I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this, but one of the reasons restaurants are so loud is that many modern restaurants pack people in like sardines to maximize revenue. Many places I have been to lately give you about a foot of space between you and the people next to you. Not only does this high density create a lot of noise, but a lot of noise actually becomes necessary to have any semblance of privacy. It's ruined a lot of dining for me. If I wanted to eat as fast as possible while not saying anything of substance to the people I'm with for fear of being overheard, I would get take out and bring it back to my workplace to consume.
How Restaurants Got So Loud
101–110 of 319 posts
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#102This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from anything else, it's hard to keep clean)
I hate the trend of minimalist/industrial interior design in restaurants for this reason. There was a new restaurant I went to recently. We got there at 4 in the afternoon, and there were only 3 parties there other than us (out of >20 tables) conversing with reasonable inside voices. The music was calm and played at low background level. Yet my wife and I couldn't hear each other across the table. The floor was polished concrete, the walls tile, the (10') ceiling metal, the tables glass topped, the chairs unpadded. There wasn't a single sound-absorbing material in the entire room. It turned what should have been a quiet murmur into intolerable din.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If children grow up associating libraries with a place that is not fun, support for libraries will die after that generation. The Berlin city libraries absolutely have spaces for children to play (loudly) and also make point of events with readings for children, and so on. A generation will grow up associating libraries as part of their life.
Libraries aren't supposed to be "fun".
And that is why libraries are closing.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing a city library with an extremely specialized institution which holds a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio is ridiculous. These are separate institutions which only share the name library.
Yeah that's kind of the problem with this entire discussion. People are discussing entirely different sorts of libraries.
Well, no. People are trying to draw a functional distinction between two types of libraries that isn't really there.
First, old-fashioned academic libraries existed; later, public lending libraries existed, but only because various people noticed that the existence of academic libraries was a good thing thing that should be more widely accessible to people outside academia and/or religious institutions. At no point has the purpose of public lending libraries been to provide the community centre and entertainment resource that some people want them to be.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#105I strongly dislike restaurants for their extreme noise levels and rarely manage to sit in one for longer than an hour without getting agitated.
There are few restaurants I know that allow us to be seated in quiet areas and/or that are much more quiet due to their design, and those are the restaurants that I'll visit often.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
With regard to the restaurant, maybe that's the goal: encourage people to settle up and leave quicker so the restaurant can serve more customers? Or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical...
If you read blogs like "not always right" you'll find that most food service employees are not on board with the customers sitting around and taking up tables. They take it as a personal attack on their income and are very rude about people who sit there. Even if the management isn't against it, the employees are.
This is a direct consequence of how food service employees are paid in the U.S. They have an income of next to nothing and depend on tips.
Tips do not play such a large part in (most? all?) of Europe and are smaller than in the U.S., so customers that stay longer mean less work without too much pay reduction.
At least that is my pet theory. I only visit the U.S. every couple of years and this year I noticed that the "standard" tip crept up to 15%-20% instead of the 10%-15% that I remember. Seems that employers are paying food service workers even less of a wage than before.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences, I should add, but I prioritize the kids.) What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains ha…
Libraries are not playgrounds. This idea that the primary functional purpose of an important space should be some kind of afterthought is rather depressing, but I guess is follows from the entertainment-centric culture we live in. The purpose of a library is to read, not to entertain your kids.
Actually the primary purpose of a library is to be a repository of books, not a reading room. Just like the primary purpose of a bookstore is to sell books, a library is a place to check out books.
Besides libraries should change! Who the heck goes to a library to look at encyclopedias to write papers anymore? If you are doing academic research, go to an academic library — a place where you’ll find few kids. But a community library? That should be a place where everyone is welcome and excited about books, not a coworking space for old curmudgeons. If you want a perfectly silent reading environment — go to your home.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#108There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books.
One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter.
They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably loud to make people leave, after finishing their food or drink.
(Around the same time they also instigated a 30 minute time limit on Wifi if you bought something. Even though I was willing to keep buying, I couldn't get through a new tea every 30 minutes!)
Theory being it's more profitable to make your customers leave and make room for others, than to make a place people want to go to.
I haven't been back. Even with noise-cancelling headphones(∗), and earbuds under the headphones, it was too loud for me. And the wifi policy was really annoying.
Sadly, I've noticed ultra loud music seems to be the policy at a lot of places these days. I find Starbucks and Costa ok - but some of my friends won't go with me because they find the music there too loud as well.
(∗) I wear noise-cancellers at most places now. It probably makes me look unsocial or "hipster", but it's to protect my ears from the loud music just about everywhere insists on playing, and helps me concentrate when I'm working in a café. I enjoy talking with people if they want to.
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#109I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional. Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designe…
Honest question, have you considered it might be on purpose so you are not using Starbucks as your personal office?
Re: How Restaurants Got So Loud
#110I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud. Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome, or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns, trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else that creates noise pollution didn't exist.
Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods were already heavily degraded. The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the time, apar…
Some visitors to Copenhagen remark that it's surprisingly quiet for a capital city. Others say it "feels boring", which I think is partly because they associate a noisy city centre (e.g. London or Paris) with fun.
There are far fewer cars in the city centre than most cities the size of Copenhagen; enough roads are restricted to people on foot or bicycles that relatively few people try and drive to, from or through it.