W(h)ither The Coffeeshop?

Someone at Eater appears not actually to have read their piece on the coffee landscape, as its hed suggests it’s about coffeeshops when it really says very little about the future of actual coffeeshops and cafes, let alone anything bullish, instead focusing almost exclusively upon a couple of small business coffee empires (e.g. Portland-born Stumptown) and a few entrepreneurial efforts at feeding coffee to frontline pandemic workers. There’s lots of talk about grocery products—Stumptown is chasing Costco, for crying out loud—and effectively zero talk about how, or indeed even whether, retail coffee is weathering the storm. How do you mention all those furloughed baristas, as the article does, without wondering, and writing about, what’s to become of them, and the third places they provide the rest of us?