
How Restaurants Got So Loud - zimbu668
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/576715/
======
tapland
Locally (Stockholm, Sweden) the head of the city libraries has made a
statement of battling the 'quietness norm' in libraries. Most of them now have
playgrounds, one in Kista (where I happened to live at the time) won awards
for best library in the world and in Sweden the same year.

It was completely unusable for what me and my fiance usually do at the
library. The study rooms had the ventilation system for the building running
through them with a loud dull noise making going back out to the playground-
ridden small library with build int coffee-shop feel like putting on active
noise supressing headphones. And the playground + café + it being placed in a
mall (as opposed to across the street in the municipality building like it
used to be) made reading or browsing a hard task.

My fiance who has ASD really has no public space available at all in this city
anymore and we are moving to another city where we know of accessible quieter
places, including parks and libraries without built-in noise generators.

./rant

Carpeting here is extremely rare. Scandinavian minimalism everywhere. The
article helps me understand why the local chinese restaurang, with carpeting,
tablecloth and padded chairs, is so nice to stay at.

~~~
willvarfar
I'm a big fan of the making-libraries-loud (loud as in happy) movement, but
I'm usually bringing my kids to browse the shelves and pick books to bring
home, not to actually spend time there reading them. In my experience kids
find quiet libraries intimidating. (Which is at odds with my own preferences,
I should add, but I prioritize the kids.)

What the libraries need is a quiet reading room, rather like the trains have
added quiet carriages.

I don't know which libraries you are meaning, but it sounds like their study
rooms are broken, rather than the whole concept is broken.

So, lets fix the study rooms! :)

~~~
keiferski
Libraries are not playgrounds.

This idea that the primary functional purpose of an important space should be
some kind of afterthought is rather depressing, but I guess is follows from
the entertainment-centric culture we live in. The purpose of a library is to
read, not to entertain your kids.

~~~
rubinelli
Kids that grow up associating libraries with fun are much more likely to want
to visit them after they learn to read. Libraries are closing down because
they don't have any readers.

~~~
ekianjo
is this a joke? the last thing most young adults like is to be surrounded by
screaming children. The louder you make libraries the less people will ever
want to go there.

~~~
ceejayoz
That's why you have a children's _section_.

------
jlokier
There's an ice cream and bagel place in town. In the late evening it's
consistently packed with people on their laptops or reading books.

One day I noticed the music was much louder than usual, and asked the staff to
turn it down. I figured it was a mistake because it was normally much quieter.

They told me this was the new company policy. To set the music uncomfortably
loud to make people leave, after finishing their food or drink.

(Around the same time they also instigated a 30 minute time limit on Wifi if
you bought something. Even though I was willing to keep buying, I couldn't get
through a new tea every 30 minutes!)

Theory being it's more profitable to make your customers leave and make room
for others, than to make a place people want to go to.

I haven't been back. Even with noise-cancelling headphones(∗), and earbuds
under the headphones, it was too loud for me. And the wifi policy was really
annoying.

Sadly, I've noticed ultra loud music seems to be the policy at a lot of places
these days. I find Starbucks and Costa ok - but some of my friends won't go
with me because they find the music there too loud as well.

(∗) I wear noise-cancellers at most places now. It probably makes me look
unsocial or "hipster", but it's to protect my ears from the loud music just
about everywhere insists on playing, and helps me concentrate when I'm working
in a café. I enjoy talking with people if they want to.

~~~
decebalus1
It probably won't be the most popular opinion but I'm siding with the business
for this one. I never got people who use cafe bars, delis, etc.. as personal
offices. I personally can't get 'in the zone' in such a public place where:

\- I need to buy/consume something every X minutes

\- have to overhear irrelevant stupid/mundane conversations

\- people have a habit of bringing their dogs everywhere now and I'm not even
going to get into how disruptive that is

\- deal with the passive-aggressiveness of the employees when you spend a
couple of hours there

Whenever I work from home and I need a 'public' place in order to separate
home and work, I go to the local library for which I pay taxes. It's probably
the only place I can walk in, not be expected to buy anything and just enjoy
the silence. Other times when the weather is nice I just go the park or on a
bench on the public trail and use my phone as a hotspot.

The bagel/coffee/sandwich/donut shops are businesses where people should walk
in, buy something, have a date/meeting/chat and then leave. I'm probably a
weirdo but again, I never got this working from a coffee shop thing.

~~~
NotAnEconomist
> I never got this working from a coffee shop thing.

This is an old tradition.

Cafes, bars, tea houses, etc have served as social hubs and placed to read or
work on documents (now computers) for literally thousands of years, everywhere
on the planet. There's simply a social need for a space like that, because
it's a more efficient usage of space to have people work on a revolving basis
in a shared space than everyone have a private space of their own or not be
able to work.

It's only with the modern invention of corporate coffee shops that misvalue
social fabric that we see the churn happening. (PS -- those corporate stores
are wrong about the short term boost from churn improving their long term
fortunes, at least from what I've heard from the big ones.)

I also find it interesting you approve of one "office-like" usage -- having a
chat or meeting -- but disapprove of another -- working on documents.

~~~
Mikeb85
Actually the thing which kills this model nowadays is the obscene cost of real
estate and the rentier class. Coffee shops simply can't be profitable as
workspaces any more.

You still can see coffee spots as social places in developing countries.

~~~
xbmcuser
But more people need these work spaces as they can't work in the closet like
apartments they are sharing with 2-3 other people. You are correct in saying
it's because cost of real estate

------
pcarolan
I work remotely and find myself working from a lot of Starbucks. The music
level seems consistent no matter where you go to the point where it feels like
a policy. It is just loud enough that you can't drown it out with a good set
of headphones or take a conference call without annoying the rest of the
group. It seems too consistent to be unintentional.

Conversely, there's a new coffee shop in Chicago that is designed from the
ground up to facilitate work. It has tons of natural light, freely available
whiteboards and almost no music call Limitless coffee. It is such a joy to not
have to deal with the din that I go there even when I'm not working. You can
almost hear yourself think.

~~~
jtreminio
Honest question, have you considered it might be on purpose so you are not
using Starbucks as your personal office?

~~~
rhacker
It seems a bit strange that they encourage laptop usage at Starbucks then if
they don't want people to use it as an office. The have laptop plug in ports
at special bars and tables all over the place.

~~~
paulsutter
Likely they want to be a reliable stop for business travelers, but they don’t
want you parking at a table for 8 hours everyday.

------
erdo
This is a pet hate of mine - glad to see it's not just me getting older. A
restaurant round the corner from me has acoustic foam on the under-side of all
the hard wood chairs and tables, and that helps a little. As soon as I find a
bar that's decided to carpet its ceiling, it's going to be my new favourite
hang (I understand why places don't want carpet on the floor. Apart from
anything else, it's hard to keep clean)

~~~
mnw21cam
The Met Office in the UK has a canteen, and at one point, they decided that it
was too noisy. Their solution was to make a load of person-sized wool
"clouds", and hang them from the ceiling. They look cool, and they absorb
noise.

A couple of months ago, I went to a conference in San Diego, and went to a
restaurant in the evening with colleagues. We could hardly hear the person
next to us shouting. I left as soon as I had eaten.

~~~
philpem
With regard to the restaurant, maybe that's the goal: encourage people to
settle up and leave quicker so the restaurant can serve more customers?

Or maybe I'm just getting old and cynical...

~~~
wccrawford
If you read blogs like "not always right" you'll find that most food service
employees are _not_ on board with the customers sitting around and taking up
tables. They take it as a personal attack on their income and are very rude
about people who sit there.

Even if the management isn't against it, the employees are.

~~~
mmkhd
This is a direct consequence of how food service employees are paid in the
U.S. They have an income of next to nothing and depend on tips. Tips do not
play such a large part in (most? all?) of Europe and are smaller than in the
U.S., so customers that stay longer mean less work without too much pay
reduction. At least that is my pet theory. I only visit the U.S. every couple
of years and this year I noticed that the "standard" tip crept up to 15%-20%
instead of the 10%-15% that I remember. Seems that employers are paying food
service workers even less of a wage than before.

------
Alreadyobsolete
It's worth mentioning that the noise levels of restaurants and public spaces
can also be inaccessible to those who hearing impairments and those who may be
sensitive to overstimulating audio input. I can personally attest to being in
busy restaurants in which my grandmother simply cannot have a full
conversation with me since there's so much surrounding noise.

~~~
JohnBooty
Yeah, my hearing's not the best and I really just cannot hear what people are
saying half of the time. It's like... everybody's struggling to hear each
other, but I _really_ cannot hear. I just can't do those kinds of spaces, at
least not if I want to have a conversation.

~~~
saiya-jin
Test your hearing on higher frequencies, those are usually the first lost when
hearing degrades. Normal headphones/loudspeakers can go way higher than people
can hear, so you can do basic test yourself.

I have something similar - normal conversations are OK, but in loud
environment it becomes very hard. Its not great to be the only one in group
who doesn't understand what others are saying. I blew my hearing probably in
front rows on metal concerts.

~~~
JohnBooty
(I realize that online hearing tests aren't reliable, but they would have
false positives, not false negatives)

Frustratingly, I've done those online hearing tests which test your ability to
hear human voices amidst background noise and they tell me I have no hearing
loss.

However, my hearing cuts out around 9khz, which is low. Definitely not my
listening equipment because my wife can hear >9khz just fine on the same gear.

------
Thriptic
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this, but one of the reasons
restaurants are so loud is that many modern restaurants pack people in like
sardines to maximize revenue. Many places I have been to lately give you about
a foot of space between you and the people next to you. Not only does this
high density create a lot of noise, but a lot of noise actually becomes
necessary to have any semblance of privacy. It's ruined a lot of dining for
me. If I wanted to eat as fast as possible while not saying anything of
substance to the people I'm with for fear of being overheard, I would get take
out and bring it back to my workplace to consume.

------
keiferski
I'd love to read an analysis of how the world in general has gotten so loud.
Even a few hundred years ago, the centers of massive cities like Paris, Rome,
or Istanbul must have been significantly quieter, being that cars, horns,
trains, speakers, boomboxes, industrial plants, airplanes and everything else
that creates noise pollution didn't exist.

~~~
adwhit
Cars must surely be the main cause. There is an interesting phenomenon known
as "shifting baseline syndrome" where we tend to compare our environment to
what we recall as a child and inevitably conclude that is has gotten
nosier/busier/more polluted, not realizing that environment of our childhoods
were already heavily degraded.

The world in which we evolved would have been almost silent, almost all of the
time, apart from the sounds of birds and insects. And there would have been
very little to 'look' at (no text/decor/branding, few hard surfaces, few
straight lines, little color and texture variation). And of course no
pollution, and very little to 'do'! So it shouldn't be a surprise to find that
the sheer sensory intensity of modern living contributes towards depression
and schizophrenia [1].

What is the endgame here?

[1] eg
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/nature/2010-peen.pdf)

~~~
probably_wrong
I agree with cars being the problem. I only thought about that when I learned
that laws were drafted to force electric cars to make noise - for a brief
couple of seconds I realised how different the world would be if all cars were
silent... and then I got my hopes crushed.

I truly cannot picture what life would be like without car noise and light
pollution.

~~~
matthewheath
In the UK at least, there's a good reason behind the law. Electric cars are
required to make noise so that visually impaired people know a car is
approaching.

~~~
naravara
They already make plenty of road noise just from the friction of the tires. If
visually impaired people can't hear it, then it's likely because of all the
OTHER sources of noise pollution around them.

------
simonebrunozzi
I hate loud restaurants, I hate loud cafes, I hate when I have to listen to
dumb music all the f __ing time.

I am also very surprised that no one has figured out a way to offer a quieter
version to customers like me. I'd pay more to have a quieter experience.

~~~
trophycase
Yes nearly everywhere plays music nowadays. I think it's to drown out the
feeling of existential dread of actually having to hear yourself. Don't think
about it too hard people, just buy more.

~~~
cr0sh
> I think it's to drown out the feeling of existential dread of actually
> having to hear yourself.

To a certain extent, this is actually true.

I have read more than a few stories recently where people have literally said
they hate quietness, and need noise surrounding them (especially other
people), so that they didn't have to be alone with their thoughts.

I find that to be depressing.

------
fredley
One thing that's becoming near-impossible is finding places to drink (as in
pubs or bars) without piped music. This contributes significantly to noise.
It's done of course so that we shout ourselves hoarse trying to have a
conversation, so we buy more drinks to lubricate our throat, but even formerly
quiet pubs near me have started doing it.

~~~
dingaling
In the UK my partner and I have started going to Wetherspoons pubs. They're
reviled in middle-class circles as a cheap, chavvy chain that buys-out
traditional pubs but they're clean, friendly and QUIET.

~~~
mattmanser
Ugh, they're usually not clean or friendly, the staff are also usually
incompetent and slow. I have been in them a lot over the years for various
reasons and my best description of weatherspoons would be a bit shit.

That they don't buy a music license is a cost saving measure.

They're ok when they first open, but after a year or two get a bit of a run
down feeling.

I also walk past one of my local ones occasionally at 9:30 in the morning,
there's always a few old men already drinking pints of lager in there, it's
sad.

~~~
fredley
Old men drinking pints of lager in Spoons early in the morning is a national
problem. It's basically treated as cheap daycare for elder relatives by some
families - drop dad off with £20 first thing in the morning and pick him up at
closing time.

The worst part by far is how they never sit together, they all sit
individually alone.

------
seanalltogether
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the article is that loud restaurants can
provide diners with a sense of privacy. In a sea of noise your conversation
will easily be drowned out before reaching others. Additionally, more ambient
noise means less chances of being irritated by other diners.

~~~
bluGill
It also means I can't understand my wife when she speaks. It is bad enough at
home with my kids yelling at the top of their lungs (any ideas on how to break
them of this?), when we go out it is impossible.

~~~
jtreminio
Use a water spray bottle - No one, including [children], like to be squirted
with water, so you can try a quick spritz at your [child] if they are
somewhere or doing something they shouldn't be.

~~~
sequoia
Respectfully, this advice is absolutely idiotic. If your toddler pees their
pants, do you rub their face in it too?

I'm not a proponent of treating children identically to adults, but children
should still be afforded some aspects of human dignity. Spraying them with a
water bottle like a malfeasant feline is not a polite way to treat anyone,
regardless of age.

If you do this to your child, you are teaching them that this is an acceptable
way to treat people that bother them. If you do not end up with an egocentric
and inconsiderate child after subjecting them to this, it will be from pure
luck.

~~~
jtreminio
Don't be respectful, it's a copy/paste for how to shut up meowing/misbehaving
cats.

------
orloffm
I once was at a huge car expo, and French and German halls were adjacent to
each other. For some reason, all French car makers had extremely loud music at
their spaces, like if they were trying to be louder than each other. It was
basically impossible to be there.

The German hall (all three major makers) had complete silence inside. So this
is also a cultural thing, and a pretty strong one as this happened in Moscow,
and most of the workers were Russians of course.

------
asib
I thought I recognised this title. Did some digging, Vox wrote an article [0]
with the same title a while ago.

[0] [https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-
lev...](https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17168504/restaurants-noise-levels-loud-
decibels)

~~~
kirykl
Also that one was discussed here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629497)

------
compsciphd
I read once, can't remember where, that once the sound in a room with people
talking reaches a certain level, it will get increasingly loud. The reason
being, if sound is below a certain level, we can hear each other while we
speak at normal volumes and the other person near us will be able to
understand us.

However, once volume reaches a certain background level, we have to raise our
voices to be understood over the background noise which increases the overall
background level which causes others to have to raise their voices over the
new background level ever increasing.

~~~
iamlemec
Definitely consistent with my experience. One time I was in a restaurant where
this sort of arms race dynamic was occurring, and at some point a guy just did
one of those really loud two-fingered whistles, then in the resulting silence
said something like "let's all try to keep it down in here". It worked
incredibly well, and the effect was actually very persistent.

------
Semaphor
Restaurants in Germany I've been to are usually pretty quiet. This excludes
fast food places, bars (restaurants that serve cocktails are included in
that), low-end non-German places (I don't know any non-fast food low-end
German places) and all 3 American(-style) restaurants I've been to.

For normal restaurants, I can actually have a conversation. But when I go to
some club or bar, I need to align my ears carefully and have the speaker talk
directly to me, otherwise, I'd have no chance of understanding anything.

~~~
biztos
> I don't know any non-fast food low-end German places

In Berlin there are a lot of low-end (as in cheap) Vietnamese and to a lesser
extent Thai restaurants that I would call real restaurants. Tend to be pretty
quiet in my experience even when they're relatively full.

------
mnx
Yes! It seems like somehow many bar/restaurant owners have no interest in
making their spaces sonically comfortable. I've been in some that felt like
they were designed for maximum reverb. The few ones with acoustic panels on
the walls / ceilings are so nice in comparison. I really hope caring about the
way your place sounds becomes standard.

------
tobyhinloopen
I strongly dislike restaurants for their extreme noise levels and rarely
manage to sit in one for longer than an hour without getting agitated.

There are few restaurants I know that allow us to be seated in quiet areas
and/or that are much more quiet due to their design, and those are the
restaurants that I'll visit often.

------
scott_s
The author, Kate Wagner, is also the author of the McMansion Hell blog:
[http://mcmansionhell.com/](http://mcmansionhell.com/) If you haven't read it
before, spend a few minutes there. It's a treat.

------
sevensor
Some of the best restaurants I've been to, sonically speaking, have been in
old houses that were converted into dining establishments. Because there's a
limit to how much they can knock out interior walls, there are only two or
three tables to a room, and the loud kitchen is necessarily in a different
room from the dining. This really keeps a lid on the noise and lets you have
an intelligent conversation at your table.

------
ryanmarsh
I don’t enjoy going out to eat anymore and prefer to DoorDash food precisely
because it’s too loud. The ironic thing is I have hearing damage so you’d
think it would bother me less.

I can’t think, can’t hear my wife, and can’t relax and enjoy my meal.

I do not understand why every small restaurant has to have high ceilings with
no plenum so the A/C sounds like a jet engine. Surely I’m not the only
customer annoyed by this.

------
mcv
There's a really nice restaurant in our neighbourhood, with amazing food, and
you need to reserve a couple days in advance. But whenever we go there, it's
ridiculously noisy. They went for a bare stone industrial look, and that
clearly doesn't dampen any sound, so you end up hearing everybody in the
restaurant all at once.

But we are also to blame; when we bought our house, we removed some walls to
let more light in, and everything is really tight and smooth, and therefore
reflects all sound. We got bad acoustics in our home.

We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some sound
absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior anywhere.

Please the eye and punish the ear, seems to be the interior design rule of
today.

~~~
naravara
>We've got a neighbour who works in a sound studio and advised us on some
sound absorbing panels, but they don't really fit in our interior

Can't you just mount them on a wall or ceiling?

Otherwise you can do lots of good by just putting down rugs or hanging woven
artwork. Plants work too

~~~
mcv
We could, but we're not sure where. No matter where we put them, they would
ruin the lines of the room.

My wife hates rugs. We have some plants, but that's clearly not enough.

------
asah
"The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible."

which works because everybody's on their phones... :-(

------
analogmemory
Reminds of another problem in restaurants, the annoying music they pipe in.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-
music-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/dining/restaurant-music-
playlists-ryuichi-sakamoto.html)

------
post_break
There is a chinese place I go to specifically because it is quiet. I'm so
tired of loud places to eat. It's draining on you after a while.

------
the_clarence
Note that restaurants are not loud if you go to Europe (except for the UK) or
Asia. I don’t know why it’s so loud in the US.

~~~
LoSboccacc
it's quite venue dependent. in some italian trattoria you can get people
almost screaming at their table, even without a loud music, because they need
to overcome the loud mouths at the nearby table to have a conversation.

------
Agnosco
I guess it also helps getting people to eat and leave faster, which enables
restaurants to seat tables more frequently.

~~~
Nasrudith
I think McDonalds are designed for that purpose in a way less obtrusive way -
ironically enough by the decorating being loud making people not want to
linger. The chairs and seats are tight and limited in manuverabilify for one
in addition to the "openness". How well does it work? Well do you want to go
hang out at a McDonald's?

Ironically they later tried McCafe iniative to make lingering spaces to try to
compete with Starbucks after seeing how many go there for coffee - often
taking the form of a nook which fails pretty badly at the task because of the
previous decorating. Illustrating quite a few other negative things about the
leadership.

~~~
dpeck
A LOT of people hang out at McDonald’s. Older folks, kids after school, etc.
In some neighborhoods they function as something like community hubs (third
spaces) during their non-peak times.

~~~
philpem
I noticed similar in a MAX in Upplands Vasby (Sweden, near Stockholm). People
just hanging out, but similar fast-food-style high-contrast decor.

The big difference between that and the McD's (or even the Subway down the
road) was the food at MAX was far better...! (so I can see why people were
hanging around and ordering more)

------
Sniffnoy
Non-mobile link:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-
restaurants-got-so-loud/576715/)

------
wenc
Tip: get noise-cancelling/in-ear headphones, and use a white-noise app like
Noisli. This combination makes most cafes tolerable as a work space.

------
d--b
> Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet.

Wrong. Restaurants are so loud because people are so loud.

My wife and I were at Freeman's in Downtown Manhattan the other day. It was so
loud we decided to scream to see if anyone noticed. And since noone seemed to
turn their heads, we screamed louder and louder, and literally no one could
hear us.

This is an American thing, it doesn't happen in Paris, nor in London, nor in
Japan, nor in Mexico.

~~~
compiler-guy
Yes, Americans are loud. But the acoustics of the space one talks do in fact
make a difference. If the surrounding space reflects a lot of sound, the
restaurant will be louder than if the surrounding space absorbs a lot of
sound.

And that, in fact is what the article is about.

~~~
d--b
sure, yes, but architects _never_ paid attention to acoustics when designing
restaurants (or maybe the very few super sound-concious).

------
swayvil
loudness + bright lights = eat it and get out

The shift over time appears to be a dwindling respect for people.

------
scirocco
Can't believe how Joe & The Juice are allowed to play so loud music at
airports

------
Soundhunter
.

