Comment by dbul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbul | Hacker News Reader

Damn it feels good to be in Pittsburgh. As I often hop coffee shops, I understand the behavior. Students will even go so far as get a coffee, work, then go to a nearby food shop and bring something back for their dinner while they continue to work on their laptops. What's great is that no one cares. Here it is choice. Most coffee shops are open until 11 or midnight on the weeknights and 12 or 1 on the weekends, most have wifi, and most have outlets. If you were to be kicked out of one coffee shop, then simply that coffee shop loses your business and another one gains.

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.

There are fewer coffee shops per capita in Manhattan compared to places like Portland and SF. I'm assuming because rents are so expensive. However, you were looking in the wrong neighborhoods. The coffee shops are in places like East/West Village and the Lower East Side.

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/...

They didn't say that laptop users were costing them $2000 / month, but that they were trying to cut their $2000 / month bill down. Big difference.

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.

The average laptop today pulls in far more than 50w. If everyone was using a net book with a fully charged battery is's one thing, but while charging I have measured up to 200w from a "gaming" laptop. Plus you need to double the energy costs as they guy sitting there and his laptop both increase cooling costs.

Rerun the numbers and you can easily get 500+$ / month in energy costs from people just sitting there using a laptop.

I was a regular at Ritual back when they covered the plugs. I recall:

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)

If you were to be kicked out of one coffee shop, then simply that coffee shop loses your business and another one gains.

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).

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