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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Never having to deal with a member of the public inside your property is a huge liability and hence stress reducer.

But on the other hand... Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out. At least that's what they say. I often see McDonald's fill that niche for older folks.

Haha yeah there are people like that in the Netherlands.

And then everyone comes with their laptop to work and it becomes an open office.

That can all be trivially fixed by style of seating and tables, removing all power outlets and so on. People who don't go there to work won't care.

I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.

You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%, 100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food, only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of these office workers. Bar seating is especially space-efficient for this.

The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe owners.

The $10 comfortable folding chairs that recently became available changed the equation for me. Rather than sitting in a cafe, I much prefer to take my laptop and a chair and go sit in a nice park, on the beach, or even in the woods.

What chair is that?

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005005339996025.html

Ah, that is not comfortable for me with a laptop!

Thanks for sharing the link though.

Is that a bad thing?

it is if you want the place to be financially viable.

The common non-tourist behaviour in a café in Vienna is to sit there talking for hours, buying a few cups of coffee total. It has been like that since before laptops were a thing. Yet the cafés remain viable.

Same here in Greece.

I’m going to build a cafe inside a faraday cage someday.

Just to see what happens.

Maybe I’ll not serve alcohol and call it Zero Bars.

Better yet, serve alcohol and call it Bar/No Bars.

For the case of

> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out

Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the human perspective.

I think it's pretty common today though. There are a number of cafes with a lot of seating where I see a whole lot of tables with someone seated working on their laptop.

Cafés as a place to be for cheap where the weather can't reach you while you read the newspaper you can't afford or a book or plan a revolution is quite old. Like centuries old, perhaps millenia if you count gossip and include inns.

I suspect the economics have changed in a lot of cities though.

so is not opening a service based business

Sounds like that is the path this business owner took.

One macdonalds deciding they dont want to be a sit-down resturant anymore doesn't prevent anyone else from opening a competing resturant.

Sure but it's also a scaling factor. People are going to choose the tradeoff that's right for them or their insurance costs.

Capitalism working as intended. Wealth extraction without having to give back to the community.

They give back by paying taxes.

Like i think the intended path here is that taxes pay for a library, a park, or a community center. Having random businesses create hang out spots out of the goodness of their heart is not the intended path. They can if it makes sense for their business, but community needs should be primarily funded through taxes not business charity.

Would make sense, your reasoning, if they actually paid taxes. Unfortunately everything is very broken on that front, labor pays much higher taxes than corporations, the richest don't pay taxes at all, and the shortfall is plugged by cutting public services and issuing debt on what remains.

The comment thread is about a McDonalds franchise owner. They are not going to be committing Apple-level tax evasion. They will be paying taxes like everyone else.

Not “like everyone else”. In comparison to an employee, a business owner has a vast array of tools available to them to limit taxes.

Income tax on employees is a tax on the business

That's right, if my income gets taxed more, it's my employer that could default on his mortgage.

You are being sarcastic, but yes that is indeed how it works.

Increased payroll taxes increases expenses for the business and if expenses increase enough business will go under.

Wage taxes suck for the employee, but they are not the only party affected.

> Increased payroll taxes increases expenses for the business

The amount of disconnect from reality is staggering.

Only yesterday some people on here were trying to convince me that taxes were literally like slavery for rich people!

If it’s that bad for wealthy folks, imagine the impact on everyone else.

You can just choose to not buy hamburgers from that McDonald's. No person needs unhealthy food.

I haven't eaten that sort of food for over a decade.

Yeh having to deal with actual customers is such a pain.

This but unironically

The platonic ideal is no customers, no employees, no management, and no government.

Just AIs trading Bitcoin with each other.

The platonic ideal is doing only your preferred form of work, and getting paid universally usable currency.

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