Oakland Cafe Owner's Banning Laptop Experiment
actualcafe.blogspot.com
actualcafe.blogspot.com
There was a big transition over the past 10 years when coffee shops went from being smoking establishments mainly catering to young people and people on the fringes to being places where a wide demographic of people meet to talk and, for many people, work on computers. Laptops + wireless breathed new life into independent coffee shops at a time when they were being hit with smoking bans and still licking their wounds from a decade of starbucks expansion.
The transition to wireless has created a thriving cafe culture that's more busy than I've ever seen it. The cafes around me are so packed all day every day that I have to time my arrival to make sure I get a seat. 10 years ago they were mostly empty during the day. And it's not just more customers, it's better customers. Schizophrenics who sat with a single cup of coffee for hours while harassing other customers have been replaced by young professionals who buy double lattes.
The vast majority of coffee shops that didn't embrace or take seriously the transition to wireless have lost all of their customers and closed. It's been somewhat heartbreaking for me to watch some of my favorite coffee shops sit empty and eventually close down because the owners didn't take the wireless transition seriously and/or because they held on to an imaginary ideal about cafe culture.
Turning it off on weekends makes some sense; people aren't working there as much. However, it's a dangerous idea for cafe owners to take the anti-wireless sentiment too far. It reminds me of when I worked in academic libraries during the period they were still holding on to their luddite fantasies about the role of libraries. If you own a cafe and are considering this, you better make damn sure that your cafe has enough of these ideal, laptopless customers. I've seen a lot of cafes gamble on this and lose.
All that said, it's interesting that wireless has made coffee shops so popular that people once again value them as social centers.
You mean social with each other, or social with their online friends?
I think it'd be neat to have a cafe with different sections of seating arrangements aimed at laptop users, chatters, newspaper readers where people weren't getting in each other's way.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/6604801.html
This article goes into some detail about two of my favorite cafes here in Houston. One caters to people looking to work or study and has become a sort-of office for many, not to mention a great place to network among other technology professionals. I'll often work there when I'm sick of the office just because the atmosphere is so nice.
The other is a coffee bar and has the best coffee / espresso in town by far, and though you see the occasional laptop user, they are very rare.
I'm very glad to have both options and frequent them both a couple of times a week.
I can see if they're checking a quick email while having a coffee, but experiences I've had and maukdaddy above show that people are camping out a lot longer than that first cup. So are they staying all day? Are they purchasing more beverages?
Most people with laptops spend 1-2 hours. You'll get people working longer in the mid morning and mid afternoon. People who show up with laptops at 2 (1:30-2 is a common transition period), for instance, seldom stay past 5/5:30 (another common transition period). 5 or 6 hours tends to be the upper limit; most people can only sit in the same spot for so long. Obviously, it's very rude to this without buying drinks at regular intervals.
At many cafes, people that are ruder about it are almost never regulars. Any cafe that's popular enough to be filled up will have a network of regulars. Regulars chat, share books, go out for drinks and, among the programmer regulars, chat about startups, collaborate on projects or hire one another for contract work. You'd probably not be able to recognize it if you go in and people are all reading and on laptops at the time, but if you start frequenting it you'd start to pick up on it
When went out of town for an internship a few years ago, I was a very frequent patron of a couple chain shops near the office and one independent shop downtown. I could work on personal projects and enjoy a few drinks without being disturbed. I was in often enough over a six month stretch to recognize most of the staff. Even so, I don't remember seeing more than a few repeat patrons, and even they were only around two or three times. I may have just been around at the wrong time of day, but I covered pretty much every time slot on evenings and weekends.
I don't want to sound like some old-fuddy duddy (i'm not that old), but i was injured quite badly by a snowboarder.
The local cafe here that banned laptops after 5pm to encourage more social evenings wasn't happy enough with the results, so subsequently also banned "studying" after 5pm, however you define that. The owner justified it by saying that his cafe wasn't a study hall, and there couldn't be a social scene in his cafe if it was overrun with college kids studying and doing homework.
At some point it becomes kind of ridiculous to feel like you're being socially policed by the owner, and it's more pleasant to just visit other cafes that won't look over my shoulder deciding if I'm being social enough or not.
Many other notable cafe's such as 49th parallel also don't have any wireless.
I guess it's all up to local culture.
A lot of European establishments I know have decided to never join the wifi movement. And even if many cafes now offer wifi it's very hard to spot people actually sitting with their laptops. Why would you want to, there are so many other things you can do in a cafe. Read, think, draw or just plain talk to the people in your party.
It's certainly pretty much exclusively a city thing - I know what short shrift I'd get if I walked into a cafe in my rural town, bought a £1.50 cup of coffee and whipped out my laptop to spend a couple of hours working. (The lack of wi-fi isn't an issue - people here heavily use those little 3G USB "dongles".) I really couldn't say why there's such a marked difference, though.
Slightly bizarrely, last time I went in a McDonald's in some grim Manchester suburb they had large signs advertising free wi-fi. Don't we study and work hard so we get to work in places that aren't McDonald's?
Laptops, though, can consume people in so many different ways, which makes it harder to approach a conversation with someone. You never know if someone is checking email, doing work, or just social masturbating on Facebook. There is a thicker "invisible social wall" when trying to approach someone with a laptop because you don't want to bother something important, so very few people even try to start a conversation.
When someone's reading a paper, you know they are interested in the day's current news, which makes an easy conversation opener. You know they aren't busy doing their taxes or writing a paper.
Laptops on the other hand encourage communication with people not actually in the cafe, lowing interaction at the cafe.
Maybe a better middle ground was banning laptop use on a weekend beyond the quick checking of email, part of this would involve not allowing laptops to be plugged in.
It probably also helps deal with some of the more disruptive elements of running a coffee shop with wi-fi, like squatters, torrenters, etc. From my time working at one, I recall that the most frequent laptop users could be pretty disruptive, and didn't spend much more than a typical customer.
The first were "on-the-way" types; they'd get a latte or mocha and a pastry, using their laptops while they did (on battery), then leave. Not really any personal contact, just a matter of business.
The second group would do the same, but would generally be friendly with the staff. They seemed to stay a little longer than the above, but it's possible that I only think that because they were recognizable and friendly.
The third group were what I called "squatters". They'd set up at a table like they owned it, and generally didn't care who they inconvenienced in the process. The squatters tended to stay for hours, and tended to try to stretch their coffee dollar; buying drip and adding a lot of sugar and milk, or doing the same with espresso to make a ghetto latte. More than once I found squatters who unplugged a grinder or a coffee machine to plug in their laptop, and then got ranted at when I informed them that I needed the outlet to provide service to others.
My experiences certainly don't prove anything, of course.
There are two issues: 1) Whether a business has the right to limit what goes on in that business (and a worthy debate that is); and 2) How serious your addiction might be if it provokes that much anger.
Step away from the keyboard.