Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024)

What throws a big wrench into determining causation is that Starbucks tries to avoid opening where there isn't already a sufficient customer base.

Even if you do manage to tease out causation tech and other "sophisticated" industry startups are also just the tip of the entrepreneurship iceberg.

The bulk of the area under the curve of a city's wealth is the long tail of blue collar people who wouldn't voluntarily associate with the kind of people who go to Starbucks starting and making moves to grow businesses that HN snobs don't even notice.

Blue collar people drink starbucks, HN isn't a monolith of elite snobs. Please don't use unfounded or un-provable negative stereotypes to try to make a point.

If you read the article, you see that the effect was pronounced in lower income areas where a natural experiment was effectively run with Magic Johnson's intervention. Which kind of goes directly against what you are saying.

My snobbish take that always gets downvoted was that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC during the 1990s. [1] There seemed to be two or three Starbucks on most blocks, probably because they thought they could fool stock market analysts into thinking it was that way coast to coast (like Duane Reade?) Independent espresso bars, which you could find in any mid-sized city in a flyover state by then, were driven out and you were left with bodegas and Jewish delis that served terrible gas station coffee at best.

Not long after, this Ithaca company

https://gimmecoffee.com/

opened up a shop in Brooklyn and won an award for best coffee in the city, half because they have great coffee, half because they had no competition. It is better now, but the standard for gas station coffee is vastly higher thanks to things like

https://concordiacoffee.com/products-tag/convenience-stores/

[1] An astonishing hotbed of conformity. Sitting out in front of the headquarters of Fox News I was told that my wife and I were the freakiest looking people they'd seen in NYC and we only had matching costumes of t-shirts, jeans, ALICE packs and boonie caps with plastic flowers.