[LINK] "Welcome to coffeetown"

[rfmcdonald]

Last week's blog post by the National Post's Rob Roberts takes an interesting look at Torontonians love for coffee and the places where it's sold.

Toronto has become a city that runs on coffee. Our downtown is thoroughly caffeine-fuelled, as made obvious by the per-square-metre concentration of Starbucks, Timothy's, Second Cups, Tim Hortons and other chains, along with a handful of independent cafes. Then there are the city's loose orbit of coffeetowns, neighbourhoods where coffee shops easily outnumber vegetable stands --or even bars.

Toronto's caffeinated hubs have emerged in the past decade, each shop unequal parts pit stop and ad hoc social centre, catering to the needs of emerging neighbourhoods where a good barista and reliable wi-fiaccess in the middle of the day has trumped cheap groceries, for adults who need to be fuelled and connected.

[. . .]

[M]aybe -- just maybe -- coffee isn't the point. While most of the traffic in and out of a coffee shop are in search of a caffeine fix, it's rare to find a place without at least a few tables, a stack of dog-eared magazines or newspapers, and a crowd taking advantage of the free wi-fi. Rare is the cafe owner these days who doesn't offer broadband gratis to his laptop-toting customers --it's a perk built into the cost of doing business, like the cardboard cup sleeves and wooden stir sticks. It's also worth remembering that when Starbucks arrived in Canada in 1996, it piggybacked on the then-nascent Indigo bookstores, with their comfy chairs and tacit encouragement of customers as loiterers.

[. . .]

While a ubiquity of cafes is something a European would take for granted, they remain a noteworthy phenomenon in a city like Toronto. The Methodist probity embedded in the city's fossil memory might look askance at what looks like so much creative loafing, but they're a sign that freelancers and telecommuters can afford homes in resurgent neighbourhoods, and that the fitfully employed can still connect with their affordable luxury. Whatever else they may be -- real estate bellwether, legal narcotic purveyor -- our coffeetown's coffee shops are a canary in the coal mine, letting us know that the economic air is, for the moment, still clean. When they go, we're in real trouble.

For the record, I am employed, and I am enjoying a nice sandwich and large coffee (naturally) while enjoying WiFi at Bloor/Bathurst's Aroma.