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05.12.2005

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Building Community: retrieving The Lost Art Of Hanging Out

I don't know about your neighborhood, but in mine if you want to go out for a drink, you have two choices: One is a kind of a sleazy place where scratch ticket machines and browning posters of the St. Pauli girl festoon its gloomy walls. You always see the same people there, sullen types with too much time on their hands, and not particularly witty in their conversational repartee. The second is a place where the decor is more cheerful, but every time you go in, there's somebody different, and nobody you know. If you're going to socialize you do it with people you've arranged to meet there.

How come there's no place like Cheers, where everybody knows your name?

There are places I go where people know my name - work and home. But in my neighborhood? - yes and no. Depends on which neighbors are out doing yard work at the time. Geography is not what determines who one hangs out with these days, but maybe that's not the way it has to be. Ray Oldenburg's book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community is both a lament for the passing of neighborhood hangouts and a manifesto written in the hopes of their retrieval. I think like most people I have temporary communities that are shaped by other things besides place--connected to book groups or to my son's school or sports, but they pretty much evaporate as soon as that context is no longer there. I've maintained connections with individuals, but that's not the point. There's no place I can go and expect to see people I know - or want to know. As Oldenburg puts it:

In simplest terms, we got where we wanted to go but now we aren't happy about where we are. We have become a suburban nation - the only one in the world... We aimed for comfort and well-stocked homes and freedom from uncomfortable interaction and the obligations of citizenship. We succeeded.

And I would add that the cities have become suburbanized as well, except where the old ethnic communities still linger.

The point, according to Oldenburg, is to have a "third place," a place that is neither home nor work where you can gather not just with the likeminded, but with a broader cross-section of people with whom you enter into conversation. A place where you learn give and take in a public forum, a place where one can display one's wit or opinion and have it challenged and discussed by competing wits and opinions. But the main thing is to have a place where you can go regularly and people know your name.

The people at Starbucks appear to have read their Oldenburg, according to Seattle architecture critic Lawrence Cheek: "Starbucks' globe-storming success is about place - creating coffee bars that feel grounded in their neighborhoods, that lure people to hang out for a wide spectrum of reasons, and that somehow make us think 'Starbucks' for refreshment or conversation instead of Tully's or Ben & Jerry's." Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

You could say it's Starbucks way of thinking globally, but acting locally - remembering that no matter how ambitious their global market strategy, all retail is local, and it needs to fit into the lifestyles of the customers it serves. And one of the lifestyle needs customers have now is for a "third place." One spot that wasn't on Oldenburg's list of places people hang out is the grocery store. Maybe it should be. I don't think it's enough just to have a place to sit and have coffee; it seems like everyone has caught on to that idea - even my local gas station has an espresso stand in its parking lot. The bigger challenge is to work with the potential that is there in grocery stores. And so the question arises: What do grocery stores have that other retail businesses don't?

Certainly one huge asset is regularity. Today, people food shop several times a week, usually determined by an occasion. If a part of that occasion would be that I'd be seeing other people I'd look forward to socializing with, I might change the nature of my shopping patterns into something that is more ritualized. And I would feel a connection and loyalty to that store because it's the one place I could go where I would experience that unique community - where shopping becomes something more than just buying products.

Central to the notion of store experience is human interaction, which includes other shoppers aswell as store personnel. The shopping experience is inherently social, and the interaction,whether positive or negative, directly and indirectly affects purchase decisions. Beyond interaction,community operates on many levels. There is the immediate community context createdby the store environment. There is the diffuse abstract community of consumers formedby virtue of shared interests and values. There is the virtual community that the store representsthrough symbols, gestures, design, etc. And, of course, there is the local community inwhich the store operates. All of these interlocking levels of community raise emotion by providinga sense of belonging - that one is at home with friends and family.

But while it's true that the place, whether it's designed to be a "third place" or any other kind of place, doesn't by itself create community - people create communities - people want community even if they don't know how to create it for themselves. So in the same way that it's true that sometimes a party needs a catalyst - a theme and a sparkplug personality to create good chemistry - so do stores if they want necessary to make people want to come back. Bars and restaurants have happy hours, why shouldn't grocery stores have something similar? Having weekly food-related events catalyzed by regular personalities that attract regular customers who come for the party can make a store a destination that fits into customers' lifestyle patterns. Maybe the theme is educational, but the goal is not just to impart information, but to create a festive mood and place where people can come where people know their name.

Loyalty cards cancel one another out. People feel a sense of loyalty not out of utility but because of human connection. The store that provides that acquires the loyalty of the customers in a way that a card can never do. A community is a unique social configuration that can't be duplicated.

Does your store have the potential to become that for your customers?

The Lost Art of Hanging Out

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