"Where's the rest of your family?" the barista at the Starbucks on Bay to Bay Boulevard asked a man who had come in for a take-out coffee grande.
Two women in their 80s sat at a table vigorously discussing something or other over coffee.
A man in surgical scrubs sat talking on a cell phone.
"This is my daughter," another man said to the barista, introducing a little girl who hid behind his legs.
Three high school girls walked in giggling and left with Frappuccinos.
Once an urban dream in Tampa, Starbucks, the ultimate deliverer of caffeine, has cropped up all over the city. There are now 20 Starbucks in greater Tampa, and while the logo is the same for all, each has its own identity.
At the Starbucks on S Howard Street, you see the city's fashionistas, sitting outside under the oak tree at the edge of the parking lot, feeling good that they're hip and they're here. At the Starbucks near the University of South Florida, young people are hunched over laptops or textbooks, one duo discussing the merits of the carrot cake. At the Starbucks on S West Shore and Kennedy boulevards, well-dressed people with French accents drift in from the Wyndham Westshore Hotel across the street. At West Park Village, mommies and daddies pick up a latte before walking the kids down the block for ice cream.
Starbucks, in the few short years since it has moved into Tampa, has changed the tenor of the city.
Now there's some place to go.
It's easy to rag on Starbucks for its near-monopoly, its corporateness, its lousy bagels, but, by providing a place to go, to meet people or be alone among people, Starbucks is making Tampa - and other cities - a more interesting place to live.
In some neighborhoods it serves as a "third place," the very "in" concept originated by Ray Oldenburg, sociology professor at the University of West Florida in his 1989 book, The Great Good Place. Oldenburg defines third place as a place to hang out, to escape the hassles of the first and second places: home and work. The third place, Oldenburg contends, is essential to a community's social vitality. It can be a bar or a bookstore or a gym, but for everyday convenience it's likely to be a coffee place; today, that usually means a Starbucks.
True, we had third places before Starbucks. Java and Cream on Davis Islands is a great good place all right. You can get ice cream or coffee, sit inside or out, and everyone knows everyone. It's a neighborhood institution. It beats Starbucks, sure, but there's only one.
After 10 Starbucks-deprived years in Tampa, I now live within a five-minute drive of three. The closest, on Bay to Bay, opened in a new strip center with Louis Pappas Market Cafe and Monstah Lobstah. I thought it wouldn't make it. Who would go there? The location just wasn't a place.
It is now.
On Sunday morning, young people in running shorts sit at the outside tables, reading the paper. It still surprises me to see them there.
In a walking city, Starbucks provides a refuge, a place to sit down for cheap.
In Boston, I stopped at a crowded Beacon Hill Starbucks to get out of the rain and returned there an hour or two later to make a cell phone call and wait for my husband. The second time, the barista charged me only 53 cents for tea. "You were here before," she explained, "so I charged you for a refill."
In other words, corporate doesn't mean Starbucks employees aren't human beings.
In Manhattan, the more than 130 Starbucks provide a real necessity in a big city: bathrooms that can be had for the cost of a bottle of spring water.
In a driving city, like Tampa, Starbucks is less of an urban necessity, but it provides that psychic necessity: a place to go, even if for no more reason than you just don't want to go home.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
