Dutch Class

I like to stop off at the embedded Starbucks franchise in Borders bookshop on Magdalen street to have coffee and a muffin and to browse a few magazines. It is often a nice little break from whatever else is going on in the day.

Some things I see there have always caused me to waggle my eyebrows. For instance a significant fraction of the people who borrow books or magazines from the bookstore to read in Starbucks seem to treat these with no respect whatsoever. Cracking spines on paperback books and peppering books and magazines with food remains will in most cases render these unsaleable. I am not sure what the direct equivalent in Holland would be but having seen a few embedded cafes in Borders and Barnes & Noble stores in New York I am pretty confident that similar behaviour over there would net a conversation with the store manager if the perpetrator didn’t get pulled up short by fellow visitors first. In Oxford this doesn’t seem to happen. One just looks.

A more recent observation is that some people seem to use Starbucks in Borders as an office or in fact a place of business and hogging an inordinate amount of space for a long time. Now I have to admit that I am not entirely innocent myself here as I do occasionally do some work with laptop or exercise book myself there but it never takes longer than an hour and thirty to forty minutes would be more typical. Given the cost of £5 for coffee and a cake I don’t feel too guilty about it.

Some people take it a little further and they set up with a laptop, lever arch files, piles of books and general amounts of contents appropriate for a small office. I have never actually timed any one’s stay but some of these ‘professionals’ do seem to sit there for large fractions of the day as I sometimes see them in the same spot as I pass at various times during the day. Sometimes they spread out over more than one table and as their ‘offices’ grow bigger they seem to take up more space in general perhaps adding an additional chair to rest their feet on or in fact an extra table to make a larger workstation.

Even this breed is now being superseded by a new generation of super-pros. A good example being people that provide remedial education for various levels of school children and students. They set up school and their students take up several adjacent tables. When one set of students is done, the next set moves in. In this way they will use a significant fraction of the cafe for up to half a day, often for the price of a single bottle of water.

Unlike the book and magazine destruction I am not sure whether this use of the cafe is explicitly in violation of any rules. What I am sure of is that it causes many other customers inconvenience as these little schools tend to take up the nicest places to sit for a long time, thus making them unavailable to others.

In conversation with friends I sometimes reflect that I will write to the UK Manager of Borders bookstores suggesting that they allocate some kind of hybrid open office space in their stores and make it available for limited periods of time for a small fee.  Personally I would happily pay it a handful of times during the month and I think it would be fair if the educational entrepreneurs did the same. They will be making hundreds of pounds per session. It would seem reasonable for them to pay for the resources they are using.

I will write that letter.