Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year.
It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task.
My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators.
./rant
Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting, tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.
I don't think it's just Scandinavian minimalism. You want hard floors when you know there will be snow and rain for a large part of the year. It would be impossible to keep things clean otherwise. Just look to Svalbard where you take of your shoes even when going to a bar.
I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.)
What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains have added quiet carriages.
I don't know which libraries you are meaning, but it sounds like their study rooms are broken, rather than the whole concept is broken.
This idea that the primary functional purpose of an important space should be some kind of afterthought is rather depressing, but I guess is follows from the entertainment-centric culture we live in. The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.
My mom is a children's librarian and in my experience the point of a library is to help kids and to get them to like reading, neither of which is silent. Reading to kids, teaching them, and helping them pick books are all primary parts of a library and none of them are silent. You can have specific sections set aside to be quiet as libraries should adapt to the communities they serve but saying that the purpose of a library is to read is taking an incredibly narrow view of libraries.
The purpose of libraries has been completely ousted by the internet. It is no longer a place that makes vast knowledge attainable to the average person, that's the internet now.
You can either have no libraries at all or libraries that cater to a different purpose, one that they can offer better then your phone.
The idea behind libraries is that a minimum of knowledge should be accessible to everyone.
For what it's worth, there's still a lot of information you can acquire legally and for free from a library that you can't get both legally and for free from the internet.
Except sometimes you want or require a physical book... not all books on the internet are available freely, legally. Also, libraries offer free access to the internet, computers, printers, etc, which (believe it or not) not everyone can afford.
If it were true that the purpose of public libraries had been superseded by the internet then no one would be using public libraries, and they would all have closed by now due to lack of funding or public interest. That public libraries continue to exist, and that people continue to use them, suggests otherwise.
Libraries of the old world are a dying thing. People simply don't want to go there anymore.
Transforming libraries to something children associate with fun, where young people can study together in groups and where culture events happen - is what should be done. Make libraries a bastion of culture and community. And that is not incompatible with a place where you can sit in peace, it's just not everywhere.
>The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.
Libraries are just repositories for literary or artistic works. They have a secondary function of acting as a "third space" or community center. Being able to find places to read is part of that, but there is no reason you should expect them to be tranquil zen gardens at all times. Most people should be able to tune out the general background noise of kids playing or whatever. It's really just loud conversations that cause problems.
Hell, most public libraries in my town are basically just de facto homeless shelters.
If children grow up associating libraries with a place that is not fun, support for libraries will die after that generation.
The Berlin city libraries absolutely have spaces for children to play (loudly) and also make point of events with readings for children, and so on. A generation will grow up associating libraries as part of their life.
Well gee, libraries weren't "fun" when I was a kid, and they were my favorite place to go because I learned the value of reading at an early age. It seems like we ought to be selling children on reading, not on fun. Doing fun activities at what used to be a library is not going to magically make children interested in reading and acquiring knowledge.
I feel like this is a very negative way to view the situation. Libraries should totally be "fun". It should be "fun" to go and find a book that you enjoy or just spend time reading in an area dedicated to the love of books. It shouldn't be a place to just drop the kids off and leave, but it should be a place kids want to go. Reading can be fun and I almost feel like it is a "trendy thing" of my generation (Millennial) to hate it.
I should have made it more clear that it was in my own personal experience. Many of the kids from my highschool or even as late as the people I am still in contact with from college. Many are astonished I own a bookshelf full of books and actually read from it. I am pretty sure there is no real relation here, but I would like to compare it to how the same set of people feel about math. They have an assumption that it is boring and not fun so they actively avoid it.
I don't know if it's necessarily "hate" per-se, but go read one or more forums on something like Reddit.
Depending on the forum, and the size of the comments, you'll sometimes see something like:
TL;DR
"too long; didn't read"
In some cases, you'll see a post where there will be a "TL;DR" section summarizing the "long form" version just below it.
The funny thing is, the "long form" might only be a paragraph or two, but apparently for a certain segment of the population who read forums, even that much information is "TL;DR" worthy.
These people don't want to read anything that won't fit inside a tweet. I'd dare say that for some, even 280 characters is just too much text to digest.
It leaves no room for thoughtful discourse. It leaves no room for intelligent debate and conversation.
I see such brush-offs of conversation online, and couple it with what I have heard of some people who eschew being alone; who need noise (particularly people around them talking with each other) so that they don't have to listen to their own thoughts - and it makes me shudder to think to what end our society will arrive at.
> Libraries are supposed to be whatever the fuck we want them to be.
No, libraries serve a specific purpose. You can want them to be banks, or restaurants, or laundromats or whatever, but that doesn't make them anything but libraries. And besides, everyone else wants libraries to be libraries, so you've been outvoted in that regard.
I don’t know about everone. The Carnegie Library here in DC is now an Apple store. Our local library is turning more into a community center, while many others are a place for the homeless to hang out.
I believe the trend of changing libraries from ‘places to read’ to ‘mutli-purpose community hubs’ is a great one. I’m not sure, but I believe its happening all over Scandinavia.. and for what it’s worth I hope its also going to start happen in The Netherlands.
Right now libraries are dying. In my city, 80% of public library use is high school kids or university kids (overflow from the busy university library) studying there during peak exam times, outside of that its extremely underutilised. And for my hometown its even worse, even 15 years ago there would maybe be a handful of people there at a time, in a building that could easily fit 30-50 people.
Turning those libraries not only into a book repository but also as a place to drop your kid to play with other kids while you read, to study (think study rooms with outlets for laptops), to grab a coffee, attend a reading, etc. to me is an amazing initiative.
And there is synergy as well: you can go grab a coffee with your friend whilst your kids play, maybe browse for a new sci-fi book - and hey there is a reading which you can attend whilst your kid is preoccupied and the reading doesn’t feel dead because some other visitors and students are also attending and even if you get thirsty you can grab a tea :)
This whole wall of text might seem a little rantlike but I truly do love libraries (my mom used to take me) and seeing them reinvigorated like that is very cool.
Kids that grow up associating libraries with fun are much more likely to want to visit them after they learn to read. Libraries are closing down because they don't have any readers.
I don't remember any of the kids running wild in the libraries visiting them as adults.
We who didn't have a problem being quiet and going there to either read quietly or to bring books home, going there for the books, seem to be much more likely to actually visit as adults. Is there any evidence to suggest people who use libraries as playgrounds are more likely to use them as adults? Because if there isn't we are removing one of extremely few quiet places for no gain. I remember going to the library or staying after school to be able to read my Asimov and Douglas Adams, which would have been hard at home. If people who have quiet homes came there to let their children off to play I would be less likely to go there, just like I'm less likely to go there now when that is happening.
is this a joke? the last thing most young adults like is to be surrounded by screaming children. The louder you make libraries the less people will ever want to go there.
I don't see where the comment above yours said anything about inviting screaming children into libraries. Screaming kids in most situations is frustrating and can be off-putting. Libraries should have similar social norms as anywhere else.
Libraries are becoming irrelevant culturally. Turing libraries into playgrounds in an attempt to stay relevant just turns the library into something new. It's like trying to trick people into reading or something, I don't think it's going to work.
The new model may be valid, but maybe we should just close the libraries altogether and start calling them "Community Centers".
That's true, assuming you want a relatively small subset of all books. Once you want something recent, or obscure, or a current textbook, you usually can't find it for anywhere near that amount, if you can find it for sale at all.
Though 4 Euros ($4.50) is less than half what I pay for most books I want on Amazon.
It would be very expensive for me to feed my book-reading habit like that. I couldn't afford it without libraries.
It's nice that you can afford to spend money on books, but we need a solution for everyone else, especially if we agree that books are a good thing for society.
Of course there are people who need libraries and I support funding them even if they're mostly empty. But I think a sizeable fraction of the people who used to go to libraries but don't do so anymore are like me and just buy the books they want to read used rather than go to the library.
The purpose of a public library (at least in the US) is to provide services to the public. A large part of the public, especially who aren't otherwise occupied during the day, are young children.
Most libraries I've been to have a large section dedicated to kids books and activities, often with stuff animals, blocks, etc that kids can use for creative play.
There are usually also rooms that you can reserve for work or study, and tables out in the open that people can sit at to read or work.
Kids are loud and energetic. Usually older people enjoy the vitality they bring to a space. The main age group bothered by them are 20 and 30 somethings who don't have kids and aren't used to being around them.
Actually the primary purpose of a library is to be a repository of books, not a reading room. Just like the primary purpose of a bookstore is to sell books, a library is a place to check out books.
Besides libraries should change! Who the heck goes to a library to look at encyclopedias to write papers anymore? If you are doing academic research, go to an academic library — a place where you’ll find few kids. But a community library? That should be a place where everyone is welcome and excited about books, not a coworking space for old curmudgeons. If you want a perfectly silent reading environment — go to your home.
Is the set of people who can only enjoy, or even read, books in silence pretty large? There is certainly a threshold of noise where I lose reading comprehension, but it's quite loud.
Do other people need silence, like absolute silence, to read?
Before I worked for myself, I never worked in any office that remotely came near to silence. Most were roughly the equivalent of moderately loud cafes, at least.
Libraries are repositories of books for people to take away. The idea that they need to provide office space for people who could just as well read at home is stupid.
Libraries find their roots in academic institutions, a context in which they are absolutely intended to be a place of study, not just a repository of books.
Well, apologies if I think kids being encouraged to go to libraries is more important than grown ups who can go _anywhere_ refusing to finding somewhere to read.
What kids should be encouraged to do is not merely attend a library as if simply being there is an end in itself, but to learn to appreciate and enjoy quiet, reflective learning.
I agree, children should be taught this. When I was a kid, the sanctity of quiet of the library was absolute. It was a special place. In a world where there's a screen literally everywhere you go, we should value the last quiet place rather than destroy it.
My 4 and 7 year olds do, my 10 month old doesn't, and I'd still like to be able to go to the library (and yay, I can, because we have nice libraries here that aren't full of aggressively shushy weirdos). Plus _I_ want to be able to talk in a library, about what books we want, about what words mean, about chess moves, whatever. It's just wrong to exclude people from a space because you want a free, quiet office, and I'm glad that more and more libraries agree.
Sure because most community public libraries have those just laying around for any member of the public to read whenever they want.
This is such a straw man. Unless you have an actual academic need for an actual Shakespeare first folio, you can read that text without needing an original printing. If you have such a need, the Palo Alto Public Library isn’t likely to have a it there for the asking.
Academic libraries at universities have their purpose, but your local public library isn’t going to typically be used by Shakespeare scholars.
Reading restricted collection books is a pretty low percentage of why people visit libraries. Reading ultra rare, priceless books is almost non-existent as a percentage of library visits.
Comparing a city library with an extremely specialized institution which holds a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio is ridiculous. These are separate institutions which only share the name library.
Well, no. People are trying to draw a functional distinction between two types of libraries that isn't really there.
First, old-fashioned academic libraries existed; later, public lending libraries existed, but only because various people noticed that the existence of academic libraries was a good thing thing that should be more widely accessible to people outside academia and/or religious institutions. At no point has the purpose of public lending libraries been to provide the community centre and entertainment resource that some people want them to be.
At no point has the purpose of public lending libraries been to provide the community centre
I'm in my 40s and here in the United States, in my lifetime libraries have always doubled as community spaces: hosting events like readings, book clubs, art classes, and so on.
Of course, they have not traditionally been free-use community spaces in the sense of "hey, come to the library and drop your kids off so they can run around and play" or anything like that. But I don't think anybody's asking for that, either.
Judging by your spelling of "centre," perhaps you're not in the U.S. and therefore have a different experience and perspective.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of spaces that feature both "noisy" public spaces as well as quieter private spaces. I worked at an offie with such an arrangement and it was quite nice.
There's really no reason why there can't be both, especially a library.
In fact a lot of libraries do exactly this, don't they?
Typical library arrangement, at least here in America:
- Center of library has long tables with multiple seats; can be used for group interaction
- Sides of library have all the bookshelves
- Between the bookshelves and the outer wall there are more private desks. It's naturally quite quiet here because even if the central "public" area is noisy, you have all the bookshelves between you and the central area
I know growing up the one library had a perfect arrangement the first floor was children's and looser in sound rules allowing for stuff like reading out loud and talking while the second up were serious quiet normed areas with a broader selection. Owing to the construction it was silent except for footsteps in the stairwells when the doors were closed.
In camabridge ma the newish library (less than 10 years old) has a designated “quiet” study room. I haven’t been inside but I’m assuming it’s like the quiet train cars, where loud talking is frowned upon.
Or, let's create some kind of public space that is not an isolated study room so that people can leave their homes but still enjoy a calm and quiet place?
But then your kids won't want to go there in the future, because all kids grow up to become adults who want loud places for their kids to grow up to visit loud places...
The main problem we experience is a complete lack of quiet places, and since you don't want any, and that seems to be a majority opinion, we won't have any.
> and that seems to be a majority opinion, we won't have any.
Is the majority really in favor of being loud? I personally believe that it is in fact a minority - just a loud minority. People who enjoy silence are also usually less vocal about their interests - sadly. Because from a public health perspective it's the loud people who can learn something from those enjoying silence.
>I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids
This is so different to me, it's ridiculous. Loud is not happy. Loud is not sad. Loud is just loud. I'm not going to a loud library. If your kids can't be quiet, then keep them out please.
Probably there should be libraries for children that are louder, but that's a different conversation.
When I go on bushwalks there are teenagers with their damned bluetooth speakers. Every business blares their horrible music at you to get you out of there faster. Workplaces want insanely distracting open-plan offices.
I'm totally with you here. I sometimes feel like living in a tyranny of the squallers. In a room with 100 people it takes 100 people to create silence and just one to destroy that. It's so sad.
Pro tip (for people in London at least): Senate House library in London rents out private Study Carrels to its members. These are located in the reading rooms (which are usually very quiet) and have their own walls and a door you can close. I loved them and did some fantastic focused work there (although others found them claustrophobic...)
There is a very simple solution to this problem. Build more libraries or bigger libraries.
A terrific example is the Jefferson Library in lower Manhattan. It is technically a children's library to the point where it's nearly impossible to find bathrooms that are adult accessible without children.
It is also possibly the best quiet library in the city because the upper levels of the space are adult only and nearly pin drop silent. You can absolutely have both.
The architectural style and decorations are part of the problem as the article says. An equally big one though is, as you say, the apparent need to have blaring music, TVs, etc. just about every place.
I was just at an event a month or so ago that had a DJ in the exhibit hall blasting music at a volume that was actively preventing people from having easy conversations. Which is sort of the purpose of being there. Not listening to some DJ who apparently has to work corporate events to pay the rent but nonetheless thinks people are there to listen to him.
After complaining to the organizers, they turned things down a bit but this is a pervasive problem. Even when I'm eating by myself, I still find the music in some restaurants both annoyingly loud and not what I would consider pleasant background music for a meal.
>Even when I'm eating by myself, I still find the music in some restaurants both annoyingly loud and not what I would consider pleasant background music for a meal.
This is by design to get you out of there quickly to free a spot for another paying customer.
I vote with my wallet and suggest you do too.
If a restaurant has music I don't like, which seems to be a trend nowadays, I get the message that they don't want me to be there and leave immediately.
There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books.
One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter.
They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing their food or drink.
(Around the same time they also instigated a 30 minute time limit on Wifi if you bought something. Even though I was willing to keep buying, I couldn't get through a new tea every 30 minutes!)
Theory being it's more profitable to make your customers leave and make room for others, than to make a place people want to go to.
I haven't been back. Even with noise-cancelling headphones(∗), and earbuds under the headphones, it was too loud for me. And the wifi policy was really annoying.
Sadly, I've noticed ultra loud music seems to be the policy at a lot of places these days. I find Starbucks and Costa ok - but some of my friends won't go with me because they find the music there too loud as well.
(∗) I wear noise-cancellers at most places now. It probably makes me look unsocial or "hipster", but it's to protect my ears from the loud music just about everywhere insists on playing, and helps me concentrate when I'm working in a café. I enjoy talking with people if they want to.
It probably won't be the most popular opinion but I'm siding with the business for this one. I never got people who use cafe bars, delis, etc.. as personal offices. I personally can't get 'in the zone' in such a public place where:
- I need to buy/consume something every X minutes
- have to overhear irrelevant stupid/mundane conversations
- people have a habit of bringing their dogs everywhere now and I'm not even going to get into how disruptive that is
- deal with the passive-aggressiveness of the employees when you spend a couple of hours there
Whenever I work from home and I need a 'public' place in order to separate home and work, I go to the local library for which I pay taxes. It's probably the only place I can walk in, not be expected to buy anything and just enjoy the silence. Other times when the weather is nice I just go the park or on a bench on the public trail and use my phone as a hotspot.
The bagel/coffee/sandwich/donut shops are businesses where people should walk in, buy something, have a date/meeting/chat and then leave. I'm probably a weirdo but again, I never got this working from a coffee shop thing.
> I never got this working from a coffee shop thing.
This is an old tradition.
Cafes, bars, tea houses, etc have served as social hubs and placed to read or work on documents (now computers) for literally thousands of years, everywhere on the planet. There's simply a social need for a space like that, because it's a more efficient usage of space to have people work on a revolving basis in a shared space than everyone have a private space of their own or not be able to work.
It's only with the modern invention of corporate coffee shops that misvalue social fabric that we see the churn happening. (PS -- those corporate stores are wrong about the short term boost from churn improving their long term fortunes, at least from what I've heard from the big ones.)
I also find it interesting you approve of one "office-like" usage -- having a chat or meeting -- but disapprove of another -- working on documents.
Actually the thing which kills this model nowadays is the obscene cost of real estate and the rentier class. Coffee shops simply can't be profitable as workspaces any more.
You still can see coffee spots as social places in developing countries.
But more people need these work spaces as they can't work in the closet like apartments they are sharing with 2-3 other people. You are correct in saying it's because cost of real estate
That makes sense. Having a meeting is disruptive to everyone else but working on documents does not. It's like an open office, the last thing you want to do is make noise and disturb people trying to get work done (ironically).
You are describing Vienna's coffee house culture. You could even have your mail received there. But part of that culture is also to avoid disturbing other guests by being unnecessarily loud.
even if you don't relate, other people have different desires and motivations and it's worth trying to understand that (for social harmony at the very least). you seem to want quiet and solitude in public places, but that's just not the norm. rather than distracting, i find cafes ideal places to work, as they have the right amount of low-recognition distraction (unlike home, where things are too quiet and my bed is so inviting).
you also seem to be looking at things negatively. here's an alternate view:
- you don't have to buy something on a timer.
- - get to know the owners/workers, and they'll enjoy your visits, no matter how long. most of the cafes i visit love it when i bring my dog for instance.
- - if a cafe is (nearly) empty, you sitting there provides natural marketing for the cafe in the form of social proof (no one likes being the only person in a business). i usually leave when i notice it getting full so others can enjoy it too, but if it's half empty, i have no qualms staying for a while without the pressure of buying something on a timer.
- stupid conversations are easy to tune out; interesting ones are the hard ones. at the very least, it feeds the superiority complex nicely.
- dogs are bundles of joy and love, and make (most) people happy.
- again, get to know and show interest in the owners/workers and develop rapport with them. they may even give you free stuff.
>dogs are bundles of joy and love, and make (most) people happy.
I'm at the point where I would pay extra for businesses and facilities that didn't allow animals. The service animal law is also being used fraudulently by so many people, I just assume it unless I can see the person is blind.
keeping dogs away from human eating areas reduces your chances of disease by a negligible amount. you would be much better off requiring everyone to wash their hands and/or disinfect their phones upon entering.
zoonotic transmission (transmission between species) is not seen as serious enough by the CDC to even track it. but for comparative purposes, there are 1-2 deaths from rabies per year in the US (and infection is as likely from rodents as anything). so the burden of proof is on the dog cynics.
in any case, the primary transmission concerns are poop and mucus membrane contact. so again, the main thing you need to do is wash your hands with soap (and don't play with poop or make out with the dog).
I suspect you intended your comment to be along the lines of "different strokes for different folks", but it pretty strongly came across as "you're weird and wrong; here's the correct way to view things".
yes, it wasn't meant to make a claim on rightness or wrongness (although i can understand why it might come across that way), but to make a point about perspectives.
and that point was not so much "different strokes for different folks", but "different strokes for the same folks", as we each embody multiple perspectives and our conscious brain can choose among them (a lesson i keep learning over and over).
I'm okay with the 30-minute Wi-Fi policy, but the loud music just makes it unpleasant to be in a restaurant even for a short date/meeting/chat. If restaurants really want to make sure customers aren't staying for too long, they should just make it a matter of policy instead of ruining the experience entirely.
I could probably do it. But apart from being able to, I think it's pretty entitled to think that buying a piece of food (or something) entitles you to hours in a food place. Where people come to eat. Typically a < 60 minute event (often much, much less).
Have you never had to work while traveling? The prevalence of internet cafes has been priceless to me over the years. I travel a lot, and having cafes to stop and work at while on the road has allowed me to be a lot more flexible with travel/work arrangements. I find them very valuable.
Well yes, the business has the right to do what it did, of course. Really no way to knock it other than saying "I don't like that kind of store."
However, there are other shops that actively cultivate the kind of culture you mention. Starbucks is probably the most prominent. It's something that Starbucks deliberately promoted since inception.
You seem already aware that it's nice to have a 3rd place besides home and work. But once it's a coffee shop you don't get it?
Exactly. Let me explain an example. I ran into an old friend once close to a Tully's a couple of years back and went in to get some coffee and catch up. Unfortunately there was no place for us to sit down at a table because all the tables were taken by single individuals working on their laptops. One of them was actually in a conf call. So we skipped that and went to have brunch at a full blown restaurant.
Sounds like there's still demand for more coffee shops. Probably why I keep seeing more Starbucks, Peets, Philz, etc. opening all over the place.
Also, assuming you're willing to drive a couple minutes out of your way, there's usually a slightly less busy Starbucks with tables available.
Maybe there's a business opportunity here for either a new kind of chain with a different brand identity... a non-music coffee shop or something. I know a place near UC Davis where it's actually disallowed to be studying there. No laptops on the tables. But it isn't a chain.
Or an opportunity for something between a WeWork and a Starbucks, a Costco of coffee shops, maybe with a membership fee on top of the cost of drinks.
Apart from the need to buy something every X minutes, those problems are also problems in the modern office. And instead of buying something every X minutes, you have a colleague interrupt you every X minutes for some banal thing that's quite possibly not even related to the work you're doing.
It's funny how obvious some people make it that they don't want business. I don't really care about power plugs or wifi when I visit a café (my battery running out is a great motivator + natural time limit, I can tether to my phone for internet) but I always pay close attention to how a new café is outfitted.
Some cafés that genuinely want your business make plugs available to the customers, some will even go as far as to put in plugs with USB adapters as well because they are making it clear: I want you to be here. Other places have no special extra plugs (just what you'd expect for a room that size) and that's fine, but some places have intentionally NO plugs and that's not an accident, that's by design.
Same thing with the wifi policy. I don't care if you have wifi, or don't have wifi, but if you aggressively block ~50% of all sites, seemingly at random, or have a time limit on usage…the message it clear, you only have Wifi so you can say "we have wifi" but you don't really mean it.
I only hope to patronize places that are welcoming, even if I'm not relying on those facilities that day. Those are the kinds of places I want to stay in business.
The kinds of places with limited internet and no plugs are the kinds of places that I don't want to be in business tomorrow, so I had better make sure not to give them a penny today.
It's not fair to say they "don't want business". They don't want certain forms of business — laptop coworkers — that in many cases are both low-profit customers and actively limit the throughput of total customers.
I had a good chat once with a guy who runs a small coffee roastery and number of fancy third-wave coffee shops in a posh university town. One of the most popular coffee shops in town went completely bankrupt and he ended up taking it over. The first thing he did was turn off the WiFi; to hear him tell it, revenue doubled or tripled overnight as soon as he did. Turns out actually having available seats can drive sales, and having a giant store in a high-rent area full of people who buy one $4 coffee and sit there for five hours isn't profitable. At the time, he was in the process of renovating half of the space to be formal paid coworking.
(I personally think there's room for middle ground. My favorite local coffee shop only allows laptops in a dedicated section, which has ample power but also higher-density seating than the normal area. When it's warm enough to sit outside, they allow laptops outside during the week but not on weekends. Another favorite coffee shop just turns the WiFi off on weekends.)
The closest café to me is a 'concept café' being run by a local coffee roaster. I'll often go <2 hours before close and grab a coffee, tip well, and sit until close. Some days if I wasn't there it would be empty, so I'm pretty sure having my body in the café brings more people through the door.
The problem with that café is their hours miss both the before-work rush, and the after-work rush, with them closing shop at 6pm. You have to be _open_ to take money.
The problem is being open costs money. In order to be profitable, you need to bring in more money than the cost of the labor, and that's after you account for cost of the product and the other fixed costs.
There is also the trouble that most of the people who will be around at close of business likely came in an hour or two earlier, so you are essentially paying someone to monitor the cafe without bringing in any new revenue.
I would think the morning before-work rush would be the best time to capture money as a coffee shop, same with the after work time. They are basically only open while working people are away from the neighbourhood and have their doors shut when the biggest rushes of people would be there.
And it's not just them, I see a lot of local businesses in this area struggling, but the problem is they aren't open to take my money at reasonable times. There's another café even closer to me that is trying to make it, but they are closed 2 days a week and it's not the weekend, I'm not sure which days they are, so it's hard to check it out. It's just baffling to me - you pay rent 24/7, you have bills every month, and staff … but if you want to take money (generate income) you have to be open. If you want to make the most money, shouldn't you try to have your doors open the most amount of time you can?
The coffee shop closest to my house has the same problem. The only times they are open are while I'm at work. They opened right about the time we moved (a little over a year ago), and we were excited to have a play we could go close by. But they are never open when it would be convenient for us.
The dumbest thing in my mind is that they are open for like 4 hours on Saturday (7am - 11am).
I think the problem with that particular coffee shop though is that they lady who owns it also runs a catering / event hosting business, so the needs of the coffee shop come last.
Some places are more explicit. There's a "no laptops" café movement now.
One where I live has a "no laptops at mealtimes" sign. If you get out a laptop, they ask you to leave. If you come during a quiet period, get out a laptop, and are still using it when reaches a mealtime, they ask you to put it away.
To be fair they do really good food, it's always packed at mealtimes, and they explain their policy is because they want to make a place where people appreciate food and conversation.
I like them and wouldn't want them to shut down.
Another place doesn't have a sign. I sat down and ordered a proper meal. Then I got my laptop out. I needed to work for the next couple of hours. Table space wasn't a problem, and it wasn't an especially posh place.
After I'd been working for 20 minutes, a waiter came over to tell me I'd have to put the laptop away. After a rather awkward conversation we agreed I could cancel my already ordered (and presumably partly cooked) meal, because I'd have to go and find another restaurant.
In Palo Alto, there’s a cafe (more or less) call Hana House that has three big sections. One of those sections is very comfy, quiet, has proper acoustic design, lots of outlets, and, gasp charges for time.
It’s actually a fairly nice model. If you want to work in someone’s commercial space, paying for it is entirely reasonable.
8p/min = £4.80 per hour. Bearing in mind I'd pay £5 for coffee and a cake in many places that seems reasonable.
UK: many public access spaces have places to sit and public wifi (e.g. central reference library, University buildings, some City Council buildings &c)
In Taiwan, there are some excellent tea houses that have an unusual billing model. You can drink their tea for the list price, or you can bring your own tea leaves but use their water, etc by paying for time.
These are not generally the kind of places where you would bring a laptop.
I try to make it profitable if I'm staying longer. If I stay for a long time, I will 'renew' my lease by buying more drinks or snacks :D Places that are friendly and welcoming today…I've gotta make it PROFITABLE for them to stay in business if I want them to be around tomorrow…
If by "business" you mean buying a coffee in exchange of several hours of free internet, electricity and real estate, then it is sort of understandable why many places don't encourage this kind of "business".
Some places do, and you have all the reasons in the world to favor these places as they match your needs, but it seems kind of silly expecting that every place should cater to every type of customer.
This seems very harsh. These places need internet anyway, need electricity anyway (the lights will be on either way.) And need real estate anyway. What is your point?
Coffee shops will never have enough seating anyway for the amount of coffee they sell.
I think this is a very uncharitable view of the situation. Some coffee shops don't want to pivot into coworking spaces and that's okay. Personally I think it's a match made in heaven since a day pass at a nice coworking space is around $10 which is like two drinks but I get that some businesses would prefer to just sell coffee.
$10 per day seems a low price to me. I have no experience of co-working spaces but I'm thinking of the costs of running a room with say 20 working spaces in it at the usual rent/rates/utilities...
They do want business, just not the kind that people who sit and stay bring. When you’re trying to improve your sales velocity, keeping existing customers moving so as not to dissuade new ones from coming in makes sense.
How does an empty café with bored looking staff invite new customers in?
When I go into frequently-empty places I find that the staff, who should have all the time in the world to help, are actually more distant, because they're so used to filling up their time chatting together or doing other stuff that when a customer actually does show up it's like some unforeseen situation they didn't plan for.
Agreed. The same can be applied to firms that bid on contracts. The firm who makes the most outlandish promises win. If you want to be honest, it is hard to compete, because your competitors won't be.
I just spent a month in continental Europe, and the cafes and restaurants there are very different than in the US. In the US, restaurants want you to leave ASAP so they can turn the tables quickly. In Europe, they're perfectly happy to let you linger all day. I even became annoyed that nobody in a European restaurant would ever bring me the check. (Finally I learned to just get up and go to the register; this seemed a perfectly fine solution.)
Another commenter here said this was because US servers depended on tips, while tipping is not done in European restaurants. Maybe so; overall I like the European method much better.
Does wearing noise-cancelling headphones actually protect your ears? My understanding of noise-cancelling(at least the active kind) is that it would play the noise you would normally hear but in a mirrored fashion to dampen out the noise you'd hear.
I'm just wondering if that would protect your ears, do as much harm, or double it.
Noise is noise, and if you cancel it out it's gone. Sound waves obey the superposition principle, which means that if I take 1 psi and superimpose -1 psi, I get 1-1=0 psi.
That's true, of course. But it's much harder to actively cancel higher frequencies. This is why noise cancelling works brilliantly on an airplane (relatively low frequency background noise) but it does almost nothing to filter out the sounds of conversations around you.
I always thought it was because noise cancelling can only block repeated waves (like the sound of an engine whirring) but conversation is constant changing sound so it can’t be blocked.
Yes, but the question was essentially, "does the sound it cancels out and you don't hear still hurt you". If you still hear it, you're answering something else.
High frequencies are passively attenuated by the foam inside the earcups. It's the mid frequencies (speech, etc.) that survive both active and passive noise cancellation. Still, a high end pair of ANC headphones does a good job on speech/tv if you have some soft music playing through them.
In addition to canceling sound, the headphones actually block a lot of it to begin with, so they only have to cancel what's left. On the gun range, it's pretty popular to use quite the opposite of noise canceling headphones. They actually amplify sounds at normal human speech levels, then cut off anything above a certain amount. They make no attempt to cancel the gunshot sounds, they just don't reply them inside the headphones. And the blockage from just the physical headphones is enough to turn a deafening gunshot into something fairly comfortable to listen to for quite a long time.
I don't know if it truly protects them from damage overall. That would take science. See "complicated" below :)
But the basic answer to your question is, no, it doesn't double the sound energy.
To the extent the headphones are successful at creating an inverse sound to cancel incoming sound, that will reduce the sound energy reaching the inner ears. The sound and its "mirror" don't add up to increase energy, rather, the energy reaching the ears is reduced where waves cancel.
(The same thing happens in, say, optical interference patterns, and coastal waves. All the energy which seems to mysteriously disappear where waves cancel is, in fact, accounted for by increasing at the places the same waves interfere contructively. In the case of headphones, it's going to be rather more subtly accounted for either elsewhere in the spatial pattern around and on the speaker, and/or by the speaker acting as a net energy absorber.)
Active noise-cancellers also have a passive component. The big squishy cups on mine (Bose QC-35). These of course reduce incoming sound energy too.
But it's more complicated than that. Ears have a sort of physical volume control of their own (using tiny muscles), which reacts to the sound level. As far as I'm aware, damage is more likely deeper in the ear, past that stage.
So anything which alters the ear's coarse volume response might produce a more complicated damage response than simply measuring incoming levels would suggest.
I apply that theory: I sometimes listen to music on the headphones, in high volume environments. This seems to mask out the environmental noise better, and my theory is this isn't just psychoacoustic masking, it's causing my ears to block out more sound physically, helping to protect them physically. When doing this I listen to music which has a consistent sound level, rather than, say, a podcast or something subtle like classical.
I've read that noise-cancellers produce a hiss which annoys some people. I can't say I've noticed much volume to the hiss, and I used to assume it was residual signal from the signal processing. But it may be that's intended to interact with the ear muscles too.
A good fraction of noise canceling for some over-ear headphones is the cups that go over your ear. Having that barrier can be a significant sound damper on its own.
I remember growing up not wanting to go out to eat with my parents. They liked this certain cafeteria style restaurant where you'd grab a tray and slide it along picking out your dishes and paying at the end. I hated that place not because of the food, I could always find something to eat, but because it was so quiet I could hear the people around me eating. It was so disgusting.
You can still find places where you can be served a beverage of your choice in a comfortable chair and tranquil setting. They just tend to have membership fees.
In the UK, private membership clubs are a thing. I'd assume it's not just a UK thing, but I have a friend that is a member at one just to have a place to get out of the house and have a quiet place to go work. Cheaper than renting an actual office, and he doesn't need it everyday. For people that do not work from home, it is quite shocking when you realize how not-quite home can be. Primarily if you have family. Other family members "forget" you're actually working, and have no problem interrupting. Not to say in an office co-workers have no problem interrupting either, but that's a different conversation.
Not sure if it's exactly what the parent meant, but, at Workshop Cafe in SF, you just pay to use a seat per hour and otherwise don't have to buy anything, so there's no incentive to get you out the door and free up the spot.
TBH your question strikes me as having a trolling tone. But I'll answer in good faith anyway. I'm pretty sure most people here understand why people like going to communal places to sit, enjoy snacks and drinks, and read or work quietly.
The question is, why is everyone else using it as a library with snacks. As I said, it's always packed in the late evenings.
The neighbouring coffee shops are also packed until midnight.
Here are some ideas:
- Why not, it's nice to do.
- Some of us are happy to pay for it.
- Lots of people want an evening place, aka "third space", but don't care for bars, alcohol and shouting. They want to quietly sit and read late at night, socially around other people, with some talking some of the time, but not constantly.
- For many, home is not suitable for working, studying or relaxing. It depends a lot on the home.
- It helps to be around other people to focus and relax, and it's nice to have an ice cream and/or bagel and/or drink while doing it.
- There's no library nearby.
- There's a great library further away, but it's shut in the evenings. (Our libraries are often packed with people. Until they close, then everyone has to find somewhere else.)
- If you enjoy reading/writing around strangers being a bit fun and lively, you won't get that in a library. But a bar is too much. Maybe it doesn't work for you, but for me and many others, the buzz from people just being happy in the vicinity is quite helpful.
- No affordable co-working spaces. The few co-working spaces are either rent-per-month (too expensive if you don't use them a lot), or closed in the evening to daily renters. Anyway, the day rate (~$20/day) is too much if you're only out for a couple of hours, and don't have good money (most people I see around are not working in IT, btw).
- Not enough friendly communal spaces. (Btw, I've helped run one of these. It was really hard work!)
Pret is really obviously doing the loud music thing too (and has for a couple of years at least). They lost my patronage. Not that they care: I think they had very good financials before their sale to Krispy Kreme.
[aside rant] We have a very strange cafe culture in the UK compared to continental Europe: too many chains, too expensive, poor quality, takeaway coffee. The latest insult is chains not wanting to wash cups, so now we have to bring in re-usable cups. At least they're offering discounts, for now.
Heh, I was referring to separate things and connected them in a tin-foil-hat way: the quite recent campaign against paper cups which encourages people to buy re-usable travel mugs and my experience with various chains serving paper cups even when sitting in (possibly fazing out normal cups). As in we're being guilted in to not accepting paper cups and instead bringing re-usable mugs.
Sounds like there'd be a good market for places that charge you for the time you spend in them rather than for the merchandise. Maybe just a bunch of desks and someone walking around with coffee/tea and snacks (free or cheap). Charge, say, $10/hour.
Ziferblat [1] does this for £4.80 an hour, with a four hour cap so you never pay more than £19.20 per day.
I've not found the environment very conducive to getting much work done though. It's too noisy and there aren't enough desks. I've had more success with the Department of Coffee and Social Affairs [2] which charges in the same way as a coffee shop but feels more like a co-working space.
Operating a restaurant is expensive. Rent is by the square foot, so you taking up a certain amount of space with your 1 tea per hour (max 2 teas?) won't pay their bills.
I managed restaurants for a few years. One consistent mistake that I saw, was that restaurant owners would rent more space than they needed. I think the owners over-estimated how popular things were going to be.
Because of this, one of the easiest ways to improve your odds of success, when you own a restaurant, is to lease LESS space than you need. Basically there's a lot of good reasons to make your customers wait in line:
1) You're not paying to rent the sidewalk in front of your restaurant
2) Having a few customers waiting out front is a great advertisement for your place.
Obviously, this isn't great for customers, but if you're a restaurateur it's awesome.
Out in Vegas, restaurants and clubs routinely pay people to wait out front to make their place seem "in-demand."
Absolutely. At the end of the day, you need to maximize dollars per square foot (or seat). Better to do 3 turns of 25 covers than to do 1 turn of 75 covers.
The architectural design of making chairs uncomfortable so people don’t stay in your restaurant for long has been a neat niche of mainstream fast food chains for a while.
I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional.
Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designed from the ground up to facilitate work. It has tons of natural light, freely available whiteboards and almost no music call Limitless coffee. It is such a joy to not have to deal with the din that I go there even when I'm not working. You can almost hear yourself think.
Yes. I think that's what I'm saying and I also think that it is great that coffee shops are popping up to solve the job to be done of providing me with an affordable space to work at the cost of a few cups of coffee.
One thing I've noticed about a lot of coffee shops is that they have a big morning rush and a big lull during the day. Even Starbucks has a bunch of offers incentivizing you to come back for 'happy hour'. I imagine they are trying to spread out traffic throughout the day. It seems like offering a nice place to work during the day, might actually be more optimal than discouraging longer stays. Maybe Starbucks could just turn down their music between 10-4 and offer promotions to co-workers.
It seems a bit strange that they encourage laptop usage at Starbucks then if they don't want people to use it as an office. The have laptop plug in ports at special bars and tables all over the place.
This sounds like an awesome place! Do you have pay extra for anything? I would happily agree to pay like 10$ for some time just to run away when I have to work.
Additional extra points would be if they would offer some external monitors as well. This was my dream for a while now.
IIRC even more expensive co-working spaces like WeWork don't offer that (some folks bring their own monitors). Maybe this could be a new business idea? Might be hard to break even at $10 though, not sure.
This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)
I hate the trend of minimalist/industrial interior design in restaurants for this reason. There was a new restaurant I went to recently. We got there at 4 in the afternoon, and there were only 3 parties there other than us (out of >20 tables) conversing with reasonable inside voices. The music was calm and played at low background level. Yet my wife and I couldn't hear each other across the table. The floor was polished concrete, the walls tile, the (10') ceiling metal, the tables glass topped, the chairs unpadded. There wasn't a single sound-absorbing material in the entire room. It turned what should have been a quiet murmur into intolerable din.
One of my favorite restaurants (food-wise) crams too many people into one huge room with windows instead of walls: glass everywhere. The sound is deafening. It's also a popular hangout for a group of kids from a local college and they're obnoxiously loud. Great food but I'm a basket case by the time I'm done eating (asd, I don't deal with sound well).
The Met Office in the UK has a canteen, and at one point, they decided that it was too noisy. Their solution was to make a load of person-sized wool "clouds", and hang them from the ceiling. They look cool, and they absorb noise.
A couple of months ago, I went to a conference in San Diego, and went to a restaurant in the evening with colleagues. We could hardly hear the person next to us shouting. I left as soon as I had eaten.
If you read blogs like "not always right" you'll find that most food service employees are not on board with the customers sitting around and taking up tables. They take it as a personal attack on their income and are very rude about people who sit there.
Even if the management isn't against it, the employees are.
This is a direct consequence of how food service employees are paid in the U.S. They have an income of next to nothing and depend on tips.
Tips do not play such a large part in (most? all?) of Europe and are smaller than in the U.S., so customers that stay longer mean less work without too much pay reduction.
At least that is my pet theory. I only visit the U.S. every couple of years and this year I noticed that the "standard" tip crept up to 15%-20% instead of the 10%-15% that I remember. Seems that employers are paying food service workers even less of a wage than before.
That reminds me of the Royal Albert Hall in London - don't know if you've been, but they have things that look like giant mints hanging from the ceiling. (I assume it's to break up any echo from the bowl shaped ceiling)
The concept of a quiet bar just seems weird to me.
The problem with most bars isn't actually the volume of the music, but the loudness. The speakers are generally cheap speakers that are undersized and are then cranked so loud they're redlining and sound like shit.
I can stand in the middle of a nightclub with a well set up speaker system and have a conversation with a friend. Yet in most bars and pubs, which are places where I'd actually like to have a conversation, I have to shout at my mates and can barely hear a word they say.
While I agree that cheap speakers used are often an issue when you actually hear the music, more often the places would be super loud even if there would be no music at all.
Some people are just obnoxiously loud, and if you have more of them in 1 group nearby, any experience from that place is ruined for me.
It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.
I try to find the quieter places... I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones. It completely throws me off the conversation I'm trying to have with the person I'm with.
> I find it damn near impossible to pick out one voice in a room full of muffled, echoing ones.
I can't even reliably pick out one voice in a largely empty room if there's other sources of noise (ie music playing in a pub, etc.) It makes things like meetups impossible and working in an open plan office a nightmare.
Yeah, my hearing's not the best and I really just cannot hear what people are saying half of the time. It's like... everybody's struggling to hear each other, but I really cannot hear. I just can't do those kinds of spaces, at least not if I want to have a conversation.
Visit an audiologist for a test. I recently had a hearing test for the reason you described and was told there were no problems.
I started to ask people if they could actually hear or understand while with them at a loud place and many told me they couldn’t - they were mostly pretending to understand after eventually giving up.
I can't hear in such places without these: https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/hearing-protection/er20xs-...
They don't improve the signal, obviously, but your ears just don't get tired in the same way, so you can make out what people are saying - just about.
Test your hearing on higher frequencies, those are usually the first lost when hearing degrades. Normal headphones/loudspeakers can go way higher than people can hear, so you can do basic test yourself.
I have something similar - normal conversations are OK, but in loud environment it becomes very hard. Its not great to be the only one in group who doesn't understand what others are saying. I blew my hearing probably in front rows on metal concerts.
(I realize that online hearing tests aren't reliable, but they would have false positives, not false negatives)
Frustratingly, I've done those online hearing tests which test your ability to hear human voices amidst background noise and they tell me I have no hearing loss.
However, my hearing cuts out around 9khz, which is low. Definitely not my listening equipment because my wife can hear >9khz just fine on the same gear.
I can attest to that. I am deaf from my left ear and when I walk on the street I need to be on the left of any person walking with me, it is impossible to hear anything. In restaurants, pubs, bars, I have already given up and I know that I will miss most of the conversations.
Same here. I'm not usually deaf, but from time to time one ear blocks for a few weeks.
When that happens, I totally know what you mean about being unable to hear conversations in restaurants, bars, etc.
Even when my talking partner is aware, localising their voice from the din with one ear is really difficult. (Btw, there's some really impressive research at using AI techniques to help with that, which will makes it way into hearing aids eventually.)
Its at times like that I find it's way too easy to maintain a conversation with nods and yes/nos without having a clue what it's about. I've even done it in languages where I don't understand a word. I feel it says something about the speaker, that they can talk for ages without any confirmation that it's understood and no meaningful talk the other way :)
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this, but one of the reasons restaurants are so loud is that many modern restaurants pack people in like sardines to maximize revenue. Many places I have been to lately give you about a foot of space between you and the people next to you. Not only does this high density create a lot of noise, but a lot of noise actually becomes necessary to have any semblance of privacy. It's ruined a lot of dining for me. If I wanted to eat as fast as possible while not saying anything of substance to the people I'm with for fear of being overheard, I would get take out and bring it back to my workplace to consume.
I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded.
The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression and schizophrenia [1].
How much time have you spent in the woods? It's definitly far, far from quiet. At least where I grew up. Maybe in the dead of the night, but here in the middle of the city, on a Main Street, it is also so quiet in my room that I can hear my la croix fizzing from 8 feet away.
Some visitors to Copenhagen remark that it's surprisingly quiet for a capital city. Others say it "feels boring", which I think is partly because they associate a noisy city centre (e.g. London or Paris) with fun.
There are far fewer cars in the city centre than most cities the size of Copenhagen; enough roads are restricted to people on foot or bicycles that relatively few people try and drive to, from or through it.
Definitely wait until spring, preferably summer, unless you're attracted to damp weather.
On OpenStreetMap, the pedestrianized roads are marked in a pale blue-grey [1].
They aren't labelled the same way on Google Maps, perhaps because on the smaller pedestrian streets vehicles aren't always completely banned, just strongly discouraged by the signs, surface, layout, and attitude of pedestrians.
The OSM cycle map layer needs a few updates for consistency, but most roads outside the very centre of the city have a separate cycle lane like one of these [2], or else almost no traffic. At school time or weekends I see 5-6 year old children cycling with their parents — other cyclists will overtake more carefully. Older children make similar journeys alone.
The Netherlands is similar. Within cities, the canals lead to some different approaches, and between cities, they provide nice long-distance cycling routes. I think the Netherlands is probably the better destination for a cycling holiday, but the difference between a Dutch and Danish city doesn't matter for a city holiday.
I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were silent... and then I got my hopes crushed.
I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light pollution.
In the UK at least, there's a good reason behind the law. Electric cars are required to make noise so that visually impaired people know a car is approaching.
They already make plenty of road noise just from the friction of the tires. If visually impaired people can't hear it, then it's likely because of all the OTHER sources of noise pollution around them.
Traffic in a city where every street is cobblestone and they are traveled by horses with iron shoes pulling carts and carriages with iron tired wheels is not going to be very quiet.
I would expect that the noise was in fact less than modern vehicles but the cities of the past were not full of the quiet sounds of nature that people like to whitewash their imagination with.
Cars, industrial equipment, and things like HVAC systems all play a big role.
Racism was definitely the primary motivator of White flight for the cities, but I also wonder to what extent people just wanted to get away from industrial noise pollution, which surely must have been at a peak during that era.
Traffic makes a big difference. I was in Venice recently, and the only noise I could hear was suitcases rolling over the cobbles. It really brought home how much noise traffic makes.
There are probably a lot more cars on the road than there ever were carriages. I'd also suspect that copious amounts of horse manure on top of the cobble stones have a dampening effect.
I wouldn't bet on it. The sound of horseshoes on anything hard is really loud. Also: Which horrible place has eighteen-wheelers driving in living areas? Carriages were everywhere.
Not sure about that, in particular herding animals into the centre of towns and cities to be slaughtered must have been noisy. Also iron horseshoes on stone paving/cobbles were apparently very loud.
From the article, it seems like it's not about "figuring it out", but about noisy places being more fashionable/ profitable. That said, I hope some keen entrepreneur will open, say, a restaurant in London with curtains, carpets and tablecloths. Don't think such a place exists, but maybe the time is ripe...
Yes nearly everywhere plays music nowadays. I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself. Don't think about it too hard people, just buy more.
> I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself.
To a certain extent, this is actually true.
I have read more than a few stories recently where people have literally said they hate quietness, and need noise surrounding them (especially other people), so that they didn't have to be alone with their thoughts.
One thing that's becoming near-impossible is finding places to drink (as in pubs or bars) without piped music. This contributes significantly to noise. It's done of course so that we shout ourselves hoarse trying to have a conversation, so we buy more drinks to lubricate our throat, but even formerly quiet pubs near me have started doing it.
I help organise events and it's been our biggest complaint for some venues: that as the afternoon progresses, the music gets so loud it's impossible to hold a conversation.
We pass the complaints along, but the response is usually "Corporate insists we do this, we hate it too, apparently it makes people buy more drinks".
In practice, at least from the data I've gathered, it drives people away.
> In practice, at least from the data I've gathered, it drives people away
It would really depend on the venue, but I managed and worked in a few bars and clubs in the mid 2000s and the daytime crowd preferred more quiet, but then in the evening, if the music was soft, there was a perception that the bar was “dead” or had fewer people tha. It actually did. A loud bar with few people gets more interest from the potential patrons because it’s perceived as more lively and crowded than it may actually be. Then it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually becomes more lively and crowded. When your business is based on customer volume, quiet and contemplative is a fast way to go out of business. Exceptions are high end, romantic martini bars selling $18 drinks or scotch bars selling high end spirits to a discerning clientele. For your average brew-pub or standard “bar,” silence equals death. You can see this anywhere there is a strip of bars and clubs, the quiet places are the ones not selling as much. Most people go to bars at night for the purpose of socializing and having fun. Most bar patrons don’t associate “fun” with quiet. Anyone that has worked in the bar business knows that you make more money with loud than you do with quiet — with some exceptions of course.
Restaurants on the other hand, in my experience, quiet does better for the restaurants that have been around awhile, while loud and lively tends to prop up the newer places because the “energy” reinforces the “hype” around perceived popularity.
Even worse is television in restaurants. There is this GREAT restaurant with near me with a little side room that has a really cozy fireplace in it (VERY rare for Phoenix). The lighting for the room, however, has been destroyed by the TV. Also who on earth wants to watch ads while they are eating dinner? It's mind boggling because the place is also somewhat high end.
Dick's hideaway on 16th street and Bethany Home. Some of the best food I've ever had! Really lovely place but...just why on earth they have TVs in there? It just doesn't fit at all with the rest of the fantastic ambiance.
In the UK my partner and I have started going to Wetherspoons pubs. They're reviled in middle-class circles as a cheap, chavvy chain that buys-out traditional pubs but they're clean, friendly and QUIET.
I agree, although in my experience the Wetherspoons volume varies over the full range.
I have a local Wetherspoons and go occasionally. If it's quiet I'll stay. But sometimes it's unbearably loud just because it's packed with raucous people in a large, acoustically non-absorbent room, to the point that I hear "crackling" in my ears.
It's still much better than the pub next to it, which serves food I like, but is painfully loud all the time inside - even when it's completely empty. That's not acoustics. They play music at a hideous volume, and won't turn it down even when the place is empty - "company policy". I listen to music on headphones much of the day, sometimes quite loud. So it's not like I dislike music. Being the only two customers in a huge pub and unable to hear each other talk seems ridiculous to me.
We used to go regularly, for the food. Don't go any more - because of the music volume.
Another publike food place locally was really nice when we first went, shortly after it opened. It's become louder and louder each time we've visited - and now sadly that place is vetoed because of the volume too.
Again, it's because they play music ridiculously loud. It's lost the charm which I think was its selling point when they opened, and we won't go back.
Well, we joked we might go back wearing industrial ear defenders to make a point :)
At a fourth pub I went to an informal business meeting recently. It was afternoon, and not many customers yet. We had to ask them to turn down the music repeatedly just to hear each other.
Seems to be a theme. I'm not sure why they do it, because I doubt their staff or the other customers enjoy it much either.
I'm familiar with Spoons, the main problem is that they have TV's visible from anywhere you're sitting (at least in the ones near me) that are incredibly distracting.
Ugh, they're usually not clean or friendly, the staff are also usually incompetent and slow. I have been in them a lot over the years for various reasons and my best description of weatherspoons would be a bit shit.
That they don't buy a music license is a cost saving measure.
They're ok when they first open, but after a year or two get a bit of a run down feeling.
I also walk past one of my local ones occasionally at 9:30 in the morning, there's always a few old men already drinking pints of lager in there, it's sad.
Old men drinking pints of lager in Spoons early in the morning is a national problem. It's basically treated as cheap daycare for elder relatives by some families - drop dad off with £20 first thing in the morning and pick him up at closing time.
The worst part by far is how they never sit together, they all sit individually alone.
That's a shame, I find the majority of them vary between OK and Excellent. The only ones I consider shit are Manchester Piccadilly, Monument in London, one in Carlisle and another in Hull.
There are also some really excellent ones such as one I found near the south downs. Can't exactly remember where but it had two roaring log fires in it. Great Malvern one is nearly as good.
I think the mechanism is supposed to be that you talk less, which in turn means you drink more.
Places serving food have piped music so you finish your meal more quickly so they sell more covers; you're unlikely to sit around chatting afterwards with music playing.
They also clear plates at the earliest chance providing an enhanced social pressure to finish.
My partner and I are 'mystery shoppers' for restaurants. We have our bill covered plus a bit extra on top (but have to fill out hefty, detailed questionnaires afterwards).
One of the things there's always a whole section on is timing: every single interaction has a time-window in which it must occur. You must be greeted within (t1), you must be seated within (t2). Plates must be cleared within (t3), you must have a 'table touch' (is everything ok with your food?) within (t4), etc.
Some discrete note-taking is often needed (descriptions of all serving staff are required too). We're pretty good at it by now, but have been 'rumbled' once. You can tell when it happens—suddenly you start getting offered the opportunity to try all the different wines they have, for free, given free desserts. Of course it doesn't matter as the meal is paid for, and often slows down the service!
I personally hate it when a waiter comes up, interrupts my meal, and asks if everything is OK with my food. Are you seriously saying restaurants are being encouraged to do this?
It has to do with the timing of it, like gp mentioned. Current best practice is that that waiter should come by within a couple minutes of the food arriving to top off water and make sure your first bites were as expected so that any problems can be fixed early in the meal.
This is much preferred to a manager only hearing about a problem after all the food has been eaten or the customer has sat staring at a plate with unsatisfactory food on it while their companions eat (making everyone less comfortable as generally humans don’t like to eat when others haven’t had the opportunity to).
My father believed that truly great restaurants don't do this, because they KNOW their food is perfect.
Practically speaking, though, dpeck is right... shortly after the food is dropped, the waiter should confirm the meal is to the customer's expectations. This is also the chance for customers to ask for condiments, get a replacement fork for the one they dropped, etc. Nothing worse than sitting in front of a hot meal you can't eat and being unable to get the waiter's attention.
More seriously, it all depends on the "level" of service, and - ultimately - on the ratio waiters/served people, which is usually between 1/6-1/10 (excellent service) and 1/25-1/30 (scarce or lacking service).
Yes, it's important to the restaurant to know if your meal is okay while there's still a chance to do something about it. It's also a chance to ask for anything else without a restaurant of people flagging down the wait staff.
Somehow other cultures (IME: China, many parts of Europe, Korea) do fine with people being expected to flag down wait staff when they want to talk to them.
As per the name, only one of those models actually interrupts your meal though. Quite often it's literally as I'm chewing the first bite. So by those metrics, the most irritating waiters would have the best times.
My pet hate is when I'm asked questions while I'm actually eating and I'm expected to answer with a mouth full of food.
I always dreamed of a restaurant that has call buttons on the table, like in a plane or hospital.
> My pet hate is when I'm asked questions while I'm actually eating and I'm expected to answer with a mouth full of food.
I definitely understand that this can be very annoying, but like I said, there are tradeoffs to both. Being a bit socially anxious myself, I prefer not to have to compete with the other diners for the server's attention, so the polling model is better for me.
as an aside, when I go to nicer restaurants I find that the servers tend to be more skilled/graceful. I don't know exactly how they do it, but they always seem to come by at the perfect moment to check whether the food is okay without interrupting a bite/conversation.
in theory, call buttons would be pretty nice, but I think some people would find it to cheapen the experience.
It generally seems odd to me, but at my job we used to go at lunch time to a place which didn't do this, and they would simply lose one person's order some of the time (i'd say 1 in 10). It's really annoying to be the one person whose food hasn't arrived yet wondering for ages if they are being slow or have forgotten. This extra touch gives them the opportunity to find out that they forgot something without completely pissing off the customer.
A few years back, here in Vienna bars didn't turn on TVs for a whole year (there was a notice on the TVs about how they can't turn them on for some reason, and to complain to $WHOEVER, not sure of the details). It was magnificent.
Even better, one pub didn't have music at all. It was the best pub in town, and that's not just my opinion because it was one of the busiest pubs.
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the article is that loud restaurants can provide diners with a sense of privacy. In a sea of noise your conversation will easily be drowned out before reaching others. Additionally, more ambient noise means less chances of being irritated by other diners.
It also means I can't understand my wife when she speaks. It is bad enough at home with my kids yelling at the top of their lungs (any ideas on how to break them of this?), when we go out it is impossible.
separate them when play becomes loud. take away toys etc. restore peace, give the toys back.
they will scream and fight it a lot the first few time, but if you keep a constant, predictable and strict response they'll get the idea, eventually, that they need to play in acceptable ways.
also make it clear that it only applies in specific time/places (evening, home, public indoor building) and where it's acceptable (afternoons, parks, etc)
Use a water spray bottle - No one, including [children], like to be squirted with water, so you can try a quick spritz at your [child] if they are somewhere or doing something they shouldn't be.
Respectfully, this advice is absolutely idiotic. If your toddler pees their pants, do you rub their face in it too?
I'm not a proponent of treating children identically to adults, but children should still be afforded some aspects of human dignity. Spraying them with a water bottle like a malfeasant feline is not a polite way to treat anyone, regardless of age.
If you do this to your child, you are teaching them that this is an acceptable way to treat people that bother them. If you do not end up with an egocentric and inconsiderate child after subjecting them to this, it will be from pure luck.
I once was at a huge car expo, and French and German halls were adjacent to each other. For some reason, all French car makers had extremely loud music at their spaces, like if they were trying to be louder than each other. It was basically impossible to be there.
The German hall (all three major makers) had complete silence inside. So this is also a cultural thing, and a pretty strong one as this happened in Moscow, and most of the workers were Russians of course.
I read once, can't remember where, that once the sound in a room with people talking reaches a certain level, it will get increasingly loud. The reason being, if sound is below a certain level, we can hear each other while we speak at normal volumes and the other person near us will be able to understand us.
However, once volume reaches a certain background level, we have to raise our voices to be understood over the background noise which increases the overall background level which causes others to have to raise their voices over the new background level ever increasing.
Definitely consistent with my experience. One time I was in a restaurant where this sort of arms race dynamic was occurring, and at some point a guy just did one of those really loud two-fingered whistles, then in the resulting silence said something like "let's all try to keep it down in here". It worked incredibly well, and the effect was actually very persistent.
Restaurants in Germany I've been to are usually pretty quiet. This excludes fast food places, bars (restaurants that serve cocktails are included in that), low-end non-German places (I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places) and all 3 American(-style) restaurants I've been to.
For normal restaurants, I can actually have a conversation. But when I go to some club or bar, I need to align my ears carefully and have the speaker talk directly to me, otherwise, I'd have no chance of understanding anything.
> I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places
In Berlin there are a lot of low-end (as in cheap) Vietnamese and to a lesser extent Thai restaurants that I would call real restaurants. Tend to be pretty quiet in my experience even when they're relatively full.
Yes! It seems like somehow many bar/restaurant owners have no interest in making their spaces sonically comfortable. I've been in some that felt like they were designed for maximum reverb. The few ones with acoustic panels on the walls / ceilings are so nice in comparison. I really hope caring about the way your place sounds becomes standard.
I strongly dislike restaurants for their extreme noise levels and rarely manage to sit in one for longer than an hour without getting agitated.
There are few restaurants I know that allow us to be seated in quiet areas and/or that are much more quiet due to their design, and those are the restaurants that I'll visit often.
The author, Kate Wagner, is also the author of the McMansion Hell blog: http://mcmansionhell.com/ If you haven't read it before, spend a few minutes there. It's a treat.
Some of the best restaurants I've been to, sonically speaking, have been in old houses that were converted into dining establishments. Because there's a limit to how much they can knock out interior walls, there are only two or three tables to a room, and the loud kitchen is necessarily in a different room from the dining. This really keeps a lid on the noise and lets you have an intelligent conversation at your table.
I don’t enjoy going out to eat anymore and prefer to DoorDash food precisely because it’s too loud. The ironic thing is I have hearing damage so you’d think it would bother me less.
I can’t think, can’t hear my wife, and can’t relax and enjoy my meal.
I do not understand why every small restaurant has to have high ceilings with no plenum so the A/C sounds like a jet engine. Surely I’m not the only customer annoyed by this.
There's a really nice restaurant in our neighbourhood, with amazing food, and you need to reserve a couple days in advance. But whenever we go there, it's ridiculously noisy. They went for a bare stone industrial look, and that clearly doesn't dampen any sound, so you end up hearing everybody in the restaurant all at once.
But we are also to blame; when we bought our house, we removed some walls to let more light in, and everything is really tight and smooth, and therefore reflects all sound. We got bad acoustics in our home.
We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior anywhere.
Please the eye and punish the ear, seems to be the interior design rule of today.
it's quite venue dependent. in some italian trattoria you can get people almost screaming at their table, even without a loud music, because they need to overcome the loud mouths at the nearby table to have a conversation.
I think McDonalds are designed for that purpose in a way less obtrusive way - ironically enough by the decorating being loud making people not want to linger. The chairs and seats are tight and limited in manuverabilify for one in addition to the "openness". How well does it work? Well do you want to go hang out at a McDonald's?
Ironically they later tried McCafe iniative to make lingering spaces to try to compete with Starbucks after seeing how many go there for coffee - often taking the form of a nook which fails pretty badly at the task because of the previous decorating. Illustrating quite a few other negative things about the leadership.
A LOT of people hang out at McDonald’s. Older folks, kids after school, etc. In some neighborhoods they function as something like community hubs (third spaces) during their non-peak times.
I noticed similar in a MAX in Upplands Vasby (Sweden, near Stockholm). People just hanging out, but similar fast-food-style high-contrast decor.
The big difference between that and the McD's (or even the Subway down the road) was the food at MAX was far better...! (so I can see why people were hanging around and ordering more)
> Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet.
Wrong. Restaurants are so loud because people are so loud.
My wife and I were at Freeman's in Downtown Manhattan the other day. It was so loud we decided to scream to see if anyone noticed. And since noone seemed to turn their heads, we screamed louder and louder, and literally no one could hear us.
This is an American thing, it doesn't happen in Paris, nor in London, nor in Japan, nor in Mexico.
Yes, Americans are loud. But the acoustics of the space one talks do in fact make a difference. If the surrounding space reflects a lot of sound, the restaurant will be louder than if the surrounding space absorbs a lot of sound.
It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task.
My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators.
./rant
Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting, tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.