It’s official: Starbucks says you have to buy something if you’re going to use the bathroom. In fact you have to buy something if you just want to hang out. In my experience of coffee shops, “something” means a bottle of water, so a few dollars can buy you a few hours. But at The Atlantic Ellen Cushing pours scorn on the new policy. The coffee shop chain “is now a little less for everyone,” she says. She finds it “patently silly and a little delusional” to believe that a coffee shop might be a better place to stay if not everybody got to stay there. Her article ends with a crushing noun swap: “Starbucks doesn’t sell community, because community isn’t something you can buy—it sells coffee because coffee is something you can.”
I’d say that one of the things being sold is a chance for people to know each other a little. That doesn’t sound as grand as “community center,” the phrase the chain’s new CEO used when announcing that only customers are welcome. It’s certainly not as intriguing as “third place,” a sociology term Starbucks likes to throw around. But the CEO explained “community center” as a place where “conversations are sparked, friendships form, and everyone is greeted by a welcoming barista.” In other words, a place where people get to know each other a bit. As for “third place,” Cushing’s article grabs the term and runs with it. By the time she’s done, it no longer means a place where people can gather without being at home or work. She figures it’s “a place, like church, where people gather on equal footing and find meaning.” Viewed that way, the Starbucks decision seems egregious. You don’t make people buy a latte to go to church!
But this business of finding meaning looks like Cushing’s idea and no one else’s. I’ll point to an article that she points to. When first using the term “third place,” she links to an essay that also appeared in The Atlantic. The essay, pondering what constitutes “a real third place,” tells us one professor believes it can “contain an element of casual social aid.” The professor: “Sometimes you need someone to lend you a cup of sugar, and that’s about proximity. You just need someone to watch your dog for five minutes while you run into a store or something.” We do that kind of thing in the coffee shops. Go to the bathroom and you ask your neighbor to watch your laptop for a bit. No search for meaning’s involved, but sometimes conversations develop.
Cushing’s article practices an old trick of the intellectual press: tilt your head, close an eye, and you can pretend this thing here is a perfect stand-in for that bigger thing over there. In this case, the new Starbucks policy stands in for the scarcening (or alleged scarcening, I don’t know) of shared spaces. I’d say a coffee shop can do its bit to fight social isolation, but it can’t do more than its bit. Cushing figures you’re not really interested in fitness unless you lift 40 pounds and not 25. Wrong, you lift the amount your muscle can handle. To switch metaphors: a room, like a boat, doesn’t work so well when too many people are in it. This is especially so when some of the people are crazy, angry, sick, and/or loud.
Customers-only strikes Cushing as a blow to communal life. I don’t see it. Consider the articles she linked to in the following sentence: “Americans have given birth at Starbucks, proposed at Starbucks, gotten married at Starbucks, died at Starbucks.” From the news article for the birth: the barista “sold [the mother-to-be] a bottle of water before she headed to the women’s bathroom.” From the Reddit post about the engagement: “We went to Starbucks, ordered our usual drinks, and when our names were called, Alex got down on one knee and proposed right there in the corner where we first met.” The link for the wedding shows the married couple drinking tall Starbucks cups of something or other. There’s no link for the death, or deaths. None would be needed, since we all assume any big-city Starbucks has seen its share of grimness. To quote a Manhattan barista on a message board: “I have personally cleaned up almost every humanly fluid and plenty that didn’t seem human.”
There are two lessons here. First, when money leaves the pocket, that’s a sign people like a place; in some cases, they like it enough to stage life events there. The second lesson is that the supply of people can get out of hand. Nobody planned on dying at Starbucks; it just happened. They showed up and they expired, and there’s more where they came from. The same for people who leave turds, puss, and pools of urine on the bathroom floor, and people who spit and yell when spending time in the main room. The bigger the city, the more people like that will be on hand. Charge nothing and the doors are thrown open.
Starbucks’ open-door policy started in 2018, when the company ran into bad press about a Philadelphia outlet. The manager had called the police on two men who wouldn’t buy anything and wouldn’t leave. The men were black, so scandal erupted. The cellphone clip that showed them being led away also captured agitated white customers saying the guys had done nothing wrong. Howard Schultz, at that time the boss of Starbucks, backpedaled the company out of its jam by saying that from now on no store would ever require a purchase for use of the place, including bathrooms. You’ll see that a piece is missing. True, the men hadn’t done anything to the customers, or to Howard Schultz. But they’d done something to the staff—they’d been a pain in the ass. Now every Starbucks location would have to take noncustomers so the corporation could be anti-racist. Seven years later and the gambit’s dead at last.
Before the Schulz decree in 2018, some stores kept out non-customers and some didn’t. Now, in 2025, every store has to keep them out: “Starbucks spaces are for use by our partners and customers—this includes our cafes, patios and restrooms.” This statement is part of a “Coffeehouse Code of Conduct” that’s gone up in Starbucks outlets. Like a lot of corporate speak, the document’s sweeping but not always definite, so it may or may not be saying that nonbuyers could face the cops. “We will ask anyone not following this code of conduct to leave the store and may ask for help from law enforcement,” the notice states at the end, doing so right after a list of prohibitions that’s already been introduced as “our code of conduct.” The list includes violence, begging, threatening, and general “disruption of our spaces.” But not refusal to buy. On the other hand, who’s counting. Starbucks might have ruled out the cops for non-buyers; it definitely didn’t do that.
The new regime wants Starbucks to be a place where people like to spend time. That used to be the chain’s calling card, but in recent years mobile orders and drivethrough have become more important. “Today, it’s a takeout counter,” says CNN of the typical outlet. (Or, in Cushing’s words, “Starbucks has become, by and large, a well-outfitted to-go counter.” She offers this paraphrase, which isn’t identified as a paraphrase, a paragraph and a half after linking to the article.) Some stores got rid of the nice chairs and put in stools, CNN tells us. As of last summer, 70% of Starbucks stores have drive through, and mobile ordering accounts for “more than 30% of sales.” Staff has been jumping to keep up, and the stores have become less fun to be. Takeout orders tend to pile up, and chair customers have become scarcer. Now the ordering system is getting upgraded, and employees are getting freed up to be friendly. The condiments bar is back, so staff doesn’t have to put in the milk and sugar. And there’ll be fewer mental patients in the toilet.
“We have an opportunity to make the store experience better for our partners and, in turn, for our customers,” says the new regime. The aim is to make each cup “a handcrafted moment, made with care.” Translated, that means, you’ll get some non-standard, specially prepared beverage, and the person handing it over will be friendly enough that you might remember the transaction. Holding your drink, you may look for a seat in the company-provided “gathering place,” this “community center where conversations are sparked,” etc. You’ll see somebody you know or fall into conversation with somebody new, or you’ll sit there and listen to people and drink your coffee (because the drink doesn’t have to be non-standard, as far as I’m concerned). All in all, none of this is going to save Western society. Still, I kind of like it.
