America's "Third Places"

It's odd how something that you notice for the first time suddenly seems to be everywhere. How did I ever miss it? One example is the word "chocolaty". I noticed the package for Girl Scout Tagalongs® cookies (by the way, the best Girl Scout cookie) describes them as "Crispy cookies layered with peanut butter and covered with a chocolaty coating." I wondered why they didn't say "chocolate coating". Looking at the ingredients, I realized the answer is because the cookies don't contain any chocolate. They use various chemicals that taste "chocolaty." Once I was aware of this, I now see "chocolaty" on lots of products that I previously would have called "chocolate."

Likewise, I had never heard the term "third place" until a week ago. (Actually I had, but it had a different meaning. I'll get to that in a postscript). Then I heard "third place" three times in a week.

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"Third Place: A physical location besides work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity."
— Allie Conti, Atlantic Magazine

The first time I heard "third place" was when Reid Robinson described his and Julie's new nonalcoholic bottle shop "Beyond the Bar" as a "third place." It's in old downtown Richardson and sells "alcohol-free spirits, including botanicals, mixers, and alcohol-free beer and wine." I bought a bottle of whiskey AF. Plug: check this place out. That's me in the photo offering a virtual toast to Reid and Julie, congratulating them on their new venture. Cheers.

The second reference came a few days later when Andrew Laska cited an article by Rik Adamski, "The Death and Life of Great American Third Places". Laska asked, "What third places do we have in Richardson?" There weren't very many good answers.

The third place (pun intended, of course) where I saw the term used was in an article on Vox warning that "You may never eat inside a fast food restaurant again."

Something stands to be lost with the shrinking of dining rooms and expansion of drive-thrus, says [Adam Chandler, author of a book about the fast food industry called Drive-Thru Dreams]. The fast food joint often serves as a “third place,” a stand-in for the lack of other public spaces and institutions offering a neutral place to hang out. “When I was reporting [for my book], I would go to small towns in the Plains states,” he says, “and I would see the local Burger King is where a bunch of old timers meet every morning, have coffee and maybe a sandwich, and hang out.”

“To see the [McDonald's] playgrounds going away — to see the stores’ footprints reducing in size, where you see this enormous emphasis on smaller or fewer dining rooms and more drive-thru lanes, speaks to a movement away from those third places,” Chandler says.

Source: Vox.

It's sad that I'm learning the term "third place" just as third places are disappearing from the American landscape. That's the story of my life: always late to the party. That's not true. No Baby Boomer should ever try to make that claim. Every trend in America arrived just as the Baby Boomers came along to exploit it, or be exploited by it. Is this the first trend that's catering to a younger crowd and leaving that "bench of old timers" on the outside?

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P.S. About that reference to the first time I heard the term "third place." It was in the early nineties in Tokyo. I went to dinner with a group of engineers from work. Dinner in Shinjuku was great. Afterwards, it was our custom to go from the restaurant to a bar for a drink...or three. Once, after a stop at such a "second place," I was ready to head back to the hotel, but a co-worker asked where we should go for "third place." Apparently, "third place" was his ritual in Tokyo, and maybe other cities, maybe even Dallas, but I'll always associate the custom with Tokyo in the nineties. Definitely not AF. Good times.