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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

This is a tough topic to bring up on HN because no matter how you write it somebody find something to nitpick you about. I certainly am not shitting on anyone that is down on their life I am active in my community, both monetarily and physically helping those in need.

The reason for this renovations is to keep homeless individuals from camping inside the stores. The author goes off on a lot of tangents on topics he has strong/biased opinions (unions, corporate greed, etc) on but this was not highlighted as the primary cause.

Retail business is hard. You _do_ want to be charitable, but you also have to make profits to survive. Unfortunately even a single unsanitary individual present can drive away paying customers.

Not here to offer solutions, but I think it’s important to be point out the root cause.

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> The reason for this renovations is to keep homeless individuals from camping inside the stores

It's also to prevent free riding businesses from setting up shop. It's also to reflect market changes where fewer people were looking to them as third places in the first place.

> Retail business is hard. You _do_ want to be charitable

Mostly, no, retail businesses don't, they want to make money. To the extent appearing charitable helps with that, they may want to appear charitable, but that's instrumental, not an objective in itself.

> to keep homeless individuals from camping inside the store

Why wasn't that a problem for the previous 20 years of Starbucks existence?

Managers of NYC restaurants (including Starbucks) are usually quite familiar with specific local individuals that may not be welcome in their establishment, and have a variety of techniques for managing occupancy.

Because there are far more homeless now due to the fentanyl invention and uptake.

Fentanyl is not a new invention, it’s been around for decades.

Yea, but its use only exploded exactly 2 decades ago, when deaths attributed to it doubled from 4 years prior.

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

I don’t deny that, I’m just clarifying the OP that relates the issue we’re seeing “now” to the invention of fentanyl. It’s more complicated than the presence of the drug, like you said it relates to the changes in usage, irrespective of when the drug was invented.

No idea, I could only speculate. Shifts in: culture, consumer behavior, homeless population volume or their demeanor, tightening retail profit margins, increasing costs of labor and operating costs would all be likely be contributing factors.

I’m not sure of the meta factors have driven it recently, but at least in some large US metro areas, it became enough of a problem that some coffee chains have recently switched from having in-store seating and restrooms to pick-up only without those amenities.

homelessness has been on the rise

From a low it reached in about the middle of the 20 year period, back to a level it was close to the beginning of that period. (In absolute numbers, not in rate.)

Speculation here, but there seems to have been an overall increase in homelessness and less willingness by some communities to police the problem.

Anecdotally, when I moved about 10 years ago, it was uncommon to see homeless downtown. Then there was a transition period where they were allowed downtown in the evening but the police would clear them out in the early morning. Now, you can find them there at all times of the day.

In the United States, homelessness has gone down but the number of street people has gone up

Hard to believe considering that police budgets go up every single year, and business owners aren't exactly shy about calling them in.

Look up “Ferguson effect”. Regardless of police budgets, policing in the USA has taken a step back in the last decade and reduced enforcement.

The result can be seen everywhere - more car crashes and deaths, speeding, homicides, car theft, and also in smaller ways like subway turnstile jumping and loitering.

Who said it wasn’t? The article is about one Starbucks in Toronto. We don’t know how many Starbucks stores closed, moved, changed their hours, or rearranged their furniture, or had managers willing to tell homeless to move on.

Previous HN thread on third places, mentioned similar changes in San Francisco, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316537

Cops used to harass them away.

In some countries and eras of human civilization, urban residents might be entertained by the concept of a company with $30 billion in annual revenue being unable to influence any local influencers of order and civilized behavior, to protect and grow their revenue stream.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SBUX/starbucks/rev...

The social and political environment for the unhoused, as well as the substance abuse environment, has shifted during those 20 years. Many homeless people today are exactly where they want to be. They don't want to come up with rent every month, please a boss every day. They want to do street drugs without a care in the world. Sometimes it's an easier way to avoid confronting mental issues.

20 years ago if you asked an unhoused person to leave a Starbucks, the fear of police, the general shame, etc. soft social pressure might have worked. Today's street residents might see the antagonism as entertainment, their position in the world as entitled, and sleeping in the police lockup as a clever free hotel hack. It's the same sense of entitlement that has them break someone's car window for something they can sell for $10 or walk out of a store with an arm full of merchandise.

In a way, the breach of social contract has become an entertainment aspect, if not a Robinhood-esque anti-society self-justification. The consequences of "being a constructive member of society" are too high for many, and the consequences of street life are ones you can mentally harden yourself against.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Except freedom. In which case freedom is everything.

The way you view homeless people is completely dehumanizing and embarrassingly inaccurate. I would encourage you to get off your high horse and acquire an ounce of perspective.

You imply it wasn't a problem, it was. It always has been. The tools to deal with them have been reduced, because people unrelated to the problem are applying various types of pressure to allow homeless people to exist where they want, as long as those homeless people don't exist where the unrelated complainers are!

Yet Starbucks managed to have chairs, tables and third-place customers for the last 20 years.

The Harvard Business School case study will be interesting: "How a $35 billion dollar company was defeated by random homeless people and their supporters.

> Why wasn't that a problem for the previous 20 years of Starbucks existence?

Hostile architecture in public spaces outside of private businesses has increased, si private businesses are forced to become more hostile to maintain the same degree of success in the “we don’t want you here” wars.

This plausible thesis calls for a collection of dated photo exhibits, suffixed by a fictional exploration of possible endgames.

The article refers to Starbucks in Toronto, where I am. How they handled panhandlers in the past was via a handshake agreement where they could come in and get a cup of water or small coffee free of charge and rest on one of the seats in the corner of the store.

At a busy intersection location where I would go to write daily, I'd see people following those rules and not bothering anyone. The store would be full of regular customers too.

After Covid, everything changed, and not just the decor. Wait times for orders increased massively, to the point where I'm wondering if staff are instructed to service the drive-thru people and Doordashers first. The customer experience now is woeful, and I haven't been back in months.

Businesses aren't charitable. They keep customers to donate money and then donate the money in the businesses name and get a tax write off. I agree it isn't the responsibility of business owners to take care of the homeless, it's the government. We should providing housing to these people. Luckily for us big businesses has advocated for a world that is good for them and bad for us. If free housing was available people wouldn't be so exploitable and would be able to hold out for higher paying jobs.

> They keep customers to donate money and then donate the money in the businesses name and get a tax write off

False if you Google search the claim. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244 “ Stores can’t write off a customer’s point-of-sale donations, because they don’t count as company income, according to tax policy experts. Customers can write off their own donations if they choose.”

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