Coffee or Tea: Third Places, Kiosks, and the Retail Architecture of Duration

502 Coffee Roasters / stof.. Image © Donggyu Kim"Coffee or tea?" is one of those phrases that follows you across contexts: asked on airplanes, after a meal, in hotel lounges, and in meeting rooms. It sounds like a small question—mere preference, a quick fork in the service script. Yet it also carries a quiet cultural inheritance. Tea arrives with the long history of ritual and domestic pacing, tied to older geographies of trade and everyday etiquette. Coffee arrives with a different l