Stephen Gordon argues that in the future everything will become a glorified coffee shop. Examples and the reasoning for this include:

• Universities. In a world where MIT is offering courses online for free, who needs to go to university for classes? Instead university will be about networking, tutoring and socializing – essentially a giant coffee shop.
• Bookstores. You can purchase all your books and store them in your pocket through devices like Kindles. In the future you’re more likely to go to Barnes and Nobel for the coffee rather than the books.
• Retailers. You can do all your shopping online through your laptop while you sip on coffee. Wouldn’t you rather do that than go to Walmart?
• Offices. As office equipment became more sophisticated it was necessary to centralize tasks in an office, where one machine could serve the needs of many. But as hardware has become cheaper and cheaper all you really need is a place your clients can reach you and your employees can get work done. A coffee-shop type establishment sounds ideal.
• Places of worship. It’ll take time, but they are already building coffee shops within them.

To read more about why each of these things are likely to happen (the part on office spaces is particularly interesting), as well as the role that 3-D printing will have to play in all this, click here.

Source: The Speculist

Via: Kottke