laptops

The Indignant Starbucks Squatter and the Compliance Mindset

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

OK...NOW it's selfish to squat at tables for hours.

I owe thanks to a blogger named JJ (and to Ken at Popehat, whose post brought him to my attention) for giving me one of the best illustrations of what I call “The Compliance Mindset” I have ever seen.

I’m sure it would horrify JJ to learn this, but he is ethically aligned with all the financial wheeler-dealers and unscrupulous mortgage lenders who crashed the U.S. economy. They also thrived in the Compliance Mindset, as do corrupt politicians, deceptive advertisers, dishonest journalists, sleazy lawyers, and millions of others in our culture who make life miserable for the rest of us for their own benefit. All of these people adopt the convenient belief that something must have a formal rule or law prohibiting it before it becomes wrong. This is, in fact, the opposite of the truth: if people were completely ethical, we would need very few rules. The Compliance Mindset is really an unethical rationalization that allows people to be rude, selfish, irresponsible, unfair, or worse because their conduct is technically legal and there isn’t a rule against it yet. Usually the rule or law arrives after a lot of needless harm has been done. Continue reading →

The Starbucks Principles

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Hey you squatters! I'm coming over!

The First Starbucks Principle: If you create a free and open public benefit, the use of which is contingent on mutually understood conditions of fairness and reasonableness, eventually the utility of the benefit will be destroyed by individuals who refuse to be either fair or reasonable.

The Second Starbucks Principle: Once this occurs, there will necessarily  be rules and enforcement, conflict leading to consensus and a new social norm, or the elimination of the benefit.

Starbucks is in the midst of the First Starbucks Principle, but the Second is on the way. The nice, absurdly expensive coffee shops that created a culture where coffee-lovers could drink their lattes at leisure while working at their laptops or perusing  books and newspapers, are being choked to death by arrogant and cheapskate squatters who stake out the tables and remain for hours on end, often driving out customers who just want to sit down briefly and sip.

I had read about Starbucks’ New York City shops covering up outlets at the store, limiting the squatters to the battery storage limits of their laptops, a pretty mild reform. Then, last week, I saw the problem up close: a companion and I purchased coffee at a Starbucks clone, Caribou Coffee, and found that every table was occupied by one squatter with a laptop. Out of eight tables, only one had a cup or food of any kind. We had to go outside and find a bench; I guarantee that Caribou lost some business, because I would have purchased another drink. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Cancer Researcher Sook Shin

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sook Shin and her husband are respected cancer researchers at an Oklahoma University research lab, committing their lives to finding a cure for prostate cancer. The couple recently stopped at a Panera Bread restaurant for a quick meal, and returned to their car to find a window broken, and their Apple computer, carrying years of data—the product of thousands of hours and research dollars—including, they say, a possible cancer cure, gone. Tragically, they had not backed up the data. Continue reading →