A coffee shop. Three words, but so much symbolic significance in today’s 21’st century parlance…a nirvana for the soul? A place to meet new people? A place to hook up? Yes, that…and so much more.
I realized early on, a coffee shop is much more than what it seems. As the years went by my desire to answer the question honestly waned somewhat, but yes, I did know, and yes, one did things other than just get coffee at a coffee shop. Some of it was just hustle: there were never quite enough hours to go around, so people sat around, transcribed for various friends writing books or dissertations; I sat around observing them, wannabe writers and publishers and students dressed in colourful apparel. There was the typical young couple, mushy and sweet, cozying upto each other. There was the slightly older gentleman, hunched up over a laptop, typing word with frenetic speed on his fancy Apple keyboard. There was the suave businessman with a colleague or a client, trying to nail that elusive business deal over a cup of hot, steaming cappuccino.
Then there was me, always enamored by the fancy, brightly-lit interiors of the fancy café, warm and engaging to most, a synonym of creativity and other-worldliness to others. Beautiful and meaningful, simply because of the hub of conversations initiated within the warm, cozy interiors. More than anything else, though, I was asked what else I did.
“Oh you know,” the t-shirt designer or gallery assistant with blunt bangs or unpaid intern would say on their way into the office. “When you aren’t drinking coffee.”
Because that’s what I did. I drank coffee like nectar, like stimulant, like warm, soothing intoxicant, like a lubricant to the terrifying possibilities of the intellect, like a source of ginger-eyed wisdom, like a defining wisdom for the soul. The question’s first directive — conveyed by softly lit panoramas of women chatting over steaming lattes, men in tailored suits smiling gently in the direction of the espresso machine — was to maintain the brand’s identity as a “third place.” The term, as appropriated by Starbucks, was actually originally coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe a particular kind of community space, one that facilitated civically minded social interaction. The “first place” is the home and the “second place” is the office, in Oldenburg’s conception, and the idea fit Starbucks’ self-styled business of “conversation and a sense of community” so well that the idea of the third place became their very foundation.
I was 18 when I first started drinking caffeine like the addict that I later became. Our English Honours course was peppered with students who wanted to wage war on the bourgeoisie and wanted to appear hipster, cool and rebellious at all times of the day. Coffee was our laxative, our drug of choice, our reason to get up in the morning and devour books by the dozen. It was our symbolic token to be wrapped around our hands whilst we quoted critics and intellectuals whilst trying to figure out the answers to difficult questions in our college curriculum. From then on, coffee was always a friend, be it during exams, or in the day-to-day rigours of daily life. It’s always been there, and I can’t imagine life without it.
The typical coffee shop, be it CCD or fancy Barista or Starbucks, caters to wide-ranging clientele. This is anything but homogenous. This diversity in crowd is extremely appealing to the imagination, a rare trippy feel-good factor which traipses in on the senses and refuses to leave. The whole perfectionism is situated within the aesthetic sensibility of the middle classes and upper middle classes. There is realness, rawness and beauty in the way the coffee shop is structured with infinite sensitivity to the needs of a variety of customers, be it the college student, the businessman or the working man or woman inealry 30’s who uses it as the safest sanctum to unleash their creativities.