51–60 of 321 posts
In the last year or two, I've noticed Panera has been playing godawful music that makes it nearly impossible to sit down, relax, and work on something.
It works of course, but now I just don't go at all.
I owned a Domino's and put up a LCD in the customer waiting area. I bought a BluRay player and a copy of Finding Nemo. It took two shifts for me to fill a disc with backups of dozens of Disney/Pixar/etc movies. Once I broke 50 hours of video, I stopped being able to recite it at will.
When I was 16, I spent 3 months working at a Hollister store in the nearby mall. They had the same 6 songs playing on repeat all damn day, every single day. It was tortuous. That was the second worst thing about that place. The first being the hourly spray of chemical fumes everywhere for their signature smell.
In general I don’t understand why people think that it’s ok to pollute every bit of space with noise of their choice (aka music). I view it as a big nuisance.
I am never in a Starbucks for long enough to really notice the music. There usually isn't any place to sit, as the place seems to turn into an office or study space, with Macbooks (rarely something else) taking up nearly every seat.
That's the whole idea of Starbucks - it's the third place.
Shame it takes them 10 minutes to make an Americano: they're often very busy washing the sugary goop out of the blender containers...
When I was in high school I worked in a Pizza restaurant that had a CD player in the closet. There were two CDs--The Carpenters Greatest Hits, which was used January to November and The Carpenters Christmas album, which they used in December. I must have listened to the Greatest Hits hundreds of times.
That sounds like my childhood. We had an 8 track with Mamas and the Papas California Dreaming and Random MARCHING MUSIC. The radio was broken. It was Russian Roulette with the revolver loaded when mom ask what music you want to listen to. You want audio arsenic or audio cyanide?
In general I don’t understand why people think that it’s ok to pollute every bit of space with noise of their choice (aka music). I view it as a big nuisance.
By having something similar to the volume of conversation, you make conversation both "safe" and less distracting. Safe since speaking won't break some period of silence that is bound to happen. Breaking silence in a populated area requires a certain amount of social tension, "Why is everyone quiet? Will I bother people if I talk here?" etc. Less distracting since there is no period of silence for someone to break. The two people talking to each at a normal volume no longer become loudest thing in the room and the center of attention, they're just "lost in the noise". Many references can be found for these concepts, but I apologize for not providing them.
Sound masking would be more ideal for concentration, but I'm sure the regular Starbucks patrons would be a bit confused at constant "hoooshhhh" sounds of a noise generator.
You can find a few quiet coffee shops with very quiet music, but it's extremely awkward having a conversation in a place like this. I don't frequent these places with company.
I worked at Chick-fil-A in high school and experienced this but with Christian contemporary music. If I never hear "Jesus Take the Wheel" by Carrie Underwood again it will be too soon. I feel the same way about steel drums after a summer working at Bahama Breeze, a Caribbean themed Olive Garden.