The researcher draws on memory of personal experience in a Midwestern college town and a larger metropolitan area in the Rocky Mountain West in the early to mid-1970's, and observations in the present day in the suburbs of a Florida port city, to analyze the rituals, customs, and practices of a subculture of customers who primarily consume beverages in 24-hour restaurants.
Over years of reading, studying, socializing and drinking countless cups of coffee at all hours of the day and night, I have become acquainted with a number of people who share my affinity for late-night conversation, finger food, and free refills. Taking an anthropological approach to this group and their activities has revealed patterns of behavior and one notable change in those patterns over time.
I became a participant-observer, supplementing my years of experience as a "coffeer" with more recent observations in two restaurants, noting the dress and decorations, customary menu choices, conversations, and behaviors of my subjects. I also conducted interviews with four servers, to whom I refer as John, Mary, Jane and Terri. The interviews covered the servers' impressions of coffeers' behaviors and, importantly, the quality of tips left in payment for service.
The activity of 'coffeeing' takes place in a specific type of establishment. These usually serve a variety of menu items, including appetizers or 'munchies' like deep-fried finger foods and cheese fries, lunch, dinner and breakfast at times other than in the morning (sometimes at all times). They must, obviously, offer a selection of beverages with free refills, (unlike the modern Starbucks and other so-called 'coffee' places) and they are invariably open 24 hours a day. For this project, I have drawn on memories of various coffee shops in Indiana and Colorado, including Denny's and Denver's chain of White Spot restaurants. The present-day observations took place largely at the Steak 'n' Shake on Brandon Boulevard in Brandon, Florida, with one trip to a nearby Steak 'n' Shake on Causeway Boulevard.
I have chosen some terms to define the different types of customer discussed. Regulars are those customers who come frequently enough that the personnel recognize them by sight, if not by name. Normals are those who simply come in, eat, and leave. They may or may not be regulars. I define coffeers simply as customers who primarily consume beverages during their visits, and the servers report that they are almost always regulars. I also set out with some characteristics in mind that distinguish coffeers from normals. Although some details have changed, all but one of my original assumptions held true from the previous era to the present.
Almost always, the persons observed are in their early twenties or younger. To me, this signifies that, as in my earlier experience, the coffee shop fulfills for a younger group the social function of the cocktail lounge. Although coffee and iced tea were once the only refillable beverages, many locations have now added soft drinks to the list. Nonetheless, it is still the free refill that drives the engine. Another aspect of coffeer behavior, confirmed by server John, is that a coffee table always includes one or more tobacco smokers. Although this custom is undergoing a well-deserved dip in popularity, smoking has always been an integral part of the coffee-shop experience on both sides of the counter.
Now as then, many coffeers have distinctive and unconventional fashions, with a wide variety of artificial hair colors, body piercings, tattoos and the ubiquitous black t-shirt having taken the place of our long hair, beads and bell-bottom jeans. Server John agrees that most of the coffeers order food, which he describes as "appetizers," meaning chicken fingers and fries and the like.
Besides smoking, the preferred activities at the table, reading and talking, still depend largely on the number of customers in the party. Server Jane reports of her single customers in the later part of the graveyard shift, "Everybody reads." (It should be noted that a coffeer holding an animated conversation with himself will likely experience poor service.) Jane works mostly on the graveyard shift, and her single coffeers come in between 4:00 and 7:00 in the morning, spending an hour or two before going to work. They are dedicated regulars, to the point where Jane can recount from memory the light breakfast foods they order habitually: one gets either biscuits and gravy or pancakes and sausage; one comes in about twice a week and gets French toast or eggs; one only has coffee and water. Almost all of them are male, with one regular female, and they read newspapers or books. Server Terri at the Causeway store also remembers several before-work regulars from her graveyard shifts. In addition, Jane reports one afternoon regular coffeer who sometimes talks on his cell phone. I need hardly mention that would have been highly unlikely 30 years ago.
These topics and more were covered in my interviews with the servers, which focused mainly on the most important aspect of all, to the server: how the tips compare between coffeers and normals. John offers a pointed and direct two-word characterization of coffeers' usual tips in server language, which translates as "they're not very good." Neither John nor Mary object to the smaller tips because of the work required to serve the table, but because of the time it is being taken up on a busy night, when the table could be generating more income. Mary also mentions one factor that places the coffeer at a table, instead of at the counter, a traditional seat for the coffee drinker: "the counter's non-smoking." This seems a surprising development to me-a non-smoking counter would have been as unlikely in my coffeeing heyday as a pierced navel.
This brings me to the one aspect of modern coffee behavior that was not as I had expected: the length of stay. In my past, it was not unheard of for me and my friends to open and close a full shift, philosophizing, socializing or playing pinball till the crash of dawn. (Pinball was a forerunner of video games involving a metal ball, flashing lights, mechanical flippers, and a great deal of profanity.) Had the line between coffeers and normals blurred, were marathon sessions no longer a necessary part of the coffee experience, or was I having difficulty discerning whether customers were coffeers or normals?
For example, I observed one couple drinking cherry cokes and sharing a sandwich and fries. The male wore corduroy pants and the standard black t-shirt, long-sleeved. His hair was dyed black and he wore numerous bracelets on his wrist. The female wore large rings on the fingers; as far as piercings, only earrings were visible. They had a quiet conversation and left.
I then watched three males having iced tea, Coke and a chocolate shake at another table, and overheard enough to establish them as bona fides: One of them began discussing the variety of 24-hour restaurants, including Steak 'n' Shake, Denny's and Waffle House, convincing me that they were the genuine article. I must assume the subject changed shortly thereafter, as their voices grew much more quiet. (I can't escape the suspicion that they had begun to discuss the opposite sex.) Three female friends of a female server shared an appetizer. One wore-of course-a black t-shirt with the legend "Leonardo," and another sported a delicious combination of old and new: overalls and tattoos! Two or three of them went to the ladies' room together, which is a subject for another paper entirely.
All of these groups left much more quickly than I expected. What was I observing here? Had the true coffeer ceased to exist? My answer came one Sunday night when the Brandon Steak 'n' Shake was closed for maintenance, and I found myself on Causeway Boulevard.
A table of four males apparently under age 20 came in. One was a beefy young man who turns out to have played football in high school, which could not have been long ago. One had very short hair, except for a 'topknot', and the obligatory black t-shirt, which bore the message: "You laugh because I'm different-I laugh because you're all the same". They had soft drinks, sandwiches and at least one plate of cheese fries, and briefly and inadvertently involved me in a battle of straw wrappers (I was unarmed.) They were having a fine time, and surprised me by leaving after having been there only 40 minutes.
Ironically, it was the unexpected change in restaurants that revealed to me the unexpected change in coffeer behavior. Most of the coffeers observed in the present fit my original definition in most respects: they wear distinctive, unconventional clothing, smoke, order refillable beverages and 'munchies'-they simply don't stay for the hours-long marathons of my past.
I need not have feared the disappearance of the coffeer. Maybe the ever-proliferating computer, with its myriad web sites and video games for diversion, is partially replacing earnest philosophical conversation as a preferred leisure activity in this segment of society. Maybe the art of conversation, and hence the attraction of sitting at a table for hours, is dying out to an extent. Maybe the warm nights of Florida induce people to spend more time outdoors.
To this participant-observer, it matters little. They may consume Cokes instead of coffee, they may sport spikes and eyebrow rings instead of long locks and head bands, they may discuss Bono instead of Beatles, and they may dash out early to surf the Net, but the ashtrays still fill up, the straw wrappers still fly, the problems of the world are still solved nightly, and the 24-hour spirit lives on. And I could use a little warm-up here.
|
|
|
|
| Prose Contents | Back Home | Navigation Page |