As my girlfriend and I only watched about an hour and a half of TV a week (outside of the Olympics), the decision was made to cut cable television out of our lives. As the receiver box that converted the signal for our cable TV had to physically returned, it fell to me to return it to the most convenient Rogers location. A quick postal code search showed that the store near the Davisville Subway station was the closest. I ended up wandering (and getting a bit lost) on the twisty residential streets rather than taking the main roads (east on St. Clair West, north on Yonge), but the cable box made it to its destination eventually. It was as I was returning home that I noticed that the Tim Hortons there had a new sign in the window:
"Free Wi-fi".
I had heard about this business move (started this summer) before, but this was only the second location I'd remembered advertising free Internet for customers. In a weird way, the introduction of free wi-fi is not so much a shift in strategy, so much as a return to the business model I remember Tim Hortons having back when I was in high school.*** Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I remember when Tims was a place you could go to hang out in. You would see people young and old gathering with friends after events to enjoy a hot drink and relax.
Somewhere along the way, this model was exchanged for one that favoured getting coffee in the customer's hands, and then getting the customer out of the store. Drive-thrus became the coffee delivery mechanism of choice, with some places literally only giving walk-in patrons a handful of seats facing a window. Certainly, not every Tims location transformed this way, but with the invasion of higher end coffee places such as Starbucks, I think there was probably some concession within the Tim Hortons organization that their plastic interiors couldn't compete on a "social atmosphere" level. And why should they? The drive-thru coffee market was an area they dominated.
Of course, then McDonalds figured out how to make coffee. But I don't want to dwell anymore on the economics of coffee joints.
Ray Oldenburg (a well-known sociologist) is famous for his theories of informal meeting places. The theory goes something like this: people spend most of their time in two places: their home, and their work (he refers to them as the "first" and "second" places respectively). Both of these locations are centres of normality and routine, and provide much of the stability in our lives that we crave. But human beings like a bit of chaos in their lives. Not too much of course! But enough to keep the world we live in spicy and interesting. Oldenburg refers to these places as "third places".
A third place can be fairly encompassing term, but generally it refers to places where informal activity can occur. They allow participants to kick off their shoes (metaphorically at least), forget whatever troubles and woes they're facing, and relax. They allow user to "appropriate" the space they're in, which means that there is little concern that someone is going to tap them on the shoulder and kick them out. Lingering is almost a given. "Proto-typical" examples are places such as park benches, mall food courts, pubs, and (as you might have guessed) coffee places.
The benefits of "third places" are often quite invisible, but their ability to bring people together on a regular basis brings a number of social benefits, such as the creation of new friend networks, and a reduction in cases of social isolation, the former of which affects our aging population particularly hard.
The introduction of free wi-fi is Tims declaring "loiter here", and I think that's a message that speaks to more than just the laptop crowd. It speaks to people's needs to be social creatures, especially in a world where there is already a lot of competition for "third places". Whether the strategy pays off or not for them, I think that opening up more space for people to socialize within (whatever your opinion on Tim Hortons coffee) is a good thing, especially given the amount of stores they have in Toronto (let alone Canada).
Now if we could get some more electrical outlets please...
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