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I would say it greatly depends on the the wifi, starbucks wifi and your local provider wifi setup greatly differs. Nowadays, scanning the network in starbucks won't show your neighbours, unlike the local coffee shop. Starbucks and the like use some commercial grade stuff to provide wifi.

source : I go in coffee shops and scan the networks.

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Is it just that the fancy equipment won't route packets between clients?

Client Isolation (sometimes AP Isolation for some reason) is a technique found in most network equipment, access points and home routers dealing with wi-fi. When used, clients won't be allowed to communicate, they'll be invisible to anyone but the AP, or router, they are connected to.

But being connected to a wi-fi network isn't a requirement to sniff wireless traffic. It's possible to also monitor traffic, and AFAIK an APs internal ACL won't matter much in that regard.

It can be done with cheap equipment. Multinationals simply have the budget to spend human resources on their network security, whereas that's often not even on the radar of someone who owns an independent coffee shop.

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