Who Pays for the Chair

The owner, Riccardo Camporesi, explained himself to the Rome daily la Repubblica, and the Italian news site Open retold it on 28 August. A guest at a table still carries the cup and saucer back to the counter, so the euro buys the chair and nothing else. Coffee at the counter costs 1.30 euros, and Camporesi pointed out that a breakfast of coffee and a cornetto, 2.80 euros in total, often ends up occupying a table for 45 minutes. He admitted that some guests felt robbed. One reviewer wrote that he'd never seen a bar where you pay to sit.

Then customers offered a fix: charge the tourists and leave the locals alone. Camporesi refused. "Non voglio fare distinzioni," he said. I don't want to make distinctions.

He wasn't the first. A bar called Pavé in Milan put a flat one-euro coperto on its receipts in 2023, and its owner called it absolutely normal that a table costs more. But Camporesi's refusal stayed with me. He had decided that the price would sort his guests and nothing else would, and he said so out loud.

I know what a Florentine counter feels like at half past nine in the morning. In June 2014 I went to Florence for the Calcio Storico, the costumed, bare-knuckled football the city's four historic quarters play every June in Piazza Santa Croce, and I drank most of my coffees that week standing up. The talk at the counter was the talk of the city that month: who'd been hurt in the last match, which quarter would make the final, whether Fiorentina would hold on to its best players over the summer. I didn't follow half of it. Nobody asked me where I was from before handing me a cup.

In 1983 Howard Schultz worked for a small Seattle company called Starbucks that sold coffee beans, and he went to Milan. Thirty-five years later, in an open letter to Starbucks customers, he described the walk: cafés and espresso bars on every street, and inside them "a sense of community and human connection." The business magazine International Finance quotes him on what he'd found, a "third place between home and work," and adds his next sentence: "But the beverage was the draw."

In Rome in 2016 I walked into a bar, which in Italy means a counter with a coffee machine behind it, and said "Un caffè, per favore." The machine hissed, the barista set the cup down on its saucer, and the man next to me, a newspaper folded under his elbow, asked how my day was going.

He asked because he assumed I had the Italian to answer: after saying it about a hundred times, I'd finally got the tone right. I had ordered the way a regular orders, so he talked to me like one, and my guess is that he had been standing at that counter for forty years. We got through the heat and his opinion of the traffic before his English, which we'd switched to, ran out. He finished his coffee and nodded to the barista on his way out.

A year before Rome I'd spent an evening in a pub in Dingle, a fishing town near the end of a peninsula in County Kerry. The barman and a guest at the bar talked with me for most of it, and by the second pint the talk had moved on to family, to the cousins who'd left for Boston and the ones who'd stayed for the boats. Somebody near the back started a song, the room came in on the chorus, and I walked out feeling taken in almost like family.

If you've traveled much, you've probably been the stranger at a counter like that, and you've probably heard the usual explanation: Italians are warm, the Irish are hospitable, and visitors like us collect the benefit. There's something in that.

But I was a visitor each time, so I can tell you how the welcome felt and nothing about how the same counter felt to the people who stood there every morning. Cristian Marone, who co-manages a Milan bar called Bar dei Bossi, gave NPR, America's public radio network, the regulars' side in 2017 when he pictured himself walking into Starbucks: "I would feel like a number, not a customer. In our bar, customer care is crucial."

Take a counter at eight in the morning with a bank director on one side and the person who cleans the bank's offices on the other. Both order an espresso, both pay the same, and the whole thing is over in a minute. I think that equality was never planned. A cup this cheap and this quick leaves nothing to rank people by, and a counter has no better chair to sell.

Now do the math on that Florentine breakfast. At the counter it costs 2.80 euros and is over in a few minutes, while the same breakfast seated costs a euro more and holds the table for 45. Per minute, the counter earns several times what the chair at the back earns, which makes it the most productive real estate in the building. The equality comes free with the speed. Since I did that math, I've sorted every place in this piece by what it really sells, velocity or time. A counter sells velocity, so it can afford to treat everyone the same, and a café with armchairs sells time, which it has to price, and the price decides who stays.

In Ireland, for most of the twentieth century, the publican, the licensed keeper of the pub, decided. The Irish Echo, a New York newspaper for the Irish diaspora, ran a list in 2013 of what a woman couldn't do in Ireland in 1970, and it includes this: some pubs refused to admit women at all, some let them in only with a man, and plenty wouldn't serve a woman a pint. The snug, a small screened compartment with a hatch to the bar, gave the women who did come a corner where nobody could see them drink.

I lived in Kuala Lumpur twice, either side of 2020, and the city puts the same question to two kinds of place. A kopitiam, the old coffee shop run by Chinese Malaysian families, usually isn't halal, so many of the city's Muslims walk past its door. A mamak, run by Indian Muslims, is halal, so almost everyone can walk in. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, a professor at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, calls mamak stalls the one place where people of every income, race and religion meet. That's one scholar's view, and it matches what I saw.

I've sat in mamaks at eleven at night more often than I can count, and the scene barely changes: a match from Spain on the television, roti canai and teh tarik, flatbread and pulled milk tea, on a steel table, a lawyer still in his office shirt and a delivery rider with his helmet on the chair beside him, both watching the same replay. The bill gives neither of them a rank.

Who walks in can change, too. Tapah Kopitiam, close to a century old, serves only halal food, and the woman who runs it told Malaysia's national news agency that about 70 percent of her customers are Malay. Same kind of coffee shop, different crowd, because the kitchen is halal.

That makes two questions. Culture, religion and law answer who gets in. The price list answers how the people inside treat each other. Schultz's Milan answered both without anyone noticing, and Starbucks had to answer both on purpose.

In April 2018 two Black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks while waiting without ordering. The company answered by opening its cafés and restrooms to anyone, purchase or none, under a Third Place Policy. In his open letter, the same one that carried the Milan memory, Schultz wrote that he'd wanted the stores to be "comfortable, safe spaces where everyone had an opportunity to enjoy coffee." In the company that had taken its idea from a Milan bar, the question of who may sit had ended in an arrest.

Five months later Starbucks opened in Milan, in a former post office, with a roastery. Schultz called it "the culmination of a great dream" and said the company came "with humility and respect." Euronews reported that an espresso cost 1.80 euros, nearly double the city's average, and that an Italian consumer group complained to the competition authority about overcharging.

Italy hasn't moved. Starbucks ended 2024 with 47 stores there, set against the 128,000 bar businesses FIPE counts. Australia went the same way, with more than 70 percent of its stores closed by CNBC's count. Malaysia is the exception. Starbucks Malaysia peaked at about 400 stores and stood at 287 in December 2025, according to the New Straits Times, after rent disputes and a customer boycott. That's still roughly six times Italy's store count.

And then the company wrote down what every counter I've mentioned had enforced without saying so. On 27 January 2025 Starbucks reversed the Third Place Policy in its company-owned stores in North America: you now need to buy something to use the café, the patio or the restrooms. Jaci Anderson, the company's director of corporate communications, said the code of conduct helps Starbucks "prioritize our paying customers who want to sit and enjoy our cafes."

So the idea left Milan in 1983 as a cup that happened to have people standing around it. It spent forty years learning that somebody has to pay for the people, and it came home in 2025 as a euro on a Florentine bill. The difference is that the Florentine bill says what it's for.

I'm German, so I owe you a look at home. North Rhine-Westphalia's statistics office counted just over 14,000 Kneipen, German for a pub with a hint of bar, in 2006 and just over 8,000 in 2023, a fall of almost 42 percent, while the number of restaurants held fairly steady. Across the country, beer sales fell 6 percent in the latest year to about 78 million hectoliters, the lowest since records began in 1993. Britain tells the same story: the BBPA, the brewers and pubs association, counts 44,650 pubs in 2025 against 60,800 in 2000. It's a lobby asking for tax relief, so I'd trust the count and take its explanations with a grain of salt.

Here's how I read the Kneipe. It sells its chairs inside the drinks: the second and third round pay for the stool the first one sat on. The pastry shop in Florence prints the chair on the receipt, and the Kneipe folded it into the beer, which worked as long as the Germans drank enough beer. I found no study of Kneipe margins, so this is my own math. Once people drink fewer beers per evening, the chair loses part of its payer.

In 2017/18 I was a regular at Feeka Coffee Roasters in Bukit Bintang. Two of the staff greeted me gladly again and again, and they had learned my usual order. After a few weeks one of them would start it when I came through the door, before I'd said a word.

Feeka's prices came close to Western ones, and they never bothered me, because I came from the West. The people they'd bother are the ones who grew up on kopitiam and mamak prices, for whom thirty mornings suddenly cost six times as much. It shows me what a price has to protect if recognition is going to happen. Recognition needs a customer who comes back, and coming back thirty times a month needs a price you can pay thirty times a month.

Starbucks has built recognition into software. Its app remembers your usual order, and almost a third of the orders in its American stores are now placed through it before the customer has walked in. At the end of September 2025 the company counted 34.2 million active members of its rewards program in the United States, and they accounted for 58 percent of what customers spent in its company-operated American stores. At Feeka two people learned my order. At Starbucks a database learns it, and what used to live in a barista's memory now belongs to the company.

The last step takes the chair off the bill altogether and writes it into a contract. Soho House opened in London in 1995 and had about 270,000 members by 2025, the year a group led by MCR Hotels agreed to take it private in a deal worth 2.7 billion dollars. I like working from places like that, and from the coworking spaces that borrowed the model, and they've shown me how many ways there are to sell a seat.

A coworking space will sell you a day at the front desk, a week or a month, so a visitor can belong for exactly as long as a trip lasts. Plenty of private clubs, especially in America, charge an annual fee and then a minimum you have to spend on food and drink on top of it. That's the Kneipe's old trick written into a contract: the membership buys the right to sit, and the minimum keeps you ordering.

That gives me a test I didn't have when I started. A third place is a place where a stranger gets in on the first visit and can afford to come thirty mornings in a row. Florence and Rome passed it, and the Irish pub of 1970 failed it for half the population. The kopitiam and the mamak pass or fail depending on who you are. Feeka passed both, for me. A members' club fails the first half by design and passes the second for the people it accepts.

I like these cafés, and that's the uncomfortable part. The new formats let in anyone and sort by what a chair costs, and I'm a customer the sorting favors. The question I keep coming back to is what a new place would have to give up to earn what the counter earns without trying.

So here's my answer to the question I sat down with.

If I opened a third place tomorrow, I'd run two businesses under one roof.

At the front, a counter that sells velocity at a price anyone could pay thirty mornings in a row, with staff who learn the regulars' orders without needing an app for it. At the back, a time business, sold openly by the hour, the day or the month to the people who need the outlet and the quiet table, the way coworking spaces and clubs already do it. The people buying time pay for their own chairs, and the counter stays the place where the bank director and the cleaner stand side by side. A coperto taxes the chair after the fact, and this sells it as a product of its own.

That difference matters more than it looks. French cafés have to post two prices, one for the zinc counter and one for the room or the terrace. Italian bars add their table surcharge, and plenty of travelers read both as a penalty for sitting down. A product feels different. A day at the quiet table with the coffee included, or a desk with its own light and outlet that you chose and booked, is something the guest buys, and the reviews in Florence show how it feels when a guest thinks he's been fined.

Pricing is my trade, and the same gap in price can tell two very different stories. Italy tells it as a surcharge for sitting down. I'd tell it the other way round: the room carries the normal price, and the counter carries a price for people on their way somewhere, a small thank-you for taking the espresso and the cornetto standing up.

The economist Richard Thaler noticed decades ago that the credit card industry wanted the gap between cash and card prices called a cash discount, because a surcharge feels like a loss and a discount feels like a gift. Nobody should feel hurried by the counter price. It's there for the person with a train to catch or a meeting to get to, and the person who stays all afternoon at the back should feel just as welcome, because the room price is simply the price on the menu.

I'd add a third payer, the one Monocle found. Since 2013 its cafés in London, Tokyo and Zurich have served coffee within reach of the magazine and the brand's own products, and the way I read it, the café is an advertisement the brand is happy to pay for. In Tokyo, Daikanyama T-Site, the bookshop complex the rental chain Tsutaya built, lets you sit upstairs in its Anjin lounge among vintage magazines with a cocktail.

I'd open it in more than one city, the bigger ones first: London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dubai, Tokyo. The barista in Barcelona won't know the order you gave in Dubai, and I'm fine with that. What should travel is the feeling, the same counter, the same light and the same shelf, so a stranger who walks in anywhere feels like a regular from the first cup.

The line I wouldn't cross is the one that bothers me about Soho House and WeWork, a price so high that most people never get past the front desk. In my version anyone walks in, in a suit or in street clothes, and stands at the same counter for the same coffee. The money comes from the people who want more than the counter, and they pay for that more openly, as a product. The bank director and the cleaner still meet at the front, and if either of them wants the quiet table at the back for the afternoon, the menu tells them what it costs.

My table has one of the room's two outlets, and I've never been asked to pay for it. Somebody's freddo espresso is covering that chair, possibly my own, and I'd rather know whose before it turns up on a receipt.