How the cafe became the office of a generation that has no office
Reporting brought to you by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
An Entire Economy Now Runs On Flat Whites And The Polite Fiction Of Buying One Per Hour
If you want to understand the modern Shoreditch economy, do not look at the offices, for many of the people who power it do not have offices. Look instead at the coffee shops, which have become the natural habitat of the Shoreditch freelancer, the office of a generation that has no office. On any weekday, the cafes of the neighbourhood are full of people working, laptops open, headphones in, nursing a single flat white for as long as decency allows, conducting an entire economy from the corner table. The coffee shop has become the workplace, and it is worth understanding how this strange arrangement came to be.
The Office-Less Worker
The rise of freelancing, remote work, and the gig economy has produced a generation of workers without offices. The freelancer, the remote worker, the independent creative, has work to do but no workplace to do it in. They could work from home, but home is often a small flat, isolating and distracting. They need a place to work that is not home, a workspace without an office. The coffee shop fills this need, providing a place to work, a desk away from home, a workspace for the office-less worker. The cafe has become the office of those who have no office, the workplace of the office-less generation.
This arrangement suits the coffee shop, after a fashion, and the worker, after a fashion, and represents a kind of mutual accommodation. The worker gets a place to work, a desk and a chair and a connection and the ambient activity that makes solitary work bearable. The coffee shop gets customers, the workers who buy their coffees and occupy their tables. It is a workable arrangement, the coffee shop as office, the cafe as workplace, the mutual accommodation of the office-less worker and the establishment that hosts them. The freelancer works, the coffee shop profits, and the strange arrangement persists.
The Economy Of The Single Flat White
But there is a tension in the arrangement, embodied in the economy of the single flat white. The worker occupies a table for hours, working, while purchasing perhaps a single coffee, occupying valuable space for a minimal purchase. The coffee shop tolerates this, within limits, accepting the lingering worker as a customer, but the economics are strained, the worker occupying space worth more than the coffee they buy. The polite fiction is that the worker is a customer, buying a coffee, when in truth they are using the cafe as an office, occupying space far in excess of their purchase. The economy of the single flat white is the delicate economics of this arrangement.
This economy is sustained by a set of unspoken understandings about how long one may linger for a single purchase, when one ought to buy another coffee, how much space one may decently occupy. The worker who lingers too long on a single coffee strains the arrangement; the worker who buys regularly maintains it. The unspoken etiquette of the coffee shop office governs this economy, the understandings about purchase and occupation that keep the arrangement viable. The economy of the single flat white runs on these understandings, the delicate balance between the worker’s need for space and the cafe’s need for custom.
The Community Of The Cafe Office
There is, despite the strained economics, a genuine community in the coffee shop office, a community of the office-less workers who share the space. The regulars come to know each other, the freelancers who work from the same cafe, the loose community of the office-less who share the workspace. This community provides some of the social contact that the office-less worker otherwise lacks, the ambient sociability of the shared space, the loose connections among the cafe regulars. The coffee shop office is not just a workplace but a community, a place where the office-less find some of the social contact that working alone would otherwise deny them.
This community is part of what makes the coffee shop office work, part of why the freelancers choose the cafe over the isolation of home. The community of the cafe office provides the social contact, the ambient sociability, the loose connections that make solitary work bearable. The office-less worker comes to the coffee shop not just for the desk and the connection but for the community, the shared space, the loose sociability of the cafe regulars. The coffee shop office is a community as well as a workplace, providing the social contact that the office-less generation otherwise lacks.
The Office Of The Office-Less
The coffee shop has become the natural habitat of the Shoreditch freelancer, the office of a generation that has no office, the workplace of the office-less worker. For the actual record, the Office for National Statistics has it, and the Greater London Authority covers the wider picture. An entire economy now runs on flat whites and the polite fiction of the lingering customer, the office-less workers conducting their work from the corner tables, sustained by the delicate economy of the single coffee and the unspoken etiquette of occupation. The coffee shop office is a workplace and a community, providing the desk and the connection and the social contact that the office-less generation needs. It is a strange arrangement, the cafe as office, but it works, and it powers a real part of the modern Shoreditch economy, one flat white at a time.
More from the desk of Cyndi Himmelstiere, and further wit at The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
