> I've never seen a cafe a-la 'friends' where people hangout and constantly buy things. I'm becoming an old, so I'll chime in with the others. Before laptops

> I've never seen a cafe a-la 'friends' where people hangout and constantly buy things. I'm becoming an old, so I'll chime in with the others. Before laptops and - maybe more importantly - before cellphones, the coffee shop was the place to hang out and meet up. From 1993-2000, I practically lived in the coffee shop downtown. We had one main shop in a city of about a quarter million. We didn't get a Starbucks until 2001, of you don't count the Barnes and Noble. It was awesome. It was the nerve center of our music and art scene. It was the only place where college kids and lawyers downtown could get a latte. It was the only place where kids who couldn't get into bars yet could hang out, and the people who could go to bars would pregame there with a cup of coffee. There was a lot of cross-pollination. I met every single one of my close friends at the time at that cafe. We would sit there all day long and talk, smoke cigs, play chess, venture out into the park or the rest of the city, then meet back up at the cafe. And it was packed - in the summer, there would easily be a hundred people hanging out in and around this tiny place. We'd spill out onto the sidewalk. It was almost like a daily block party. But back to the whole pre-cellphone pre-laptop thing - absolutely no one was there to work. It was where you went after work, to do your socializing. And without cellphones, it was a rallying point - everyone got out of work or were at their home phones at different times, so if you wanted to meet your friends, you had to hang out at the coffee shop because the odds were high they'd show up there too, uncoordinated. This concept is foreign to anyone in their 20s. The 90s coffee shop culture was real, it was awesome, and for better or worse, it'll never come back. Sometimes this makes me sad, but the upside is that I don't waste half of my day alone hoping to bump into friends. But - so many good memories!