Commercial venues offer no stable common ground for group bonding.

Evidence

But when the figure presiding over the gathering is a two-story-high vinyl Budweiser can instead of a medieval church steeple, membership feels less secure, and establishing solid common ground in a scattered suburbia requires more talk. Participants wanted to get together as a group, but the only way they could do it was under the auspices of the giant, looming Bud. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 937

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s mutual-aid research: solidarity formation requires a common ground that commercial third places do not supply. — connects to: Commercial leisure spaces can in principle incubate civic talk but usually fail to. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 653
• ADDENDUM: Analogous to how trees function as living infrastructure that physically and symbolically grounds communities — here the vinyl Budweiser can is the hollow inverse of a rooted public tree.