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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

And in rich neighborhoods, Starbucks?

and Panera, but yes.

I don't know if community centers are the right analogy though. Simply put, a business where you can get a drink or pastry and socialize for an extended amount of time is an integral part of many societies, but it was lacking in most parts of the US for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeehouse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_coffee_house

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pub

As much as I love small cafes, I have to say, Starbucks has grown on me, specifically living in a nice neighbourhood. The Starbucks near me is always very clean, has a very nice interior, plenty of outlets for laptops, fast wifi, very clean washrooms, and pleasant baristas. They even have a large communal table which they allow meetups to book. And plenty of people ranging from families to students walk from their detached homes to chill. I know that not all Starbucks are like that (one NYC location had a filthy bathroom, one in San Bruno is always packed with inventory boxes and people) but I think they were able to foster a community and place of comfort for their cafe.

People hate on Starbucks but it has brought halfway decent coffee to the masses. Yes, the locally owned specialty coffee shop will be better, but Starbucks coffee is not actively offensive the way McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, or office drip coffeemaker (or worse, vending machine) coffee are. Back in the 80s, "cappuccino" was a signal of rich-toff status. These days anyone with $5 in their pocket (so perhaps excluding the absolute poorest) can have one. Plus they really put effort into making something resembling the "upscale café" experience available to the masses. Which means that small town cafés, in order to cater to young hipsters with money to burn, have had to up their game.

I think you're overestimating the number of people in the states who have $5 in their pocket on any given day to blow on coffee, having said 'perhaps excluding the absolute poorest'. :(

A few days ago, I was blown away by kids at the Starbucks probably around aged 10 (give or take a few years) teaching one another how to pay their Starbucks balance with their iPhone. In my youth I never had such an expensive piece of hardware in my pocket, nor the cash to spend on $4 drinks.

By design, yes -- when I was younger I worked at a Starbucks for a few years, and in training they talked about how they wanted to make it the 'Third Place' after Home and Work. Makes sense that would be the community center of a neighborhood.

Barnes and Noble cafe's are also very popular hangouts. As were Borders before they all closed.

That's where you go to work on your novel alone with your headphones on.

You would think, but the internet speeds are an issue, which severly limits their ability to make them community spaces. At many starbucks in my neighborhood back home you can barely get a website to load. Those few that offer internet by Google, rather than AT&T, seem to be much better. Ive always wondered why they cant simply limit the time one can use the internet before making another purchase rather than capping the speeds.

Around here, Starbucks switched to Google (which isn't Google fiber, but whoever the cable provider is in the area) for 60-80mbs speeds. This was a HUGE improvement over the old Wayport internet that was delivered over a T1, and then DSL (3mb). I noticed that McDonalds as well as other companies all used Wayport and the slow speeds are unusable unless only a few people are on the wifi.

It's almost unusable even if you're the only one in the place.

I had figured that AT&T would quickly work to improve services, especially ones under their "attwifi" SSID because it really makes them look lousy having such awful speeds.

There's a fairly big one near where I live that allows people to reserve bits of it for small community events during the week, as well as scheduling amateur or semi-professional musicians to do low-key live performances each weekend.

well that was intended; part of corporate strategy basically from the onset. I don't think McDonalds intended to be anything similar

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