the space is as a depot rather than a destination.
Independent cafés usually have more community vibes. But private businesses are not public spaces. I don’t like having to buy something to work out of a coffee shop. And I feel that if I’m there for longer than two hours and don’t buy something else, I’m taking advantage of a small-business owner who needs to generate revenue from their seats.
That’s why, on Saturdays, I work at the library. It’s clean and quiet. You don’t have to buy anything to be there — in fact, you couldn’t if you tried.
While at the library last Saturday, I noticed a meeting room hosting a session on job-seeking and local navigation for Spanish-speaking immigrants. You can’t get that out of a coffee shop. Yes, there are some small businesses (like Dreams of Beans in Peterborough, Test Batches Brewery in Midland, and Immigrant Food in Washington) that encourage engagement with non-profits and other community groups. But these are rare.
International coffee chains moving away from their role as third places highlights the enduring value of libraries and their essential function in healthy communities. That’s what makes the library so special: they are there to serve the public. Whether you want to work on your laptop, use the computers to watch fight videos on TikTok, or conceivably even borrow a book, it is the one place that anyone can go for as long as they like, so long as they don’t cause trouble.
Premier Doug Ford, when he was a Toronto city councillor, once notoriously said that he would close a library “in a heartbeat” within his Etobicoke North ward, which he inaccurately claimed had more libraries than Tim Hortons. The province of Ontario has 921 libraries and 1,824 Tim Hortons. The threat to those libraries remains: In 2019, the Southern Ontario Library Service budget was cut by 50 per cent. Following budget shortfalls this year, London is considering closing two libraries; it has already suspended Sunday service for the remainder of the year. We are witnessing the erosion of an irreplaceable resource that the private sector cannot and should not be expected to provide.
That was the subtext of Ford’s misrepresentation of the library-to-Tim Hortons ratio —we don’t need so many public gathering spaces (libraries) because we have so many private ones (Tim Hortons).
As much as I appreciate the opportunities for public gathering created by Tim Hortons, Starbucks, mall benches, and food courts, these are businesses run by private companies. They may have an economic incentive to provide these social amenities, but they do not have a mandate to do so. The minute these spaces become unprofitable or a security liability, they will shutter operations, and the community will lose the resource.
This Saturday, I will be back at the library. I will bring my own coffee.
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