Why Do So Many Coffee Shops Look the Same?

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

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I think we're past that, Charlie.

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Somebody call action.

Yeah.

AKA Charlie Sheen.

Only on Netflix, September 10th.

Hi, Kyle.

Hello, how's it going?

It's good.

How are you?

Thank you so much for doing this.

Of course, I love coffee shops.

Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and we met up in December of 2023 at a cafe on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

What's your order?

Usually a cappuccino, like as small a cappuccino as possible.

Kyle Kyle has spent a lot of time in coffee shops.

He's fascinated by them.

A thing that draws me to coffee shops is they're such centers of like displays of taste and culture.

They're almost like multi-sensory art museums for the taste of the moment.

He works in them when he's at home and abroad.

And around 2015, 2016, he started to notice something about all of them.

Whenever I would travel for work as a freelance journalist, I would go to all these different cities around the world.

And wherever I would land, I could always find essentially the same cafe.

It didn't matter if he was in Beijing or Reykjavik, Kyoto or Los Angeles, Bali or Brooklyn.

The places all looked identical.

Like a place with white subway tiles on the walls and plants and ceramic planters and reclaimed wood furniture, wide windows in the front, like storefront windows, maybe a marble countertop, and the Edison bulb, uncovered Edison bulb.

If you go to coffee shops with any regularity, you probably know the kind of place Kyle's talking about.

We were having this conversation in the kind of place Kyle's talking about.

It's minimalist with muted colors, and there's good Wi-Fi for millennials and Zoomers on their laptops.

There's avocado toast on the menu and foamy drinks just ready for their photo op.

You could always order a cappuccino with good latte art.

You could get a cortado if you wanted.

And like you liked it, right?

Yes, I definitely liked it.

Kyle started to think of these places as, quote, generic coffee shops.

Like, oh, look, I'm in another generic coffee shop.

And no one had told these cafes to look the same.

There was no like parent company like a Starbucks to be like, you have to look like this.

And there was like, I guess I would say there was a tipping point at which I realized it was weird that they all looked the same and that they were all conforming to this one standard.

It was so odd, he figured it would go away.

Like, I thought that this was a blip, essentially.

You know, for some reason, this was popular right now, and it would disappear and dissipate, and, you know, things would go back to how they were before.

But that is not what happened.

Then they just kept spreading.

Like, the aesthetic was spreading its tentacles farther and farther.

And also, it wasn't just coffee shops.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

The sameness of coffee shops all over the world was so confounding to Kyle Cheika that it sent him down a rabbit hole.

One so deep that it resulted in him writing a book called Filterworld, How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture.

It's about how the internet is shaping our taste in coffee shops and also way more than that.

In today's episode, Kyle's going to walk us through the recent history of the cafe to help us see how digital behavior is altering a physical space hundreds of years older than the internet itself, and how those changes are happening everywhere.

It's just easier to see them when they're spelled out in latte art.

So, today on Decodering, why do so many coffee shops look the same?

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Coffee houses are old.

The first ones are thought to have appeared in the 15th century during the Ottoman Empire, and they've had and continue to have a robust place in many countries and cultures.

But in America, give or take a smattering of cafes and scenes in urban bohemias and college towns, there has not historically been a vibrant coffee culture.

Tasters' choice freeze-dried coffee.

Looks, smells, and tastes like ground-roast coffee.

And then something changed.

Yeah, I mean, for me, it was certainly Starbucks.

Our well-caffeinated guide, Kyle Cheka, again.

Like, for me in the Connecticut suburbs, the Starbucks opening in our town was like the coming of civilization.

In the early 1980s, Howard Schultz, on his way to becoming the CEO of Starbucks, visited Milan and realized espresso-based coffee drinks might do great in America.

By the 1990s, the Seattle-based company was expanding massively, going from 84 to 2,500 stores across the country, including in Connecticut.

It felt like a form of progress because there was so few coffee shops or like cafe culture examples before Starbucks.

Starbucks made oversized armchairs and Italian-style coffee a bedrock possibility of American life for the first time.

A cafe experience as available in the suburbs as the city, as omnipresent as gas stations, but at the start, much, much cooler.

Another café latte?

You better believe it.

Since why are you so trendy?

The curmudgeons of Seinfeld famously fueled up on black coffee in a diner.

But even they couldn't resist the siren song of the café latte.

I've been drinking café latte since the fifth grade and I haven't looked back.

Seinfeld was far from the only piece of pop culture to observe this strange new phenomenon of people becoming Starbucks customers.

The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee.

In 1998, when You've Got Mail came out, Starbucks was still such a notable phenomenon.

Clever little observations about it could go into your love letters.

So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95

get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of salt.

Tall

decaf cappuccino.

Call it decaf cappuccino.

When Americans fell for tall decaf cappuccinos, it also led to a boom in independent local coffee shops, places that did not share some corporate master plan.

So I thought it would be helpful to like think about the other kinds of coffee shop spaces that existed existed even in the 90s.

Like, you know, there's diners or like a college coffee shop with really gross couches.

And then, you know, there just were independent coffee shops where things sort of looked different in every single one.

Yeah.

I mean, I think it was like local.

It was much more localized in that way.

Like you would have work from local artists on the walls that was often not very good.

And then like there's the friends cafe, when I feel like there's a lot of chairs with like velvet, like high tops with velvet on them.

Upholstery.

Like there were like people making design choices that were not all identical.

I don't want to overstate the glory of the 1990s or 2000s coffee shop.

The couches could be rank.

The lighting could be dim.

The coffee could be burnt.

And the food could come with a lot of sprouts.

But if you went to one in another state, let alone in another country, it would have been weird for it to be exactly like your local spot.

And I know that because I thought it was weird.

I don't travel nearly as much as Kyle, but I visited Nashville and I remember going into a coffee shop, hip minimalist, serious about the beans and the cappuccinos, and thinking, I've been in a cafe exactly like this.

And then cafes exactly like this started to be most of the cafes around.

I never did anything with this observation, but Kyle, he had to figure out what was going on.

Why and how did these funky, unique, not entirely reliable, occasionally unkempt coffee shops converge?

The generic coffee shop, I think, is a bit like my Moby Dick or something.

It's like

the idea I've been chasing in a lot of writing.

He realized pretty quickly that the answer to what had happened to coffee shops couldn't just be found inside of coffee shops.

Instead, it was all caught up with a phenomenon that seems really different.

Over the course of the 90s, you saw the invention and development of the proto-mainstream internet.

I mean, what is internet anyway?

Internet is that massive computer network, the one that's becoming really big now.

At first glance, the only thing the internet and cafes seem to share is that in America, they started booming at the same time.

But that's not a coincidence.

Before the internet, there was only so much work you could do outside an office.

After the internet, there was quite a bit you could do outside the office, so long as you had a space to do it.

Cyber cafes and coffee spots ballooned by providing that space, giving people a well-caffeinated location to plink away on their laptops.

And there was a tremendous amount of optimism about what you could do with all that plinking.

The internet seemed like the fastest, easiest way to discover all the things you might like that had ever existed.

If you could sort through it all.

Even back then, like even in the mid-90s, there was the sense that there's too much information online.

Like at a time when there were only like, say, hundreds of thousands of websites, people were already like, oh, shit.

Oh, no.

This is going to be too much.

We're going to have too much content.

So researchers, coders, hobbyists, and companies started developing tools to help early internet users deal with this flood of information, deploying little bits of computer code, which we now know by another name.

Algorithms.

An algorithm is just an equation.

It's a way to sort out one thing from another.

So in this moment in the mid-90s, they were starting to turn to algorithms and these kind of automated systems to sort the content of the internet and deliver what was most relevant to you.

These algorithms did some really straightforward things, like sorting emails based on who sent them to surface the ones likely to be most important to you, or helping you to find websites that reflected what you were actually searching for, which was Google's great innovation.

Algorithms could filter out what you didn't need to show you what you wanted to see.

And as helpful as algorithms could be, you were still deciding what that was.

Like in the mid-2000s, when I was spending a lot of time writing and procrastinating in a coffee shop that turned into a bar at night, being on the internet meant reading blogs whose URLs I had typed into my browser and listening to songs that I had personally loaded into my iTunes.

But a few years later, that would begin to change.

Circa early 2010s, when, you know, Twitter is in an early phase, Instagram is just getting popular.

I don't think we knew that they were going to take over our lives in such a way.

Social media platforms initially seemed like fun, convenient clearinghouses for content and connection.

A more streamlined way to be online.

A simpler way to waste time at a cafe.

And of all the things social media platforms were predicted to do in these early days, changing the decor of the place you were procrastinating in was probably low on the list.

But when we come back, we're going to explore how that's exactly what happened.

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So, when did you see the generic coffee shop aesthetic like really take off?

So, I think in the early, early 2010s, more and more culture was moving online.

Like, our consumption of culture was increasingly flowing through Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr and YouTube.

But then, I really point the kind of acceleration of this culture to 2015, 2016, which is when all of the feeds of YouTube, of of Instagram, of Facebook kind of make the switch to becoming more algorithmic.

So rather than just having a chronological list of like every Facebook update that happened over the past day, the feeds would start recommending content to you based on what you had already engaged with.

Kyle thinks this is an extremely important transition because it changed the whole way we're oriented towards the internet.

Instead of going out and selecting what we want to see, now the platform decides for us.

The message of algorithmic feeds, of social networks, was like, we will give you what you like.

We will approximate your desires and tastes and preferences and like customize and personalize something for you.

Like the TikTok feed is literally called for you.

And of course, they're not doing this to be nice.

They're doing it so we'll stay on the platform for as long as possible.

Over the years, a lot of attention has been paid to the way engagement is driven by outrage, by things that provoke us, that we really mind.

But Kyle thinks that shortchanges something even more common, how engagement is driven by mindlessness.

I mean, I think there's like different forms of mindlessness almost.

Like one form of mindlessness is the ambient lo-fi chill hip-hop beats, which is like...

You're pointedly not supposed to pay attention to them.

You're doing some other task.

You're using them as backgrounds.

So it's like an unobtrusive, you know, wash of sounds that you can live on top of, essentially.

And then there's a different quality where it's like the mindlessness of paying attention.

Like you're so immersed in paying attention to an Instagram reel or a TikTok video that you have no other thoughts in your mind.

Mindlessness is the bread and butter of social media platforms.

There's the fugue state when you're trapped in the infinite scroll on the one hand and the ignorable perpetual Spotify backing track on the other.

And though there are punctuating exceptions, in general, the platforms don't want to serve you anything that will snap you out of either of these states.

Because the ultimate goal of all these platforms is just to keep you looking at the stuff or listening to the stuff, it's guiding you toward the most bland thing or the least offensive thing or the most unobtrusive thing.

In writing his book, Kyle talked to a musician named Damon Krakowski, who has first-hand experience with the platform's preference for the innocuous.

Damon was the drummer in the indie dream pop band Galaxy 500.

They put out some influential albums in the late 1980s and very, early 90s.

They were minimal, drenched in reverb, and sounded like nobody else at the time.

But you wouldn't know that based on the songs Spotify recommends.

Damon found that Spotify would only promote the most generic tracks by that band.

So Spotify algorithm somehow fixated on this track Strange.

Strange hadn't been a hit single.

There had been no music video for it.

It didn't sound that much like Galaxy 500.

And that's exactly why the algorithm pushed it.

It was because it sounded like a generic, like, 80s, 90s rock band track.

And that was an ironic conscious choice that the band had made made at the time to kind of be like, isn't it funny we're playing a generic song?

But then Spotify runs with it and it's like, oh, wow, this is so effective as generic music that everyone should listen to it.

Right.

And the thing is, also, that like when you do listen to that generic thing, then the algorithm just thinks you want more generic things and it just keeps ping-ponging back and forth until we're just in this sort of like beige blondewood, lo-fi beats, generic world.

Yeah, it's just like, of course it becomes narrower and more homogenized.

Like all we're being exposed to is what the algorithmic system is showing us.

You can probably see the effects of all of this for yourself.

It's hard to get Spotify to play something that sounds different than what you've listened to before.

Netflix only suggests shows and movies in genres you've already watched.

Your TikTok for you page has you pegged.

And Instagram is awash in ads for stuff you've already bought.

But the algorithmic feeds aren't just serving blandness online, they're altering our physical world too.

And when we return, we head back to the perfect place to see it happen.

Can I just have a cappuccino

with regular milk?

Small.

So, like, all podcasts should be recorded in coffee shops.

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So Kyle had a theory about the generic coffee shop.

Over time, I came to the conclusion that what was behind the aesthetic and what was behind the homogeneity was digital platforms.

But I still wasn't sure that I was totally right.

I wanted to kind of report out my hunches.

So he spoke with cafe owners all over the world about their shops and what they looked like and what their customers wanted and how they advertised and on and on.

And what he found is that going into the 2000s, as the internet was starting to spread, you still had distinctive local coffee shop styles all around the world.

If you went to Scandinavia, you'd find a minimalist blondewood mid-century cozy aesthetic.

Australia created its own cafe culture featuring flat whites and avocado toast.

And there was the steampunk-inflected Edison bulbs and raw wood decor of Brooklyn.

And the internet made it easy for the people in these scenes to discover one another.

So I think first it created a web.

Instagram early on was this way that all these different coffee shop owners connected to each other.

So they could suddenly find each other and see how, you know, the barista in Berlin was making his latte art versus the guy in Sydney.

It was a classic cultural exchange happening over great distances at hyperspeed.

Cafe owners were globalizing, borrowing from their faraway colleagues.

But once the algorithmic feed switched on, baristas discovered that customer demands were changing too.

As this community of coffee shop creators came together, consumers also started expecting similar things from each one.

Like, there's a kind of singular cappuccino format that the consumer who's like very Instagram savvy comes to expect.

Did they like feel like people were coming in and being like, Do you have a flat white?

Yes, absolutely.

These things very quickly became an expectation of every coffee shop.

Like you kind of went from never knowing avocado toast existed to it being the most universal millennial-coated food item that has ever existed in the space of like three years.

So, cafes were feeling pressure to to have the same menu, but they were also feeling pressure to look a certain way in real life, but even more importantly, online.

As I talk to the cafe owners, there's like certain ways in which they have to conform.

So the first digital space that they have to conform to is Google.

Like they have to be findable on Google search.

They have to make sure the photos on their Google Maps listing are good and like look nice.

And then a lot of them talked about this pressure to be on Instagram and post the top-down snapshots of cappuccinas and latte art in a nice natural light.

If they didn't do it, what happened?

One, they were gonna get far fewer new visitors, like particularly for tourists traveling through some of these cities.

They weren't gonna like catch their attention as successfully if they didn't have the good photos and the high star rating.

The threat of it too, I think, is like failing to stay in people's minds almost.

And it meant that they just had to like talk the Instagram talk.

You might be listening to this and thinking, okay, fine.

Your business has to be on Google Maps.

Maybe for whatever reason, you've even decided it has to be on Instagram.

But what makes it so it has to be on Google or Instagram or Yelp with the exact same aesthetic as everyone else?

Why couldn't you do something different?

Why do you have to do minimalism and fiber art and cold brew?

Why can't you just do your own thing?

And you could, but there are risks.

One is that a platform like Instagram might not surface your posts.

The economic incentives of algorithmic feeds is like you will only get attention and therefore money if you conform to the most successful trips of this platform.

But the other, maybe even bigger risk is that you might turn off your potential customers, that the people on the other side of the algorithm looking for a coffee shop or a restaurant or an Airbnb or a piece of furniture or a wall hanging, they'll be so used to a particular aesthetic, to certain signifiers of quality and style that they might ignore you if you don't display them.

And that includes a customer like Kyle.

Yeah, I feel like I'm guilty of using this to judge places as well.

I still prefer that generic aesthetic.

I'm like, oh man, this place doesn't have subway tiles.

This must must suck.

And this is the really confounding thing about the rise of the generic space, the reason Kyle's been chasing it down like Moby Dick.

It's a window into the homogenizing effect algorithmic feeds are having on culture, experiences, and locations, yes.

But it's also a window into the homogenizing effect they're having on us.

So I told you about how Kyle's obsession with the generic coffee shop started when he was traveling all over the world as a young journalist on assignment.

And he had a ritual whenever he would arrive in a new place.

I would open Yelp or Google Maps, and I would search in the little search bar hipster coffee shop that knew exactly what I was talking about.

And it could just deliver the results of these generic minimalist coffee shops that I was looking for.

He liked the places the algorithm found for him.

They made coffee, he liked.

They had good Wi-Fi.

He could do work there.

He felt comfortable in them.

But over time, his feelings about them got more complicated.

I was both looking for these cafes and I liked them and enjoyed being in them and I was grossed out.

I was both grossed out at the generic quality of the design and I became increasingly grossed out at myself for gravitating toward these spaces and maybe enjoying them as much as I did.

I mean, the thing that's also so interesting is that obviously those spaces are so

uncomfortable

to so many people who aren't like

affluent millennials with their Apple laptops.

For sure.

I think people often describe them as oppressive because they feel like they can't fit within it.

Like there's no tolerance for humanity or diversity or difference.

I'm impugning myself when I say this too.

I think like holistically, actually like it's not different than McDonald's.

Everyone's like, oh, America, we're exporting McDonald's to Paris and Rome and China and all these places that have their own culture.

And it's like, it's not different.

It's just, it's just that coffee shops, because they have a different class signifier, they resonate in a different way, but it's just like, it's just about going somewhere else.

and just wanting the same thing.

And somehow that's been dressed up as being sophisticated.

I mean, I had this literal experience in Paris where, you know, there's tons of beautiful Parisian cafes that are historic.

And yet you go and get a cappuccino and you're like, oh, the espresso is dark roast and burnt tasting and the foam is too foamy.

Like, clearly, this French cappuccino is not what I wanted.

And then, you know, three blocks down the way, there is like a Parisian cafe that was opened by a bunch of Australians.

And like, it has the perfect microphones cappuccino and the ceramic vessels and the avocado toast.

I'm like, which which one did i choose most often obviously the australian one because it's like authentic to my taste this is key it's authentic to kyle's taste or rather the version of his taste that he and all the rest of us have allowed the algorithms to help mold ultimately my underlying theory is that in the same way that cafes became generic or we've seen the homogenization of cultural forums, like ourselves are becoming more generic as well.

Like we are being flattened, we are being made to be more similar and less individual and less interesting in a way because of this like hyperglobalization.

The generic coffee shop isn't just influenced by the internet.

It's become a microcosm of it.

But it's one you can actually see and touch and smell.

And so it makes the homogenization happening there in all its stultification as plain as the macchiato in front of your face and i mean i think the great problem with this situation is that unusualness and difference and like surprise and like discomfort are core to what makes culture valuable and us interesting yes

we are not interesting people when we are just like going to the australian derived coffee shop we had this fantasy that being exposed to everything online would make us more urbane and intelligent, open-minded and even open-hearted.

That having the world at our fingertips is something we would use to its fullest advantage.

A fantasy that we would want to hook up to the mainframe like Neo and the Matrix and let knowledge just gush into us.

This was ignoring all the scongy, dark, vile stuff that would have gushed in too, but it was also ignoring the truth that we can be satisfied with so much less.

I guess I'm curious, like, do you feel totally alienated from the coffee shop experience?

I mean, coffee shops are a large part of my life, I would say.

I'm really committed to my coffee shop going.

So, like, I still enjoy those spaces and I still, like,

that defines my aesthetic of what a good coffee shop is sometimes.

And, like, I still look for the Subway tiles.

I still want the latte art.

Like, I love a good ceramic bowl for my cappuccino.

It almost feels like I've like seen outside of the Matrix, but I'm still happy in it.

You're the guy who's like, I just want a steak.

I don't care that it's not real.

It's really hard to buck your taste.

However, it got made.

That's the latte art.

You did it underneath the cap.

It's a heart.

So pretty.

Like a beautiful surprise.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by me and produced by me and Katie Shepard.

Decodering is produced by me, Katie Shepard, and Avan Chung.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

I'd also like to thank Ben Frisch and Patrick Fort.

And I'd also like to direct you to go buy Kyle Cheka's book, Filter World, How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture.

What we talked about here is just a small part of the book, book, which dives into these ideas in so much more depth and breadth.

Go get it and then spiral about your taste for weeks, but like in a productive and good way.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

If you're a fan of the show, I'd also love for you to sign up for Slate Plus.

Slate Plus members get to listen to Decodering without any ads, and your support is crucial to our work.

So go to slate.com slash decoder plus to join slate plus today.

That's all for now.

See you in two weeks.

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