It’s Hard to Say This, But Starbucks Might Replace My College Library Experience

I read the news and am writing this from a coffee shop, and not a Starbucks. The reason I work from this coffee shop? It has free Wi-Fi and no one says anything if I bring my own sandwich.

Starting July 1, Starbucks will offer free Wi-Fi. FINALLY. As a former student/now freelance reporter, I’ve viewed Starbucks as something as a snooty coffee shop, simply because you have to pay for their Wi-Fi.

I get their hesitation to jump on the bandwagon. It’s because of people like me that buy a hot chocolate and use it as my office to transcribe notes, write blogs, and conduct interviews.

In fact, in the NYTimes, where I read the news, Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, a social media marketing agency, reinforced my suspicion:

If you have eight people sitting in a store for four hours on one cup of coffee, that’s not moving revenue,” he said. “However, if that same group is there for four hours on one cup of coffee and buys 14 songs, that’s sales.

I recognize that coffee is a for-profit business, but I figure that enough people buy coffee throughout the day to make up for my lack of consumerism, especially at a company like Starbucks. And, in a city like Washington, D.C. with the public libraries largely understaffed with shortened hours, I have to admit: I miss my college library where I could go for hours amongst my peers and look stressed out. The coffee shop has taken this role in my real world experience. It’s nice to sit amongst 20 or so others, all on our laptops, feeling the communal stress that is lent by life.

Starbucks says that users now average an hour of use and do not expect an increase in usage. That’s probably because you had to buy at least two hours for $3.99. Starbucks will definitely turn into a breeding ground for nomad workers, just like every other coffee shop has.

I don’t see how this might be a bad thing though, the people that might have otherwise gone other places to do work may go to Starbucks and pay for one cup of coffee, but it’ll be one more cup of coffee that they wouldn’t have had before this change.

Lisa Gillespie is a former staff writer for Campus Progress as well as the Managing Editor & New Media Director at Street Sense. She graduated from the University of North Carolina–Asheville.

Related Stories