We loved this provocation from futurist Bridget McKenzie on her Facebook recently - objecting to Yet Another Cafe Opening, and wondering if they could be different:

Another cafe is opening nearby. Yawn! Every time a shop closes, it opens up as a cafe. And, although the sheer number of places to eat and drink here means that there’s a lot of variety, including loads of games cafes, there are simply far too many places that just sell coffee (and a few cakes if you’re lucky).

What is the point of investing so much money and time into a new place that is hardly distinguishable from the others? Are so many really viable? And what if we end up having nothing to eat out but wheat-based baked goods and flat whites?

Here are some ideas for making a place a bit different, hopefully helpful everywhere that’s being turned into copycat cafe town:

What about specialising in healing herbal & spice tea? You could make a little set of cards or a decision chart so people know what tea blend would suit them.
I’d go to a place that specialised in soup. Three or four kinds, in bowls or mugs, with croutons and all sorts of toppings.
A Laughter Cafe? Have loads of comics and some comedy nights. Maybe a laughter therapy session once a day.
A Mending Cafe. A regular place where there’s a person with skills & a sewing machine etc. They run skills sessions. You can pay to have some things mended or they tell you who to go to if they can’t mend it.
A quiet cafe, with sound-muffling booths and a no music policy, and you can pay extra to sit for longer to work there. Noise-cancelling headphones are available.
A cocktail bar - a no-alcohol place that has the glamour and variety of a normal bar. Hosts sober events.
A place that only uses local produce.
A superfood cafe - salads, smoothies and porridges that are colourful and supplemented with things like functional mushrooms. You get the nutrition you need all day from a visit there.
I’m still missing Fra Kost - the Swedish cafe, and there’s nowhere else to get properly Scandinavian food anymore.

What have you seen work? Any more fresh ideas?

Image is an ad on a new riverside development near me, with new retail units. Angling for a cafe with bearded metropolitan baristas.

Our AG founder and co-initator, Indra Adnan, exchanged further on FB with Bridget:

Indra Adnan It needs a lift out of the whole model. After all, why sit and pay for an expensive coffee or even bowl of soup when you could’ve done that at home while chatting to your family or flatmates (or Zoom pals). Plymouth started an interesting trend of ‘talk shops’ where the point was to come and chat to neighbours. It seems once people are in relating mode, they become more creative about the best conditions to attract more people. There’s a purpose.

Bridget McKenzie: Ah yes, I tried to start a whole movement of this in 2006. I set up a website and a whole set of tips and incentives called Power Parties. A practice of neighbourly sharing, turning off energy at home and making best use of energy in a more shared space, or a friend’s home. It didn’t have to be a party, just a phase of sharing the energy.

Indra Adnan: I admire your goal. I noticed you said ‘tried’ - what happened? Confess I meant more low key than that, friendship oriented, without a pre-set agenda

Bridget McKenzie: Well, it was only 2006, and I think was my first independent website (having just left institutions). I tried to DIY it rather than seek a supportive partner. It wasn’t very top-down at all, or prescriptive. It was more of a broad idea, using the website to showcase ideas and examples of how people can share & save energy by coming together.

More here. And here’s an interesting take on why these cafes are so homogenised from Kyle Chakha - perhaps an effect of the algorithms that weave them together, constantly comparing, on sites like Instagram:

These 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as “authentic”, an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere “authentic” to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.

In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. “AirSpace” was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic.

The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner’s personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing.

On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me – who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram – toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map.

To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn’t just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.

More here.

A laughter cafe, a healing cafe, a soup cafe, a mending cafe... Anything but yet another coffee cafe, pleads Bridget McKenzie