Common interests

As these interviews illustrate, love is not necessarily in the air in coffee bars.

The strange thing about this thought is that it makes sense. It is indisputable, statistically and mundanely, that most love relationships are started at work or during studies. In coffee bars, where the customers are sober and always on the way to somewhere else, love is probably usually unimaginable.

7.4.5. Common interests

People with shared interests are also an important coffee bar customer group;

informal gathering places in the urban landscape seem to address a demand.

Marginal groups, such as homosexuals, have traditionally used more shady spaces in the urban sphere where they could meet; have physical relationships or other forms of contact (Gavin Brown 2004, 93). The coffee bars in

comparison attract other types of groups that share interests; interests that are subject to less prejudice and suppression. For instance, “normal” interests shared by people in the same situation, such as breastfeeding women strolling the streets with their newborns, who account for a large proportion of the customers. In Norway, this group’s size is large due to the extensive maternity leave; family policies have also been amended, so that parental leave now includes men to a greater extent; consequently, men on parental leave now also make up a customer group.

In Norway, women with newly-born babies are established into non-compulsory post-natal groups organized by the child health clinic in their neighborhood. All the coffee bar owners are aware of the importance of these groups. Those who are on parental leave find the coffee bars suitable for many reasons. One is the design. The huge windows make it easy for parents to keep an eye on their strollers while they are inside drinking their coffee. If a child wakes up or moves in the stroller, the mother or the father can act quickly if necessary. This feature of coffee bars (the windows) means that parents are able to relax and use the coffee bars quite a lot. Another important feature of the coffee bars in this regard is that they accept breastfeeding women; this indicates the level of informality of coffee bars. Anne Line, an active stroller, who is breastfeeding her second child next to the window in Kaffebrenneriet, said:

It’s important that you can meet other members in your post-natal group without a lot of complications, just for the need and the joy of meeting each other. The coffee bar suits these needs perfectly.

Ella, who lives in Tonsenhagen and is a frequent use of Kaffehjørnet, praises the coffee bar as a natural starting point for a walk: “What would we do without it? It’s a natural place to meet for those of us who have kids and want to go for a walk together.”

A coffee bar is also easy to use because of the lack of demands on the customers; this reason seems to be given by all kinds of customers, but especially the women on maternity leave.

Some informants also emphasize that a coffee bar is chosen not only because of its function as a meeting place, but for other reasons as well; as expressed by Anne Line:

Good coffee tastes incredibly good when you are walking around in a sleep-deprived state all the time! Bad coffee during the (child’s) daytime nap almost ruins my day.

As mentioned above, Elisabeth Toth, the owner of Evita Espressobar, has observed that a group that contributes substantially to her business is the other shop employees in her neighborhood, Smalgangen. Before she opened her coffee bar they had nowhere to meet before they opened their shops at ten; Elisabeth Toth said:

Many of those who work in the shops and those who run them are my regulars. They were in fact the first defined group – in my eyes – that started to use Evita on a regular basis.

Today many of those who work in the surrounding shops in Smalgangen, and in Grønlands Torg, start the day with a cup of coffee and a friendly chat. This group of customers comes into the coffee bar from about nine o’clock. Many of them say that Evita has made a substantial difference to the small

entrepreneurs and the employees in Smalgangen and Grønlands Torg. Evita has developed into a genuine meeting place, and the various people who work in the area have grown much closer, and got to know each other; and

friendship and business contacts have been nurtured. One person who owns a neighboring store formulates this in the following way:

…it goes back so long ago, so you take it for granted; but it hasn’t always been like this. If you look back, things were very different then. Evita was the place where we developed close contacts, where we got to know each other, and so managed to develop many good relationships; we have built an

environment down here. Before, it was pretty dull here you know. (comment: ‘here’ means the business community of Smalgangen and Grønlands Torg).

It is ten to nine in the morning; I am sitting at a table drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, Dagbladet. Evita fills up with customers, at quite a pace – within 15 minutes the place is absolutely crowded, inside and outside. All the customers who are here at this time of day seem to know each other, as they nod or talk a little to each other. A group of Asians occupy a table; I have discovered that they have a preference for the table in the west part of the tiny space; so if you are a regular, you know not to sit down at that table at that time of the morning. Three women in their mid-forties also team up, and take a table outside to the left of the entrance; however, if this table is occupied when they arrive, it does not bother them:

We got our table, but on the other hand we’re not that picky.

It’s not the table that is the most important thing here. It’s everything else. The little daily coffee with the girls,

said Rita who always sits outside, no matter what the weather. Cigarettes and coffee mean you can’t sit inside. For Rita, Evita in Smalgangen is the social-glue for the shopkeepers in the street. It is here they have developed friendships, and it is here the first conversations about joint pursuits take place; it is here business and pleasure are mixed; it is here where informal social relationships develop, and to such an extent that it makes it more interesting to run a business in Smalgangen than it would have been without Evita.

Evita in Smalgangen is different to any other coffee bar I have visited in the center of Oslo. It is much more of a social place; the large majority of those who visit Evita arrive with someone else; on average 6 out of 10 arrive

with someone else, or end up in socializing situations. Because the place functions as a meeting place for the various commercial players in the neighborhood, it becomes very social, but also due to the fact that many of the other regulars seem to have a lot of time to spend at Evita.

Such as Leif, he has time. Lots of time. He does not work. He is on welfare and receives disability benefit. This is perhaps not unusual in this part of the city; in Gamle Oslo, disability benefit is more common than in any other part of the city (Bråthen, Djuve et al. 2007). Leif is married, in his mid-fifties, and his wife still works. Leif lost his job in a cargo shipment company a few years ago, and although it was during a period of economic growth, he found it hard to find new work; he has also had lots of problems with his back. After all he has been part of the workforce since he was 15 years old:

I have paid my contribution to society; I don’t owe it anything now,

he said, and gives a rather long and well-reasoned little lecture on the relationship between work, welfare and psychical pain. Leif is a talker. He talks with almost everybody that is interested in listening. Very often he sits in the shade under the trees outside the coffee bar, drinks his coffee, reads VG – a daily tabloid newspaper – and chats with those on the next table or those who sit down at his table. Leif is the kind of socializer who invites you into conversations. And he smokes. Cigarettes and coffee. A combination that seems to be dying out on the west side of town; but it is more alive and more integrated into the coffee consumption in the east.

Perhaps because smoking (outside only) seems to be just as much the rule as the opposite, the social character of the place is different.

Smoking tends to signify the social and cultural differences between these once traditional working class districts and the more affluent areas on the west side. Even if the gentrification is overwhelming in the streets of

Grønland, there is still a distinctive flavor and fabric of another social reality.

The presence of poverty, drugs, crime and social deprivation is not only to be found in the statistics for the district, but also in the visual appearance of the place. In Grønland things look different. The clothes people wear are less fashionable, and there are no real up-market brand shops; people on the streets do not seem to be concerned with fashion; and there is a great number of people dressed in ways which some may consider bizarre; the fashionistas are hardly ever seen. And then there is of course the visible traces of poverty.

There may be few poor people with blankets draped on their backs (as seen in

other parts of the world); but you will nevertheless see socially deprived people wearing soiled clothes.

The population in Grønland includes a lot of ethnic minorities. This is reflected in the coffee bar’s clientele: almost 50 percent of the guests at Evita belong to an ethnic minority. In other words, the diversity of the local community, Grønland, is reflected amongst the guests of the coffee bar.

Although, coffee bars may be considered as being hallmarks of the emerging educated middle class, it doesn’t mean that they are incapable of absorbing a more representative section of the cultural and social surroundings.