I spend a lot of time in coffee shops and in the last month I have officially sworn off three different ones. I’ll preface this little rant with a small question: Am I the only way who is driven insane by loud coffee shops? Is it just me or is there a market out there for a place that keeps the noise to a minimum for people who want to study, read or relax?

The ones I go to at least, all cater to college students and young professionals–yet they are obscenely loud. I can normally trace the noise back to one person. It’s called a “positive feedback system” or, your conversation is loud so I raise my voice, and you in turn raise yours again to speak over me. And because companies are petrified at offending anyone, they let that person drive the rest of their customers out the door. No one should have to bring an iPod in just to drown out the third grade teacher who is reading essays aloud to her colleagues or the sorority girl talking on her cell-phone.

I would assert that the old saying “the customer is always right” deserves an update. Some customers are better than others, and it’s those customers who are always right. They can’t all be because they don’t all want the same thing. With an alarming regularity the needs of one group collides with another–the choice then is whose side to take? I say you take the ones who will make you the most money. You don’t keep it quiet because it’s the “right thing to do,” you do it because that’s what the customer is demanding.

Messageboards face this problem all the time, they have to prevent trolls from scaring the real users away. They have to come down heavy on the fringe users to protect their core audience–or risk losing both. Why should brick and mortar stores be any different? Are the immune from customer frustration? They aren’t from mine, and I won’t be coming back. I know it doesn’t feel good, but with all things you have to decide who is objectively more valuable and then cater to them at all costs. I come in everyday while your average loudtalker, considering they don’t understand coffee shop etiquette, has considerably less loyalty. Starbucks: The reason your stores are so loud is because you blare that god-awful music you’re peddling. What is more valuable, losing the study crowd or the few impulse CD sales you’re hoping for?

The concept of a “third place” is going to be the cornerstone of the next few decades of the American economy. For now, places like Starbucks and other coffee shops are poised to fill that niche. However, if I saw a place that truly valued the business, intellectual and professional crowd, I’d dump my savings into their stock. Right now, we have few alternatives so these places feel entitled to our business, and are becoming alarmingly oblivious to customer comfort. What cannot be forgotten is that you have a captive audience so long as you keep that crowd comfortable. So as more people start to work away from the office, they are going to need an environment that respect the sanctity of their thoughts and serenity.

If anyone knows of a place, let me know. Until then, you can find me complaining like an old person.

I know this sounds like I’m coming late to the party, but if you’re not using an RSS Reader you should start. It will completely revolutionize how you read on the internet. Google just bought Feedburner for $100 million, so I can only imagine the sort of improvements we’ll see in RSS in the near future. Now Google is freed up and incentivized to do a whole bunch of great stuff with Reader because they’re making money on the content end now. Blogger was fantastic (and free) because Google wasn’t dependent on it for revenue–they made it off the Adsense ads. Now, Google Reader could lose money everyday and they won’t care because they’re picking up cash off the ads they’re placing inside the feeds themselves instead of ever having to do it on the platform itself.

Anyways, there is nothing in the experience of this site that you lose by reading it through RSS. So if you want to make things easier, just click the button below to subscribe and you’ll get the updates as they happen. Again, I appreciate everyone who reads–especially those who take the time to comment–and hopefully this will make the burden of entry a little lower.

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I talked about the Brasidas’ square tactic in my post about the perfect paper. I’m just finishing up Xenophon’s “Anabasis” and it looks like he used the exact same maneuver. He explains it a little bit more in depth and it confirms the efficacy of my method.

“It would be safer for us to march with the hoplites forming a hollow square, so that the baggage and the general crowd would be more secure inside. If, then, we are told now who should be in the front of the square and who organize the leading detachments, and who should be on the two flanks, and who should be responsible for the rear, we should not have to plan all this when the enemy is approaching but could immediately make use of those who have been specially detailed for the job.”

When you lay out the square in advance with clear, orderly lines, you insulate yourself from the chaos of improvisation. You mark the boundaries now so later you don’t have to. Each paragraph is given a singular purpose and its only duty is to fulfill it. No longer is the task to figure out a direction and then go that way, for you’ve done the first part in advance. If it can work for a ten thousand man march through country after country of hostile territory, it can work for a paper or an article.

And then there is a small caveat. Xenophon found that as they traveled mountain passes–difficult subject matter–the square would come apart at the corners, or it would bend and gap. The solution then was to create small groups of auxiliary soldiers who occupied the middle. Their job was to fill these gaps, to fluidly go from one side to the other as needed. This is the role of transition sentences. They fill any holes that might arise where the paragraphs come together. They prevent doubt and danger from seeping in at your most vulnerable place–in between points.

His innovation drastically improves on Brasidas’ tactic because it made him more adaptable and less rigid. This should be what we all strive for. Once you master the form and structure, quickly move away from being dependant on it. It’s why Robert’s last law was “Assume Formlessness” and it’s why the 5th step of the OODA Loop is the loop itself–so it becomes less a methodical process and more of an intuition. The paper format is a foundation and it’s up to you to adjust and build for the task at hand.