Coffee Shops
The coffee shop is the place par excellence for coffee consumption in Australia. It is a recent cultural import in France and, as such, an ideal place to observe the contemporary effects of globalization. Based on empirical data collected through participant observation between 2015 and 2020, we provide an analysis of coffee shops as supports for mobile lifestyles that highlights three central processes: the redefinition of coffee consumption standards in France in line with an Anglo-Saxon standard; the generational affirmation of an identity through the experience of differentiated consumption; and the reinvention of French elitism. As places where identity is asserted through mobility practices (cycling, online communication, bilingualism, etc.), coffee shops are part of an economy of experience that reproduces globalized consumption codes in France. They are spaces of glocalization, of production of hybrid identities, founded by intermediaries at the origin of subtle, even acrobatic arrangements between tradition (and even nationalism) and globalization.