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Starbucks Spent Years Rushing Us Out the Door. Now It Wants Folks to Stay for a While
High-tech coffee shops are changing with the times
For over a decade, technology has trained us to treat every step between wanting a cup of coffee and having one in hand as friction to be eliminated. Order ahead. Skip the line. Grab your cup from the designated pickup area. Get on with your day. All without acknowledging another human being or spending a minute longer in the shop than necessary. We were sold on immediacy being the future. And once apps made faster possible, slowing down came to feel like bad service.
Coffee shops responded accordingly, increasingly catering to our need for speed. Starbucks essentially turned itself into the real-life version of the opening credits of Weeds: a steady, almost robotic stream of look-alike customers filing in and out, coffees in hand. By 2015, the pursuit of a frictionless coffee run seemed to have reached its logical conclusion. Starbucks rolled out mobile ordering and, that same year, opened its first “express” store on Wall Street, a grab-and-go outpost designed to put java in customers’ hands and send them right back out, no seats in sight.
But in making the experience more efficient, we lost many of the small, incidental interactions that had helped make the coffeehouse a third place to begin with. Somewhere along the way, we stopped looking like individual customers and started behaving more like robots, filing in and out through a perfectly optimized system that, for all its efficiency, felt increasingly soulless.
So, for those of you standing in line at a coffeehouse right now—stay in line! Maybe you never quite bought into the idea that every inconvenience needs to be solved. Or maybe you’ve spent the past decade wondering whether all that speed and automation was costing us something human. Well then, my friend, this story of redemption is for you. Because now, finally, the same coffee shops that got us in and out in record time are urging us to slow down, sit, sip and stay awhile.
In a striking reversal, Starbucks is now asking customers to do the very thing it spent years engineering out of the experience. Baristas are greeting customers the moment they walk in, while refreshed stores feature softer seating and spaces designed for lingering. The message is clear: convenience no longer has to come at the expense of connection. After years of taking seats away—some during Covid and social distancing—the company has added back roughly 25,000 and is investing $1 billion to redesign thousands of stores with homey décor and other “uplifts,” transforming them into what the chain describes as a “living room outside your home.”
And while Starbucks is reversing course, the rapidly expanding Tatte Bakery & Café has remained committed to connection, explicitly positioning its cafés as places to gather and feel part of something, whether you come alone or with others. Tatte’s growth suggests the desire for the coffee shop as a social, communal “third place” never actually disappeared; some companies simply stopped designing around it.
Of course, the modern third place looks a little different. Unfortunately, the laptops aren’t going anywhere.
But if we’re going to spend so much of our lives staring at screens, we might as well do it among other people—and maybe even smile at one of them. So, what’s your hurry?
Related: Starbucks’ ‘Coffee Run’ and More Celebrations of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games
Leslie Richin is a digital media strategist and freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. In addition to Muse, she has contributed to Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, Spin, Paste, Adweek, Spotify for Artists News, PopMatters, ABC News, Bethesda Magazine and Curl.
