Coffee

[IdleRich]

In the 90s when I was at uni I went to Southampton to visit a friend. It was the same as Swindon and it was horrible. Centre was a faceless pedestrian precinct just like Swindon's with a couple of shopping centres like the ones in Swindon with Debenhams and M&S and whatever... I found it really creepy. Cos I grew up near Oxford which was different, I didn't realise how homogeneous much of the UK was...

But are other countries different? In Portugal they have the German chains Aldi and Lidl, and if you were blindfolded and placed in an Aldi you would have no idea which one you were in, but you would be able to find the prawns by instinct.

 

[shakahislop]

In the 90s when I was at uni I went to Southampton to visit a friend. It was the same as Swindon and it was horrible. Centre was a faceless pedestrian precinct just like Swindon's with a couple of shopping centres like the ones in Swindon with Debenhams and M&S and whatever... I found it really creepy. Cos I grew up near Oxford which was different, I didn't realise how homogeneous much of the UK was...

But are other countries different? In Portugal they have the German chains Aldi and Lidl, and if you were blindfolded and placed in an Aldi you would have no idea which one you were in, but you would be able to find the prawns by instinct.

I reckon it's something that happens everywhere to different extents but England is particularly into it. America surprisingly isn't much like that from what I can see, although you'd sort of expect that it would be.

 

[IdleRich]

As for coffee chains specifically, I read a book about Starbucks that was surprisingly interesting. They were the first company to put two outlets in the same square or on opposite sides of the same road, the accepted wisdom was that the overall footfall would not change, it would just be split between the two stores - but Starbucks did it anyway and to everyone's surprise they increased the number of customers and I guess other companies were watching and did the same - so every time you walk down a street and think "why the fuck are there so many x?" you've got Starbucksto thank.

More interestingly though, with the branding thing, people - real coffee drinkers! - often opposed Starbucks opening a place in their town fearing it would affect their own beloved local - but again all the evidence suggests that the net result is that the town drinks more coffee and branded plus non-branded alike gain.

I guess this book was written twenty years or so back when a proper coffee shop was a rarity and in fact when Starbucks was good.

 

[WashYourHands]

I reckon it's something that happens everywhere to different extents but England is particularly into it. America surprisingly isn't much like that from what I can see, although you'd sort of expect that it would be.

 

[IdleRich]

I reckon it's something that happens everywhere to different extents but England is particularly into it. America surprisingly isn't much like that from what I can see, although you'd sort of expect that it would be.

I know why you say that... but at the same time does one really expect NY to be like Alabama to be like Alaska?

 

[Mr. Tea]

i think all of that found fertile ground in england for whatever reason. some quirk of the culture, people love things being the same from one place to another. it's the only place i've seen on the planet where the town centers all have basically exactly the same shops in them. i don't have any idea why. people must love it. i love it.

I find it pretty depressing and I think a lot of other people do too, so it's not like something we've arrived at because we've demanded it. We just have governments that don't give a shit, and systems of taxation and other kinds of regulations that lead to a massive economy of scale, so that the bigger a business is, the more profitable it can be, and the more easily it can grow bigger still, often at the expense of small, independent businesses. Look at how many pubs are now run by a handful of massive pubcos or breweries.

I remember reading once that they have laws in Spain that actually limit the percentage of shops in any given town that can belong to chains above a certain size, or something like that anyway, precisely to prevent this sort of extreme homogenization that has afflicted the UK.

 

[Mr. Tea]

In the 90s when I was at uni I went to Southampton to visit a friend. It was the same as Swindon and it was horrible. Centre was a faceless pedestrian precinct just like Swindon's with a couple of shopping centres like the ones in Swindon with Debenhams and M&S and whatever... I found it really creepy. Cos I grew up near Oxford which was different, I didn't realise how homogeneous much of the UK was...

Oxford still has a couple of streets with old-fashioned men's outfitters and whatnot, because enough people with a lot of money who like those sorts of things live there to support those kinds of businesses, but if you walk down Broad Street you'll find a Burger King, a Boots, a Monsoon/Accessorize, a couple of major phone shops, a WH Smith... it's the same precise combination of shops you'll find in Inverness or Truro.

Edit: maybe most of that has happened since you were a teenager growing in a village nearby though, I dunno. Although if that's the case, then I'm sure the transition was largely complete by the time your ex was there doing her PhD.

 

[shakahislop]

tea, rich, I have no idea obviously, it's just a gut feeling or speculation. maybe there's some structural or geographic reason. I reckon it's something in the air though. a taste for familiarity, a dislike for not knowing what's what and what to do. and impersonality. my take on uk culture as a whole is that it's something that's not confident in itself, so many of the old traditions got beaten up by the 80s etc and the mass import of US everything, people are still trying to negotiate the new, and by and large a lot of people want predictability from thier shops

 

[shakahislop]

I know why you say that... but at the same time does one really expect NY to be like Alabama to be like Alaska?

even on the east coast, which is basically about five interconnected cities, there aren't like supermarket chains that everyone knows and can put into hierarchies. there's Starbucks but nothing much like Costa or Cafe Nero, everything is like random individual coffee shops so far as I can see. the actual americans might be able to see better then me about this kind of thing

 

[shakahislop]

I'm drinking a cocktail in a fancy bar, one of the ingredients was smoke, literally a load of smoke, like a bonfire blowing in your face, four different types of wood apparently, moderately unpleasant and a waste of good kindling

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm drinking a cocktail in a fancy bar, one of the ingredients was smoke, literally a load of smoke, like a bonfire blowing in your face, four different types of wood apparently, moderately unpleasant and a waste of good kindling

Sounds like you'd be better off down the local Spoons, m8.

 

[Mr. Tea]

my take on uk culture as a whole is that it's something that's not confident in itself, so many of the old traditions got beaten up by the 80s etc and the mass import of US everything, people are still trying to negotiate the new, and by and large a lot of people want predictability from thier shops

I'll sure there's something to be said for that, but something I've noticed in the last decade or so over here is an explosion in bars/cafes/'diners' that are, I suppose, aimed at punters of roughly my age (older millennials or younger Gen Xers), which are full of daft games like Hungry Hungry Hippos and so on, or, more commonly, vintage arcade machines. So it's all based on a nostalgia for, and fetishization of, this American or quasi-American or US-Japanese globalized culture of the 1980s that you're talking about, that displaced a lot of the older traditional culture here, in the same way you can go to a tailor in Oxford and get a suit and hat that recall the 1880s.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It is, of course, a bromide by this point to observe that "even the nostalgia isn't what it used to be."

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm drinking a cocktail in a fancy bar, one of the ingredients was smoke, literally a load of smoke, like a bonfire blowing in your face, four different types of wood apparently, moderately unpleasant and a waste of good kindling

Tough ingredient to work with, smoke. Done it a few times, set some rosemary ablaze and covered it up with an upside-down glass, to imbue the glass surface with the smoky aroma.

 

[IdleRich]

Oxford still has a couple of streets with old-fashioned men's outfitters and whatnot, because enough people with a lot of money who like those sorts of things live there to support those kinds of businesses, but if you walk down Broad Street you'll find a Burger King, a Boots, a Monsoon/Accessorize, a couple of major phone shops, a WH Smith... it's the same precise combination of shops you'll find in Inverness or Truro.

Edit: maybe most of that has happened since you were a teenager growing in a village nearby though, I dunno. Although if that's the case, then I'm sure the transition was largely complete by the time your ex was there doing her PhD.

No I think it's probably always had the same stuff... but it's just some places have all the same stuff and only the same stuff. Of course Oxford and Swindon feature the same chains to some extent but you would know which city you were in, Swindon and Southampton in that moment seemed virtually interchangeable.

 

[shakahislop]

Tough ingredient to work with, smoke. Done it a few times, set some rosemary ablaze and covered it up with an upside-down glass, to imbue the glass surface with the smoky aroma.

i said to the barman, 'what the actual fuck is this', and he told me they burn four special types of wood to make the smoke. i think you need more types of wood. or maybe coal, brimstone, twigs and the first leaf to fall from an oak tree in autumn

 

[Clinamenic]

i said to the barman, 'what the actual fuck is this', and he told me they burn four special types of wood to make the smoke. i think you need more types of wood. or maybe coal, brimstone, twigs and the first leaf to fall from an oak tree in autumn

Are you still in NYC? We’ve gotta meet up man, next time I’m in town.

 

[shakahislop]

Are you still in NYC? We’ve gotta meet up man, next time I’m in town.

we should get all the americans in the pub together

 

[IdleRich]

When I went to Moscow we went to a coffee shop and the guy said we got a vacuum coffee maker. It was awesome, like this mad steam punk contraption that had all these tubes and stuff, I can't remember precisely how it happens but you light a flame that creates a vacuum in one place so it sucks the water through tubes and through the coffee, then as it cools the vacuum disappears and liquid goes back the other way.

It took aaages and I sat there mesmerized watching it work. After at least twenty five minutes it finally deposited a pretty average cup of coffee. As soon as I was back in England I bought one for myself. Sadly Liza kicked up a fuss about the naked flame and then she (deliberately?) left it out on the balcony so it went rusty and then got smashed. I still miss it even though it was a massive faff to use and made the room stink of paraffin.

 

[Mr. Tea]

i said to the barman, 'what the actual fuck is this', and he told me they burn four special types of wood to make the smoke. i think you need more types of wood. or maybe coal, brimstone, twigs and the first leaf to fall from an oak tree in autumn

You could have recommended tobacco, skunk, crack, and freebase heroin.