Coffee break- The lure of the coffee shop

Coffee_manWe visit and write about coffee shops a lot on jkOnTheRun and I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently as to why that is.  Let’s face it, the beverages in coffee shops vary in quality a lot and are fairly expensive so even if you are a coffee addict these shops are not really places that you just have to go regularly.  I have a comfortable home office that is designed to make working much easier than working out and about so why do I go work in coffee shops so much?

After a lot of thought I’ve come to a fairly simple answer.  I go because as adults there is not really anywhere else to go.  Let me elaborate so you can understand what I mean.  We have three teenagers at home, 14, 17 and 18 years of age, and there is a constant stream of people coming in and out of the house all the time, what with friends, boyfriends and girlfriends making the rounds.  Most of the time my home office is not very quiet and there is always something going on that distracts me from working.  OK, maybe I’m actively looking for distractions but the end result is the same, it’s often difficult for me to work at home, especially during the summer when all kids are out of school.  I can work longer and better in those circumstances away from my office.

Once I came to terms with that fact I was confronted with the dilemma of where to go to work.  When I was a kid I could go virtually anywhere, the mall, fast food restaurants, and other types of shops.  Once adulthood is reached that’s not so easy, proprietors look at you with suspicion if you hang out too long and it’s just not cool to loiter in most places.  You can go to places like libraries but those are likely too quiet and let’s face it, Internet connectivity is pretty important to me and others who are trying to work online.  Say what you want about Starbucks they changed the way mobile workers get stuff done when they partnered with T-Mobile to put hotspots in most of their shops.

So it’s really a combination of not having anywhere else to go, needing a relatively comfortable place to work, and the critical need for Internet connectivity that makes coffee shops such a draw for me and others like me.  It’s not the coffee addiction (solely) that brings me back to the coffee shop regularly, it’s because I don’t have anywhere else to go to work.

UPDATE: I missed a fourth reason I patronize coffee shops.  They WANT me there.  As simple as that.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post