Coffeshop? Coffee Shop? Cafe?

Britons are perceived to be a nation of tea drinkers and I am happy to be included within the generalisation. What is more refreshing, in any season, at any time of day or night, than a cup of tea? What is the one thing that is always missing on holidays beyond British waters? The typically idyllic (but generally fallacious) view of an English town always includes one or more tea shops serving leaf tea in bone china cups accompanied by crustless cucumber sandwiches and a three-tiered array of sweet delicacies.

However, over the past decade, the proliferation of coffee shops – note the two words, not to be confused with the Dutch single-word, and slight misnomer, ‘coffeeshops’ – has marked a change in the British hot beverage appetite. Looking at the companies’ histories, Costa began spreading its tendrils throughout the UK in 1995 when it was acquired by Whitbread, and Starbucks started appearing on every other street corner in 1998. Despite Costa having been retailing in the UK for longer, it seems to have been the American style Starbucks that led the nation’s change of heart.

I remember several years ago being in a Starbucks in the US and gawping at the incongruity of people sitting with laptop computers, or books, or a pad of paper and pen, working. Yet, I am now sitting in a Costa writing this in long hand (a strange experience in itself), watching people come and go with their cappuccinos, lattes, and sickly flavoured coffees; despite making my coffee last for nearly two hours, I have yet to see any of the British public with a pot of tea.

Being a weekend, most people seem to be coming in to relax, meet friends or to read the newspaper, but during the week, I have seen business meetings take place and exchanged the silent acknowledgement of solidarity with other people working and monopolising a seat for more than the twenty minutes it takes to drink a massimo coffee. While I have been scribbling, a teacher has just taken her seat: she has, like me, bought a combination of school work and personal reading and the obligatory bucket of coffee.

Apart from the increase in coffee as the drink of choice, the blurring of the boundaries between the spaces of work and home and the public and private is interesting. (Eavesdropping, I learn that she is also a secondary English teacher.) While people have always brought work home, the concept of bringing it home to take it out to complete in public feels indicative of the exhibitionist lives that many of use now lead online when we tweet our every move or regularly update our statuses. Through the internet’s democratisation of society (more blurred boundaries) we seem, as a nation, to be slowly losing our stiff-upper-lipped, tea-drinking identity. But are we becoming more European with our café (a word deriving, of course, from the French for ‘coffee’) culture? No. We are becoming more American with our adoption of the coffee shop as a space for working and thereby losing more of both our personal, and previously private, space and identity.

Personal pricing

This week, Facebook was valued at approximately £32,000,000,000. Initially, this may seem a phenomenal sum of money for a website that people merely use to keep in touch with friends, make witty remarks on status updates and peer voyeuristically into others’ lives.

When we remember we pay nothing to use Facebook, the question of what makes the company worth anything surfaces. Is it the hardware infrastructure running the site? Is it the programmers who make it all work? While these might form the tiniest part of the valuation, the £32 billion is what the information about its users is worth.

Think about it. In signing up for Facebook you entered, inter alia, your age, gender, location, schools and universities attended, courses taken, employers, personal beliefs and the interests you have. You then made virtual friends with people who you have encountered because they – usually – have something in common with you. Therefore, when one of your friends finds something new they enjoy or they are interested in, Facebook can recommend it to you as there is a good chance of you being interested in it too. In short, having shared your life with it, Facebook knows what will interest you before you do. Think about that from the marketing point of view.

Before you dismiss this as unrealistic, consider the last purchase you made on Amazon. Did you notice the list of recommended books or DVDs ‘that you may like’ which had been bought by other people who also bought the item you have just paid for? All you told Amazon was that you liked a certain book or DVD by purchasing it. The information you have chosen to give to Facebook covers far more of your life.

We would all like to believe that you cannot put a price on human life but this is what Facebook’s valuation has done. According to its own statistics, Facebook has more than 500,000,000 active users. This means that each of its users’ lives is worth around £64. For less than the price of a tank of petrol, you have been sold to the marketing executives of any forward thinking company which looks to Facebook for access to their target market. Unlike a traditional survey which might identify consumers at a single point in time, your profile on Facebook changes as your interests change and with this the forward thinking company either knows it is no longer worth chasing you or that they need to double their efforts in appealing to you.

Does this mean that I am going to delete my Facebook profile and stop posting online? No. I, like so many others, find the free service that Facebook provides both useful and fun. I am willing to tolerate the advertisements dotted throughout the site, but I would like think that I understand some of the implications – both for now and the future – of the privacy agreement saying what our data can be used for which we are obliged to accept when joining.