Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124950421033208823.html

by talison • 17 years ago

22 20 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

figital• 17 years ago

What happens when everyone has an 8 hour netbook battery and a 5G hookup?

conorgil1452• 17 years ago

I think they also need to worry about the growing popularity of smaller devices like the iPhone and, like you mentioned, netbooks rather than laptops. Someone could sit in the shop for hours and use the wifi to watch a streaming movie on their iPhone/netbook and take up a seat. It is only one seat, but if they aren't buying anything it could hurt business.

It is reasonable to ban laptops and other devices from a store during lunch time because of the huge wave of customers, but they should be allowed once the big wave dies back down. Late night coffee shop studying is really popular, especially in college towns.

callmeed• 17 years ago

"It is reasonable to ban laptops and other devices from a store during lunch time because of the huge wave of customers"

But it's okay for someone to sit there and read the Wall St Journal that a previous customer left behind?

Plus, if we're talking about coffee shops, why lunch time? At all the coffee shops I've ever frequented (granted, not in large metros), the busiest time is between 7:30 and 10am when everyone is getting their coffee ...

Finally, I tend to think places like coffee shops do better and gain popularity when they look busy. If a coffee shop is full or near full, other people notice that ...

alex_c• 17 years ago

It is painfully obvious that there is demand for a service here. People who bring their own tea bag and use the free wifi the entire day are never going to be profitable, but what about laptop users who aren't quite that cheap?

I did the working-from-a-cafe thing for a while, and it can be quite enjoyable. Working from home can lead to self-discipline problems. Renting an office can be expensive. Shared workspaces are more affordable, but the atmosphere isn't necessarily great. Working in coffee shops isn't for everyone, but it clearly works for some people.

So what's the business model that can make this work for everyone? There has to be one.

dlsspy• 17 years ago

Hacker Dojo / coworking spaces. Charge a monthly or daily rate for a place to sit alone or with peers in a facility that has a restroom, tables, and power outlets.

pj2• 17 years ago

How about public libraries start selling coffee!

spaghetti• 17 years ago

The Main library in Santa Monica has a cafe in a central courtyard.

rajat• 17 years ago

One alternative is coworking spaces. At the risk of sounding like an ad, I use one in Austin called Conjunctured (http://conjunctured.com/) and the cost is $250 a month. For that, you also get use of a conference room when needed. That's around $8 a day, and pretty competitive with coffee shops. Check out if there are any coworking spaces near you; they don't have to be expensive.

One of the nice benefits I'm enjoying that I didn't expect is meeting a lot of driven, self-motivated, young professionals. Being an old-timer, this has been really refreshing. Plus, I've actually been asked for advice; don't know how useful my advice has been, but man, it's a nice boost for the old ego.

3pt141592• 17 years ago

In Canada many of our cafes have 20 min max signs. I've only ever seen it actually enforced once, when someone had stayed for nearly 5 hours without buying more than a simple coffee.

sfphotoarts3• 17 years ago

I've never been there but isn't that rather a sweeping statement? I thought Canada was pretty big, isn't like me saying in CA many of our cafes...?

Sounds like a good reason to move to SF. Any coffee shop that limits or bans internet usage will quickly loose trade to those that embrace it. Wifi is like having a bathroom, its just part of a coffee shop.

I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy, the coffee shops need to factor the price into their drinks, people are willing to pay for the things they need, just like the cost of cleaning the bathrooms is factored in. I realize every time I spend nearly $4 for a drink that probably costs under 50c to make that I'm subsidizing the experience.

rdouble2• 17 years ago

Sounds like a good reason to move to SF

Many of the coffee shops in SF have already taken steps to limit laptop usage. Ritual removed all the power plugs. Four Barrel purposely does not have wifi. Same with the newer Blue Bottle in Mint Plaza. Certain cafes like Sugarlump and that one in Bernal which I forgot the name have very bad wifi that they do not fix, on purpose, to limit the number of laptop users. Mami Tobi's in Hayes Valley also does not have wifi, on purpose.

All the coffee shops in the Inner Richmond charge for Wifi, except for Martha Bros, which doesn't have any reasonable seating.

Reverie in Cole Valley removed the wifi years ago. Oddly enough the wifi removal was initiated by Craig Newmark.

Unfortunately in cities like SF or "college towns" the free wifi in cafes is severely abused. People will buy the cheapest cup of coffee and then sit there for 8 hours. When I lived in Cambridge, it was impossible to sit at the 1369 coffee shop at any time during the day because the seating was completely taken up by laptop lurkers. They ended up moving to paid wifi to fix the situation. Ritual in SF is crowded enough even with no power plugs. When they had the power plugs, the laptop usage there was ridiculous.

At this point in time the only draw of many of the coffee shops with wifi in SF is actually the wifi itself. For instance, Mission Creek Cafe has awful coffee, food and service. The only reason anyone goes there is because there are power outlets and wifi.

Any coffee shop that limits or bans internet usage will quickly loose trade to those that embrace it

Coffee shops lose money on heavy wifi users. Laptop lurkers are usually students and freelancers - people who take up space and don't spend much money. Coffee shops make money by... selling coffee. The coffee shop that has done the best financially in San Francisco is Blue Bottle, which not only didn't have wifi, it didn't have a physical space. It was just a kiosk underneath a garage door in an alley. Yet, it consistently has 20 people lined up.

3pt141592• 17 years ago

Yeah it is sweeping. Tim Hortons has the same sign in every one I've ever been in.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/16/Tim_stores_wik...

pj2• 17 years ago

It's funny that this article is on WSJ, owned by NewsCorp, which just said it is going to start charging for access to its online content.

cwan• 17 years ago

I think the WSJ and Barrons are currently the only two papers in its portfolio that they already charge for content. The WSJ has at least been quite successful at selling online subscriptions.

abalashov• 17 years ago

I don't know - my personal solution to this problem is one of reciprocity and mutuality in my business etiquette. If I'm going to spend all day working at a coffee shop, I'm going to buy a fair bit of stuff, too. Not all at once, of course, but in some sort of steady trickle. The impact this has on nutrition and caloric intake is left as an exercise to the student.

It's not that I'm rich; quite the contrary, actually. But I understand that a coffee shop needs to be able to justify the opportunity cost of giving up a table, let alone the sort of comfortable table at which I often like to work.

I think what the coffee shop owners and employees like to see isn't me paying their wages; I can't afford to buy a latte every hour either financially or biologically. But what I can do is buy a latte when I come in, and maybe a few refills of drip coffee throughout the day, maybe a bagel and whatnot for lunch (money that would otherwise be spent anyway if I'm not near home). Oh, yes, and I tip pretty generously throughout it all, which keeps the employees that might otherwise look askance content--although, of course, that is not the only reason I do it.

I frequent a variety of local coffee shops with a range of attitudes toward laptop campers, although all of them tolerate laptop users, just some more begrudgingly than others. And yet, I'm one of their favourite customers, it seems, because I at least try to make it worthwhile for the shop to have me around, too.

Of course, my story here may not be universally applicable; I spend half my time in a college town, where people who colonise to study or work on a computer all day are universal and if you locked them out you'd simply alienate 90% of your customer base.

(Here's a hint: Don't open a coffee shop in a college town, or you will constantly struggle with this problem; there's just not a lot of table turnover, but you can't really tell them to move along when the sort of customer they are is a majority constituency.)

The other half is spent in Atlanta, equidistantly from two fairly major state universities. That imparts a vaguely similar quality upon the whole thing, and the local coffee shops are also unusually, uh, 'progressive' in Midtown.

Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users

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