

Oakland Cafe Owner's Banning Laptop Experiment - drewsing
http://actualcafe.blogspot.com/

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carbon8
I've been deep in cafe culture for almost 20 years now (hanging out in them
since I was just starting high school, and now I've been working from cafes
and home for 3 years), mainly in the Chicago area.

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while harassing other customers have been replaced by young professionals who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.

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joezydeco
_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?

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carbon8
Social with each other. Neighborhood social centers, enough so that people
care enough to even consider banning laptops.

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smokey_the_bear
Cafe owners are certainly free to structure their cafes how they like. I
actually appreciate that his laptop policy is clear, I'd feel welcome going
there with a laptop on weekdays. Sometimes they make the power outlets
inaccessible, or tell you to leave when it gets busy, and they don't post
those policies so clearly.

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.

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masterj
There's obviously room for many cafe structures.

<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.

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maukdaddy
GREAT idea! I went into my local coffee shop here in Chicago last weekend, and
EVERY single table was occupied with someone with a laptop. At least 25
tables, all with laptops, me with no where to sit with my food/drink.

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joezydeco
Maybe I'm not in cafes enough to understand this, but how long are laptop
users camping out on tables?

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?

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carbon8
I often spend all afternoon at various cafes, buying a $2-4 drink every 1-2
hours.

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

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kd0amg
_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.

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carbon8
That's pretty unusual for an indie shop. Typically that would only be the case
if the place was heavily reliant on foot traffic. If a coffee shop isn't
tapped into a neighborhood and some surrounding social networks that bring in
repeat customers, then it has to figure out a way to get a steady stream of
new customers.

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gamble
These cafe laptop bans remind me of the infamous ban on snowboarding at the
Deer Valley ski resort in Utah. (And seem to provoke a similar response, even
though 99% of their competitors don't have bans) I suspect they're more about
marketing the business to a niche clientele than because the laptops are a
problem in themselves.

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lsd5you
Snow boarders cause more accidents and add risk and higher insurance premiums
to skiers around them. In europe at least, there is enough demand, mostly from
older people for such a ban, in more than one resort (i believe).

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.

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_delirium
I'm somewhat ambivalent on this. I can see the motivation, but it does
sometimes seem to drift into an overbearing cafe owner trying to socially
engineer _exactly_ what kind of culture they want their cafe to have.

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.

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derefr
I know that I, for one, never bring my laptop to cafes—instead, I pull out my
phone and web-browse over 3G. Does the policy cover this (increasingly common)
activity as well?

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spudlyo
Popular Cafes here in Seattle (Victrola, Vivace) have been shutting off the
wireless on weekends for at least a year now. People seem used to it.

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Tiktaalik
Vancouver's most popular local chain, JJ Bean, has never adopted wireless and
they continue to be massively successful based on the quality of their
product. They're rapidly expanding.

Many other notable cafe's such as 49th parallel also don't have any wireless.

I guess it's all up to local culture.

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kaib
Wow. After reading the article and some of the comments I'm realizing how
different the cafe culture in Europe is. We have been living in the Bay Area
for a number of years, so it's not like I haven't seen the droves of people
sitting silently in coffee shops and tinkering away on their laptops. But the
fact that this even generates a discussion.. :-)

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.

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andyking
I was wondering about this myself when I read the article. I live in the UK
and while you _very_ occasionally see the odd person sitting in the corner of
a cafe on a laptop, it's nowhere near as common as it seems to be in the US.

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?

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gaius
The target market for McDonalds is chav kids on pay-as-you-go phones who want
to watch videos on Youtube. They don't seriously expect anyone to be working.

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awa
Uhmm... So I believe that newspapers and other reading materials are also
banned in his cafe

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awa
Why the downvotes? Don't newspapers also reduce the interaction among
customers... I don't mind cafes banning or discouraging squatters or switching
off wifi, but why are they stopping people from checking email during
breakfast even when they are using their own USB modem/connection.

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drewsing
Interesting point. I agree with you in that newspapers take away from
interaction.

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.

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dlytle
I don't see what's so terrible about this, other than just knee-jerk moral
outrage.

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.

~~~
dlytle
To clarify the above, generally we'd get three kinds of laptop customers.

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.

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smokey_the_bear
I stayed in Pittsburgh for a month in a place with no wireless, and there was
a cafe nearby that let me sit all day with my laptop and my dog! I was amazed,
I drank as many mochas as I could, but I wished I could pay an hourly rate or
something, I really didn't want them to feel taken advantage of.

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greenlblue
I applaud the effort. I've always thought of cafes in a romantic way as
conversation/idea factories but this illusion is completely shattered when I
walk in and people are clanking away at their keyboards. So it's nice to see
somebody is trying to bring back the romantic image even if it is just for the
weekends.

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rms
Seems like a good idea for a few cafes to do, especially for PR purposes. I
doubt this is going to be a trend though; people shouldn't take it too
seriously.

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imd
I read a similar article a number of years ago, but at the time there were no
negative comments (to my memory). Funny how attitudes have changed.

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nfnaaron
Wow, what extreme reactions on the negative side. It sounds a lot like smokers
being angry at no smoking laws for bars.

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.

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jessriedel
Well, I think the smokers are angry because the gov't in some places has
stepped in and made it illegal to smoke at _any_ bar. That's quite different
than a coffee shops deciding to not allow laptops in their particular store.

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lsternlicht
Sounds like Cafe Grumpy NYC

