A couple of weeks ago, I read The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty by Albert Y. Hsu. It’s a great book- anyone who lives in the suburbs and cares about religion, Christianity, spirituality, or the Church should read this book.
What I found most compelling in the book was the author’s discussion of community (because I love community and because two of my dreams are about community). Suburbia is marketed as the perfect “community.” A peaceful, quite, safe place to raise your family. A place where you can have a beautiful house, a yard where your dog and kids can play, exceptional schools, shopping malls and strip malls galore within a 10 minute drive, a million options for entertainment, and jobs so that you can buy just about everything you ever needed or wanted.
But I think we all know that the suburbs are not the perfect communities they are promoted as. The suburbs have been given a very bad reputation by many who are concerned (and rightfully so) that life in the suburbs creates self-centered, isolated people who are alienated from their neighbors, their family, and the rest of the world. The suburbs might be portrayed as perfect “communities”, but in reality there really isn’t much true community around the suburbs (there are of course places in the burbs where community can be found, but these places are far too difficult to find). Everyone is so busy, so scheduled, so consumed with consuming. Many of us don’t even know our neighbors living next door. We don’t form relationships beyond our close family and friends and we don’t love and care for our neighbors (our literal and non-literal neighbors).
The author of The Suburban Christian, Hsu, was writing about how community participation has greatly decreased over the past few decades especially in suburbs. Socializing has decreased. People just don’t spend as much time with other people as they used to. People are so busy, busy, busy. A lot of the loss of community can be attributed to the loss of what Ray Oldenburg calls “third places” which he defines in his book The Great Good Place as “public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” Back in the day, people gathered in the town square, at church, or at the ice cream social, but we don’t have town squares, more and more people don’t go to church, and we don’t have many ice cream socials anymore.
Then Hsu started writing about Starbucks. Starbucks started out with one store in Seattle selling only coffee beans and coffee making equipment. The founder, Howard Schultz, took a business trip to Italy and he noticed there were espresso bars all over the place. Each espresso bar was slightly different, but each was filled with people who were drinking coffee and chatting with other people. Schultz observed the espresso bars and saw people meeting up with friends they saw everyday but also meeting people for the first time. He then had an “aha” moment realizing that he had been doing the coffee business all wrong. Hsu, wrote Schultz, “had seen coffee merely as a product, a commodity to be sold, not something with the potential to build relationships and community.” So Schultz changed his stores. He set up tables and chairs and started serving coffee in his shops. The stores became “a place where coffee became an experience, where people could meet and talk and linger, where people built relationships and community.” He created “third places.” People flocked to Starbucks around the country because these coffee shops filled the need for third places, for places where community can be built.
I was starting to get worried as I was reading this because in my mind Starbucks does not create authentic community- the sort of community that I want my coffee shop to create. But then Hsu wrote this: “Yet Starbucks’s success only goes so far. While Starbucks may provide an inviting atmosphere and a context where people can connect, it’s not truly a public meeting place for civic interaction. You might go there with your friends, but you don’t necessarily go to Starbucks to meet strangers and engage neighbors. In the end, Starbucks is still a commercial enterprise, selling lattes and Frappuccinos.” Starbucks customers are people who have a car to drive to there and drive through the drive through, people who can afford a $4 (or $5 or $6) cup of coffee, people who are educated enough to know and understand words needed to order a coffee drink. I haven’t spent a lot of time at Starbucks, but I’ve only met up with good friends, I never met anyone new, I never even saw anyone outside my socioeconomic class, and most of the time I got a drink to go or I sat by myself and didn’t interact with anyone. Perhaps Starbucks brings to the suburbs an opportunity to build community, but Starbucks is not that ideal “third place” where ALL people from a community can gather together and build community and build a better world.
Now that I’m reassured that Starbucks really does not create the sort of community that I want my coffee shop to create, I have to figure out how my coffee shop will have to be different from Starbucks in order to create authentic community?
Here’s some ideas:
The coffee shop will have to be physically accessible to the community (including those people who don’t have cars or can’t afford to use gas to go anywhere that’s not absolutely necessary). Ideally people would be able to walk or bike to my coffee shop. Otherwise maybe I could find a location near one of the few bus routes in the ‘burbs.
The cost of coffee, other drinks, and food cannot prevent people from coming to the coffee shop. Perhaps there will need to be some sort of a sliding flexible price for coffee and food. Those who can afford to pay more for their coffee and food can pay more while those who can only afford to pay a few cents for their coffee and food can do so. A few Panera Bread stores have tried out the “pay-what-you-want” model and it has worked well for business and for the customers. Check out this article.
The food and drinks being served have to appeal to the people that I want to be a part of the community. I will have to get the know who is living in the area around my coffee shop and then cater my menu so people will be comfortable with the food being served. Food has brought people together for thousands of years and I hope this will be a strong part of my coffee shop.
It would be awesome if community spontaneously happened in my coffee shop (picture the grand opening where people of all races and ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses gather and instantly become best friends and then leave the shop, go home picking up litter along the way and serve their neighbors, come back the next day with a hundred more best friends of all different backgrounds, etc.). But as we see with Starbucks, “community” doesn’t spontaneously happen. Building community takes a conscious effort. I’m not exactly sure what this might look like but I will have to figure out ways to get people to actively engage with each other and get to know new people who are different from them. It will be simple things like me encouraging regular customers to say “hi” to a new customer and perhaps more formal things like a night of people sharing their life stories.
The focus and purpose of the shop (especially for me) cannot be selling coffee or other products. Just because the coffee shop aims to be socially and environmentally responsible doesn’t mean that it’s ok to allow consumption or profit to take over. The ultimate focus must be creating community and making life better for the Salvadoran coffee farmers. Of course selling coffee will be a part of this and it will be a business, but it must be more of a ministry than a business- people must come first. I don’t know exactly how to find this balance, but this is vital.
