Starbucks and the Last Rule of Fight Club

If you know anything about popular culture and movies, you know the first rule of fight club: You do not talk about fight club. But do you know rule #8, the last rule of Fight Club, that makes rule #1 so powerful?

If this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.

There are no spectators at Fight Club. You participate the first time you attend. For fight club, participation is critical. You don't talk about fight club if you experience it. The injuries you get at Fight Club talk for you. If you participate, you become part of the tribe of Fight Club, unable to turn back.?

I didn't think I'd ever think of Starbucks, Fight Club, and the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi together.

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot

Now Starbucks might seem an odd parallel to Fight Club. However, we are losing a critical part of Starbucks' marketing for decades: the paradise of third space is being replaced with parking lot drive-throughs.?

Starbucks is on a push to shut down stores without drive-throughs. I found this out this weekend.?I happened onto the last day of a store I'd been buying my coffee for close to twenty years. The staff told me that this store, which was very popular in the days before COVID,?was closing since it didn't have a drive-through.?

Starbucks own website ?relates this:?

In 1983, Howard traveled to Italy and became captivated with Italian coffee bars and the romance of the coffee experience. He had the vision to bring the Italian coffeehouse tradition back to the United States. A place for conversation and a sense of community. A third place between work and home. He left Starbucks for a short period of time to start his own Il Giornale coffeehouses and returned in August 1987 to purchase Starbucks with the help of local investors.

From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection.

Drive-throughs are replacing third space. In the business survival due to?COVID, this makes a lot of sense. Drivers can buy their drinks without contact with staff or hang around the store for too long. Except the most significant marking advantage Starbucks had was people hanging around the store too long: what they call the third place, and I often refer to as third space: the place you go that is neither home nor work.?

Yet, third space is participatory space. Third space might be a place to meet friends and talk. Third space might be a place away from home's distractions to read or get some work done. Until COVID, third space is where I did all of my creative activities and a lot of my remote work. Most of the stores I used to spend hours getting The Work done before I went to my job are now closed.?Starbucks encouraged other students, creatives, business people, and me with some of the first wifi and plentiful plugs for laptops.?

Third space, like the last rule of Fight Club, is participatory. While there is people-watching going on, it's rare to see anyone just a spectator.?It's also rare that regulars speak to each other. Yet, we are all part of a tribe of Starbucks regulars, doing our own thing every morning.?

You talk about third space without even knowing it. Starbucks was where I saw many job interviews or preliminary business meetings before a big presentation. I saw salespeople making pitches to potential customers or couples going on a non-alcoholic first date. All said the same thing: "why don't we meet at Starbucks?"?Starbucks was remarkable for third space, not for the coffee.?

Starbucks is remarkable because of third space, which was a brilliant form of marketing, understanding the power of the piazza. It ties into the idea of fight club speaking not with words to violate rule #1 but by the results of the last rule.?

Steve Lipton is the CIO of Scientific Device Laboratory. Steve also is an instructor for LinkedIn learning, authoring 22 courses for iOS Development and SAP Business One. You can learn more at MakeAppPie.com for iOS development and bizoneness.com for SAP Business One.