If you're going to work from a coffee shop, you need to buy something. Co-working spaces are pretty expensive so even a daily 6-dollar latte is a better deal compared to some co-working facility fees.
Anyway, I'm afraid that curbing internet won't be a complete solution since it's easy enough to tether off a phone or connect to an Xfinity hotspot.
A potential solution to this problem would be to make useable power outlets scarce. Some laptops can last a full day without a charge, but you'll find that most people will need to plug in at some point if they're working for extended periods of time. Not a perfect solution since it can be thwarted by external battery power banks.
It's not just about buying things. These places aren't selling workspaces, they're selling drinks, often to people in their immediate community and often with a goal of being part of the community.
So if the community can't get a table, they stop coming at all, and that's a bigger existential threat to the owners than just the money.
> The problem became so severe that the bar began to lose its regulars. Esten and his wife would bump into former customers around the neighbourhood and they told him that they could never get a seat at the bar because there were laptops everywhere, so they started going to other coffee shops instead.
> “That was breaking our hearts,” he said.
These people don't want to babysit tech workers. Even if it's financially sustainable to do, that's not what they opened a small coffee shop or bar to do.
Don’t most coffee shops sell to the “immediate community?” I don’t think many people travel long distances for coffee.
Maybe I’m just a miserable misanthrope, but despite all the rhetoric I’ve never had a “community” experience at a coffee shop. In my experience it’s just cash for drinks and a place to sit. I’ve had much better experiences getting to know people in explicitly non-commercial settings (dog parks, playgrounds, classes, etc.)
Something more devilish is having unergonomic furniture for office work, a seat that's too hard or too high relative to the table, lighting that's more likely to create glare on a screen, etc.
I've sat on chairs that are comfortable for only a few minutes, then start to get increasingly uncomfortable the longer I sit in them. That's more of what I meant.
I understand what you mean, I was saying that having to use such seating is likely to result in customers not returning to your coffee shop.
That might be ok if you're a tiny shop that only really wants to do takeaway but to me, most coffee shops are a place to relax and have a conversation with someone. A chair that becomes uncomfortable after a few minutes is in direct contradiction to that purpose and indicates either hubris or ignorance on the part of the owner.
Is it too much to expect the local authority to recognize this new trend and provide the appropriate facilities, just like we have parks where we can go to relax or exercise?
Back in 1994 the town dialup ISP started doing business; by 1996 I was working there and getting indoctrinated. I can't remember the name of the terminal servers anymore.. we had about 30 of them, 12 POTS lines on each, so we could have say 360 people online. At a 10 people to 1 port oversubscription ratio, people were getting busy signals at peak hours, but eventually got on ...
... as the months went on, people figured out how to use keep-alive programs and our idle-user scripts started to fail. Busy signals got worse and worse, and of course, we lost customers.
When I think of the coffee shops, and people buying a cup of coffee, or a bagel, every now and then, I'm sure it must feel the same to the shop owners.
And in our modern world of seemingly infinite resources, I get that trying to remember dial up modems run by a few poor dudes in a literal garage is only going to garner the same sillouettes of billionaires out to dominate the economy; and so does the sleepy cafe owner trying to make rent manifest as John Buckingham Starbucks himself.
But this middle aged geezer has a nettled solidarity for these small business owners, who are without any apparent tool to save their business without deliberately summoning the modern marvel of public shaming on social media. I could never run a business.
>putting retail workers in the position of having to even ask people to leave is too uncomfortable and potentially even risky.
That's why some employees get paid a couple bucks an hour more to be a shift manager. You also don't need to directly confront people after 1 hour, you can be passive-aggressive with any customer bold enough to stick around for 4-5 hours. The policy isn't meant to be taken literally, it's more of a deterrent and a pretence for action.
Dealing with customers not leaving is just part of the work in retail. Somebody needs to be the person who draws the line and tell somebody to stop loitering and leave. Some people will literally live in the coffee shop if nobody stops them, never mind staying there for 8 hours not buying anything.
I hate people and love WFH. Who are these people taking such a good thing and ruining it by removing their pyjamas, getting dressed and going out in public?!
Library environments are often better workspaces, especially study carrels at university libraries. (Stick to public universities if you don't want to be kicked out.) Cafes have more of a bustle to them that isn't good for extended "deep work" sessions.
But this article happened back in 2009, too. I remember it. I may have been part of the problem. It's a signal of an economy that is displacing and reallocating workspaces.
I am very much pro remote work - but tax payers and businesses shouldnt subsidise you. A public library or a coffee shop are not your office. Rent one, work from home, or go back to an on site job. I really dont get this entitlement - if someone came to my coffee shop, if owned one, and stood there all day working, i’d kick them out and ban them.
Ok, coffee shop I get in some cases. Libraries though? What harm is someone doing by sitting at one of many empty seats in a library and doing quiet work?
That's why you don't own a coffeeshop, it would be a miserably experience for you and for the customers. Lots of recently opened coffeeshop would love to receive those remote workers tho
Those that own coffee shops in my network absolutely despise people coming in, sitting for hours on end, spending little money and charging their laptops for free. It may be fun for a while to show there’s demand in your coffee place but after a point it’s simply parasitical.
It ruins the vibe of a coffee shop as well. Just awkwardly standing around as everyone drones away trying to ignore your unpleasant existence because you just happened to be standing near them waiting to (god forbid) get the coffee that's being prepared for you because there's no available seats.
I would say this is much more of an urban/rural thing than an American/European thing. Also a discount/luxury thing.
If you are running a coffee shop in an insanely expensive urban area slinging $2 coffees, you need a certain turnover of customers or you will just straight up go out of business. I have been hustling franchise owners walking around their resteraunts stalking people to make sure people didn't mill about for longer than TWENTY MINUTES. Didn't finish eating? Fuck you buy something else or finish eating on the sidewalk.
If you're in a suburban coffee shop with a cheaper lease sipping on a $9 iced coffee drink and a $7 pastry, and the place is dead, not only will the staff likely not care that you're sitting there, they might chat you up so stave off the boredom.
This. Urban areas are more likely to either see or equate your taking up space in their restaurant, even if you're not working from home. In NH most coffee shops I go to are absolutely empty, and usually have a couple people getting breakfast or coffee while working and it's a regular in out turnover or enough space that it doesn't matter. Even in Manchester which would be the closest thing to a city in NH
I know for a fact that, if you hog a table for more than 30-45 min in most busy cafes in Milano, you'll get hate-looks at the very minimum, if not literally kicked out. It changes the further you move from the city centre - as rents get lower, of course. It's also why WiFi in cafes has been quietly de-emphasized, over the last 10 years, pretty much everywhere in Italy. Money is money.
Do people who do their work in cafés consider the fact that other people can see what they’re working on?
I like people watching and sometimes shoulder surfing. It’s a curiosity thing. If I can see someone doing work, I will sit somewhere where I can see what they’re doing.
The other day, I was watching someone doing their invoicing. I could see the names addresses and emails of their customers, and how much they were being invoiced and the service they were being invoiced for. If I was trying to be a cyber criminal, I would have a decent amount of info just from that to be able to target some of those people. Perhaps even replicate the invoice, but change the bank account to a different account. I’m not saying that I would actually do that. But, if I can think that up, surely there are people who would also think that up, except act on it.
I don’t know why people think that cafés or other public spaces are good spaces to do work, because people can see what you’re doing. I’m constantly surprised by some of the kinds of work people will carry out in public too. It doesn’t seem a smart thing to do.
I sometimes work in coffee shops, but yes I take this into consideration. I’ll usually be working on either something that isn’t sensitive, or writing code where you’d need remarkably good eyesight and attention to work out what I’m actually doing from any distance. I also typically sit with my back to a wall but that’s just because I have crippling ADHD and can’t concentrate with things going on behind me.
What really gets me is the people who’ll join video calls from a coffee shop. Not only is it going to reveal a ton of information to anyone nearby it’s just straight up anti-social, no one went to the coffee shop to hear about your quarterly sales goals, Bob.
At a former job, I was provided with a laptop that had a hot key that enabled a built-in privacy screen, so you had to be pretty much dead on straight to see it.
That is pretty cool! I have a screen I can put over my laptop screen that does the same thing, but I realised that depending on the angle you could still view some stuff on my screen. I never do any work outside of home/work so it doesn’t really matter for me.
I would say a surprising number of people do not take measures to ensure their privacy/security when working outside of the home/office.
I had a guy try this recently while I was chatting with a friend in a dark speakeasy at 7pm. He sits down right next to us, opens his laptop at full brightness, and starts working in Excel. He even has the audacity to look over his receipts with his phone flashlight. It lit me up like a kid at a campsite about to tell a ghost story. Completely killed the atmosphere. I was about to have a Larry David moment when the server told him to leave.
Starbucks could win this by making dedicated meeting spaces or simply charging to use outlets or Wi-Fi for an hour at a time. How did Dunkin donuts beat them to that.
Can we create a decentralised networking of beautiful micro co-working hubs to create, inspire and connect within a 10 min walk or cycle commute from your doorstep.
The cost needs to be so low, it's accessible to everyone which is hard initially but once there is sufficient volume/space inventory then it's easier to encourage membership with prices less than $100/month.
Hi! We're working on exactly that. We have 16 locations throughout the US, and currently, our membership is $100/month. Where are you located? I can tell you if we have a location near you. If you prefer to check out our website, let me know and I Can post it.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadAnyway, I'm afraid that curbing internet won't be a complete solution since it's easy enough to tether off a phone or connect to an Xfinity hotspot.
A potential solution to this problem would be to make useable power outlets scarce. Some laptops can last a full day without a charge, but you'll find that most people will need to plug in at some point if they're working for extended periods of time. Not a perfect solution since it can be thwarted by external battery power banks.
So if the community can't get a table, they stop coming at all, and that's a bigger existential threat to the owners than just the money.
> The problem became so severe that the bar began to lose its regulars. Esten and his wife would bump into former customers around the neighbourhood and they told him that they could never get a seat at the bar because there were laptops everywhere, so they started going to other coffee shops instead.
> “That was breaking our hearts,” he said.
These people don't want to babysit tech workers. Even if it's financially sustainable to do, that's not what they opened a small coffee shop or bar to do.
Maybe I’m just a miserable misanthrope, but despite all the rhetoric I’ve never had a “community” experience at a coffee shop. In my experience it’s just cash for drinks and a place to sit. I’ve had much better experiences getting to know people in explicitly non-commercial settings (dog parks, playgrounds, classes, etc.)
Low tables and lounge-style chairs are comfortable but they can't reach anywhere near the density of the standard arrangement.
That might be ok if you're a tiny shop that only really wants to do takeaway but to me, most coffee shops are a place to relax and have a conversation with someone. A chair that becomes uncomfortable after a few minutes is in direct contradiction to that purpose and indicates either hubris or ignorance on the part of the owner.
If you’re buying one six-dollar latte and sticking around for a few hours, you’re abusing the cafe’s hospitality.
With where the economy is heading, we'll be co-working from kitchens very soon.
The coffee shops will wax lyrical of the days when they hated on tech bros who took up valuable real estate for hours.
Are you comparing store bought mocha to homemade?
My homemade mocha formula:
- 1 teaspoon of cocoa or cacao powder.
- 1 shot of Coffee from moka pot.
- 1 cup of cashew milk made at home by blending hot water, 15 or so cashews, a couple of dates blended in for sweetness.
... as the months went on, people figured out how to use keep-alive programs and our idle-user scripts started to fail. Busy signals got worse and worse, and of course, we lost customers.
When I think of the coffee shops, and people buying a cup of coffee, or a bagel, every now and then, I'm sure it must feel the same to the shop owners.
And in our modern world of seemingly infinite resources, I get that trying to remember dial up modems run by a few poor dudes in a literal garage is only going to garner the same sillouettes of billionaires out to dominate the economy; and so does the sleepy cafe owner trying to make rent manifest as John Buckingham Starbucks himself.
But this middle aged geezer has a nettled solidarity for these small business owners, who are without any apparent tool to save their business without deliberately summoning the modern marvel of public shaming on social media. I could never run a business.
Policy at the front: “Patrons get 1 hour of seating with each purchase”
You can also make the seating less comfortable to encourage people to move on, which is a classic technique. Or straight up just don’t have seating.
The problem with this is enforcement.
People have become antisocial and angrier, an effect of COVID isolation? I don't know.
But putting retail workers in the position of having to even ask people to leave is too uncomfortable and potentially even risky.
That's why some employees get paid a couple bucks an hour more to be a shift manager. You also don't need to directly confront people after 1 hour, you can be passive-aggressive with any customer bold enough to stick around for 4-5 hours. The policy isn't meant to be taken literally, it's more of a deterrent and a pretence for action.
Dealing with customers not leaving is just part of the work in retail. Somebody needs to be the person who draws the line and tell somebody to stop loitering and leave. Some people will literally live in the coffee shop if nobody stops them, never mind staying there for 8 hours not buying anything.
This is even if you’re paying continuously.
People with small kids, schoolkids in the summer or after the kids are home from school but before work is over
People with small apartments in dense cities who need to get out of their space for their well being
The modern world can be very isolating by default, so you have to head out sometimes.
But this article happened back in 2009, too. I remember it. I may have been part of the problem. It's a signal of an economy that is displacing and reallocating workspaces.
I used a library to work while travelling, to avoid overstaying my welcome in a café. It was fantastic.
I also use them at home, where they enable me to earn money and pay taxes, if that's such a big concern. Most students do, too.
But at many of the coffee shops I go to I can use Xfinity, their city-wide solution for their customers.
Often times I don't even need to ask for the coffeeshop's wifi password since the Xfinity connection may be good enough.
Quite often it isn't, more often than not actually. But the main shop I go to near my apartment it's reliable.
In Europe no one bats an eye at you spending your entire day in cafe seating using the WiFi.
If you are running a coffee shop in an insanely expensive urban area slinging $2 coffees, you need a certain turnover of customers or you will just straight up go out of business. I have been hustling franchise owners walking around their resteraunts stalking people to make sure people didn't mill about for longer than TWENTY MINUTES. Didn't finish eating? Fuck you buy something else or finish eating on the sidewalk.
If you're in a suburban coffee shop with a cheaper lease sipping on a $9 iced coffee drink and a $7 pastry, and the place is dead, not only will the staff likely not care that you're sitting there, they might chat you up so stave off the boredom.
I like people watching and sometimes shoulder surfing. It’s a curiosity thing. If I can see someone doing work, I will sit somewhere where I can see what they’re doing. The other day, I was watching someone doing their invoicing. I could see the names addresses and emails of their customers, and how much they were being invoiced and the service they were being invoiced for. If I was trying to be a cyber criminal, I would have a decent amount of info just from that to be able to target some of those people. Perhaps even replicate the invoice, but change the bank account to a different account. I’m not saying that I would actually do that. But, if I can think that up, surely there are people who would also think that up, except act on it.
I don’t know why people think that cafés or other public spaces are good spaces to do work, because people can see what you’re doing. I’m constantly surprised by some of the kinds of work people will carry out in public too. It doesn’t seem a smart thing to do.
What really gets me is the people who’ll join video calls from a coffee shop. Not only is it going to reveal a ton of information to anyone nearby it’s just straight up anti-social, no one went to the coffee shop to hear about your quarterly sales goals, Bob.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130bPdQvH3w
The cost needs to be so low, it's accessible to everyone which is hard initially but once there is sufficient volume/space inventory then it's easier to encourage membership with prices less than $100/month.