From a website
I’ve never seen this. Has anyone seen a homeless/vagabond/vagrant in starbucks?
Sounds fake but let’s find out da STRAIGHT DOPE
I have seen homeless people at Starbucks, but have never seen one act outrageous or seem to be “living” there (how would that work, anyway?). My city has a LOT of homeless people, too.
I live in Chicago and I have seen, what I am pretty sure are, homeless people, in Starbucks. They stay about an hour then leave. And that is about the standard for Starbucks that I’ve seen. People stay about an hour or a bit more then leave.
It makes no sense to stay in Starbucks all day unless the weather is really bad. At least in Chicago, there are lots of parks to sit in, if the weather is OK
DC doper here…I’ve certainly seen lots of homeless people in Starbucks but I suspect they’re just there to warm up/cool down, use the bathroom and possibly get a drink.
I’ve seen Starbucks employees ask them to leave if the homeless people are asking customers for money. Most of the locations here have locked bathrooms so that the staff can limit use to customers.
When I volunteered for a branch library, we always had a number of homeless people in the main reading area since many shelters don’t allow them to stay there during the day. Unless someone is flat-out disruptive or abusive, the library is a pretty safe bet.
Yes, there’s one who hangs around my neighborhood’s stores with one of those “help, God Bless” signs, he apparently broke his leg and has a full-limb cast on it. Saw him in there the other day, just sitting down and chilling w/ his brew.
One Starbucks I frequent has a “regular” homeless man. He’s harmless…he loves to pull up a chair and talk, but you can’t understand his mumbling. I’ve seen him coming and going - I’m not sure how long he stays.
The annoying part is the fake panhandlers. It’s amazing how many people at that Starbucks have run out of gas just down the road and need gas money…or want to get to the (insert name) Ministry to turn their lives around and just need bus money…or their car broke down and they left their kid there to try to get money to stay at a hotel. I usually sit outside when the weather is nice, and I am not exaggerating that I get AT LEAST one request every single time I stop there. Grrr.
Dc doper, I’ve seen homeless in Starbucks, but never for a really long period of time. Most businesses in communities with lots of homeless have pretty low tolerance for homeless people camping out in their shops.
They recently removed all the comfortable chairs in my local Starbucks, because the homeless would fall asleep in them. They wouldn’t make them leave, but they did insist on waking them and telling them “you can’t sleep here.” I guess they got tired of doing that.
In my experience, coffee shops in this city, regardless of name, allow anyone who buys a cup of coffee to stick around for the duration of consumption. If they harass other customers or make nuisances of themselves, they are asked to leave. But from what I’ve seen, they pretty much stay out of the coffee shops because they know they won’t be well-received unless they have money to waste there.
I had more problems with people who had a little money to waste on a coffee shop. There was one pair of crazy sisters that used to come into the shop where I worked. One was OK, bought a cup and stayed fairly quiet. The other one, I called her “Fangle-Tooth” because she had this one loose front tooth that wiggled when she spoke, was loud and stole stuff. She always took a handful of butter patties to go with her bagel, and we caught her taking rolls of toilet paper out of the bathroom. We had to stop letting her use it, and hide the butter when we saw her coming. Sometimes we had to ask her to leave if she stayed too long after finishing her bagel and coffee.
It was people more like her, who had a couple bucks to spend, that gave us more problems than homeless people.