The Tragedy of the Coffee Shop
coffeeandcode.org
coffeeandcode.org
One family business is running businesses like these, and it frustrates me to no end when people (for whatever reason, not just working on a laptop) hog a seat and a table for hours on end after buying the cheapest thing they can find on the menu once when they walked in. I don't mind if someone sits there for 10+ hours a day if they keep on buying food and coffee regularly, and I know I've sat at a table for hours on end working but even went as far as to make a timer on my laptop to get up every like 30 minutes to go get something. But it's crass to sit there like "oh, this seat is mine, I bought ONE small cup of coffee 3 hours ago, stop looking at me like that".
It's one thing for a coffee shop to look busier by having a whole bunch of people sit there and work away, attracting passers-by, but it's another when people who don't buy anything just hog the tables preventing new customers from coming in because they see a total lack of available work space.
That being said, I remember once when I was at a family friend's coffee shop and there was one customer who just. wouldn't. leave. He was told about their time limit policy about customers getting x hours with purchase (rarely enforced...except with people like these) and he was like "whatever" and acted like he was going to buy something but then settled back in and worked. I saw this go on for 20 minutes when I decided to boot him off the wifi. I don't think he realized I was purposefully doing so until I kept on kicking him off, and the outrage on his face was unbelievable. It was as if he felt he was entitled to sit there and do whatever he wanted after buying a 50 cent bottle of water earlier, how dare I interrupt what he was doing. Unfortunately it's those types of people who ruin the whole experience for all the reasonable folk.
Lastly, the advice about getting to know the owners/employees is the best :) I don't spend much time actually working, but when I have there were always a few customers I got to know and even once ended up working with because they decided to chat me up after seeing whatever I was doing on the side, like reading some tech book or coding on my laptop. I always included a little something for them, like free cookies. Those are the kinds of customers that make my day.
Isn't this a bit consumerist, consume something or get out? (And didn't that jump out at you when you wrote it?) Perhaps there should be a 3rd way, paying for time at a table. The problem is the pricing (and people taking the piss).
I would suggest a nominal rate (after the first hour or two) would make everyone happy. It is quite likely the average stay would increase as people would not have taking up space on their conscience.
The point of effectively buying table time is valid, imho, and I agree that buying food (or other stuff) from the cafe is a good approximation.
I personally don't care how someone goes about supporting the shop though - I'd be fine with someone paying like a couple bucks an hour or even like a $5/hour includes bottomless coffee and a snack plus outlet and wifi kind of deal. But most coffee shops don't have employees that would be comfortable with making a deal like that on-the-spot with a customer, nor is that a really obvious thing for most people to even propose.
So in lieu of paying for a table or offering to do so, someone could just occasionally get up, stretch, and buy a cookie. I didn't say it had to be a large cup of coffee every hour :) Just a little something occasionally to show that you're not just going to make yourself comfortable there without buying anything more.
Just from observation, so many people come in and stay for just a few minutes or take their coffee to go that it's kind of a nice equilibrium. It's rare that you'll find a coffee shop in Pittsburgh to 100% capacity (except perhaps Sunday afternoon or evening in the fall and spring). Electricity costs nothing. If anything, having people in your coffee shop serves as a kind of advertisement that it is a place people want to be for whatever reason -- the coffee is good or they just feel comfortable there.
As fantastic as Manhattan is, there are two reasons why I wouldn't want to live there: too many tourists and too few coffee shops. The best I could find in the upper west side was Cosi, a chain. The best I could find around Soho was some piece that closed earlier than shops in Pittsburgh. And the best I could find in the Upper East Side closed a couple years ago. Pittsburgh, baby. Awesome place to live if you love the coffee shops.
What you are experiencing in Pittsburgh is a function of cheap rent. I lived in Minneapolis many years ago and the coffee shop scene was similar to what you described. The attitudes toward people hanging out and not buying anything are much different when the rent on a space is $900/m instead of $9000/m.
I wouldn't say that electricity costs nothing. Ritual Roasters in SF said that laptop users were costing them upwards of $2000/m in electricity charges.
Ritual used to have a bazillion power outlets you could plug your laptop into, and they'd have them covered up only on the weekends. During the second week of March 2007 (a date that shall live in infamy) they covered up nearly all of their power outlets permanently in an effort to encourage higher turnover and cut their $2,000/month electric bill down.
http://sf.wikispot.org/Ritual_Coffee_Roasters
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/...
If the coffee shop is open 18 hours per day, 30 days a month, and the average laptop pulls 50w, which costs $.20 per kWh, they'd need to have like 350-400 laptops plugged in every single hour that they're open to rack up $2k / month in costs.
If you bring your laptop in and sit for six hours, you've just cost them seven cents in electricity.
Rerun the numbers and you can easily get 500+$ / month in energy costs from people just sitting there using a laptop.
1) Most people there were either blogging, checking email, surfing myspace and craigslist, or doing the newfangled Rails thing. The machines were 90% Macs.
2) The place was cooled by opening the back door and turning on a big floor fan. On hot days, this lowered the temperature from unbearable to merely very hot.
In your hypothetical air conditioned coffee shop where everyone is playing WoW on behemoth laptops, $500/month incurred by laptops is possible. But for Ritual Roasters circa 2004, definitely not.
(btw, I thought it was a fantastic idea when they covered up the plugs)
The point of these articles is there is no "business"; if people with laptops actually were good customers no-one would have any problem with them consuming resources (space, power).
A few assumptions:
- People who walk in, pay $n for a cup of coffee, sit at a table and stay for an hour aren't abusing the system at all. Even if it's just one person at a table reading, we'll say that $n pays for an hour of table time, in addition to the coffee, expenses, profit, etc. In that case, two friends walking in and sharing a table is just a bonus for the shop owner.
- If people want to stay for longer than their purchase justifies, they're willing to pay $x for the table, power, wifi, etc.
- Nobody wants to pay for both their table space and their coffee.
- This coffee shop is _good_ to work in. It's encouraged by the staff, the seating is comfortable, outlets are within reach, the music isn't obnoxious, the food and coffee are good, private rooms might be available for a higher table fee, etc.
Given all that, here's how I think it could work:
In this coffee shop, a typical customer walks in and orders a cup of coffee from the barista. She makes it, takes his money, and hands him the coffee. The trick is that the cup he's received has a little RFID chip, basically rigged to say 'I am a cup of something'.
The customer chooses a table and sits down. On the table is a little device with a coin slot and a display on it. It might be reminiscent of those old jukebox selectors that make you think of '50's diners. The device has a little clock on it, and also a little secondary display.
When he sits down, the RFID chip registers with the table and the device on the table registers 1 hour on it's clock. The device also registers the RFIDs unique ID with a server somewhere in the shop, making sure it only works once.
After an hour, the clock has run down and the customer is still happily working away. He doesn't really want another coffee yet.
The wait staff receives an alert on their handheld (Think an iPod touch or some similar device) that the table has 'expired'. They walk over and ask the customer if they can get them anything else. When he declines, they politely remind him that he'll have to pay for any additional table time, and he can do so with the device on the table.
He throws $x into the device, it adds time to the clock and the dollar amount to it's secondary display. Half an hour later, he decides it's time for more coffee. He calls over the wait staff (maybe there's even a little button on the device to call them over), and asks for another coffee. The wait staff looks at their handheld, sees that the table has paid for time, and goes to get the coffee. They gives it to the customer, and charge it against the table on their handheld. The dollar amount on the secondary display decrements to pay for the coffee, but the clock stays the same. Now the purchase of that coffee paid for some of his table time. In this way, he isn't effectively double billed.
Opinions?
So the key would have to be if all the other coffee shops started turning off wifi and covering their outlets, or it would have to be a really great place to work.
Potential enhancement: the staff will babysit your table for you while you go to the bathroom. That would be a big win.
Most people (attractive coffee shop customers) accept that they should buy something and stay for a reasonably long time, but if they were forced to do that by such a technical and precise system, they would hate it.
"The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own boss—none of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeper—all the way to Barbie tea sets—than any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it."
That happens to a lot of good people, sadly. Michael Gerber covers it pretty well in "The E-Myth Revisited", which I consider the Bible for small business owners. I make anyone I work with read it before we work together. Any entrepreneurial-minded person who hasn't read it would do well to check it out. Amazon, no affiliate link:
http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...
I remember the first time I visited a coffee shop, long Before wi-fi was invented: it was a social place that had big couches, plants, books and games. People gathered there, played chess and cards over coffee, and there were even live performances of various sorts at night and on weekends. Contrast to your typical coffee shop scene today: rows of tables and uncomfortable chairs, doubled-up with dudes at laptops who have been camped out for hours, nursing a small cup of coffee.
Once upon a time, coffee houses were about relaxation and social life; today, they're basically about work. So personally, I'm thrilled that cafes are starting to cover up power outlets, and I hope that they soon follow this trend with paid hourly wi-fi access -- or even eliminating the wireless access entirely.
That said, cafés will have to go beyond blocking up power if they want to dissuade laptoppers. Battery life is going up a lot, you can easily get 5 or 6 hours on the new MBP and my EEE PC will do 8 hours no trouble. Add a 3G dongle to that, and I don't really care where I go.
That's insane. Might as well rent an office for that price. Also, that much coffee is definitely not good for you.
I agree that you should buy something, but I disagree with the "regularly" part. I certainly would agree that bringing your own teabags to a coffee shop is totally out of order though.
But not every hour. Not even I can stomach that.
If you can't keep up, or aren't thirsty, you can buy a coffee 'for the house', which basically equates to just giving them money. If you're trying to make friends, or the cashier or barista is cute, you can buy them a drink too. You'll probably be looked at funny (since I'm guessing their drinks are free,) but life's full of weirdos. Might as well be one. ;-)
I can see a "sense of entitlement" in you comment. Why do you disagree that if you are sitting in a coffee shop and occupying one of their seats and using up electricity for your laptop, you should buy something regularly
That is more likely to be true if the shop is full to capacity (e.g. during the lunch rush, etc.). When there is free space, your marginal cost to the coffee shop is just electricity, which isn't that much.
That said, I agree it's only decent to purchase something regularly -- a coffee every 2 hours or some food seems reasonable to me.
In this case they don't charge for the WiFi, it just comes with your coffee.
My reasoning is that most laptop users will use WiFi, and if they want to use it, they at least have to ask for a new card every couple hours, which involves either buying something or overtly seeming like a leech.
But what are we to do in our modern much more efficient real estate and beverage service markets?
Publicly subsidize 3rd places?
I'm having a hard time comping up with a libertarian argument for public subsidies of public spaces. I happen to think bridges are better when privately funded, like the Millau Viaduct http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct
But that's because the return on investment with bridges is easy to collect.
3rd spaces however could be crucial to community building, thereby acting as a fertilizer for increased business activity and possibly even as a way to reduce crime rates.
But those benefits are difficult to charge for.
http://www.spottedbylocals.com/berlin/area/mitte/bars-mitte/...