Oh man this reads like an artsy web short. A bunch of creatives on macs in a hipster coffee shop. I have nothing against it, its just so deep in the stereotype!
Living on the west side of LA, this is the quintessential daytime coffee shop crowd around here as I always imagined it. It would be really interesting to see this experiment replicated in other cities like SF and NYC to get a sense for how different the crowds are.
I don't think the results in SF would be that interesting - everyone is working on their app!
I have a metric now for interactions with strangers in San Francisco: Time to App. It's like Time to Crate in games, but here you time how long an otherwise interesting conversation turns to someone talking about their app.
My go-to coffee shop in Cambridge, MA is in the same building as the Broad institute and across the street from MIT. I'd say about half the conversations I overhear are about biology/life sciences and a quarter are math (topology is common, as far as I can tell).
Of course the people sending out invoices aren't having conversations! But still, almost surely there'd be a different distribution. More science, less film.
You might be amused to hear that when the Barismo opens over on Third St., they're planning to have part of the cafe be a 'shared work space'--i.e., they're going to charge you to sit there all day with your laptop.
When I lived in Brooklyn, as gentrification rolled down from Park Slope, it became difficult to find a cafe that wasn't overrun by mommy gangs.
As a resident of SF I find coffee-shop laptop users to be a pest in busy cafes. Coffee shops are a great social environment, and dominating a seat for an extended period of time while you are immersed in your computer runs counter to that culture.
This is a design problem and Starbucks has it right; uncomfortable and small seats and tables. So you can sit, but anything past 20mins and you want to get up and move.
The other side of this, however, is that if I need to work somewhere and I don't have an office, where can I go? 2 people cannot comfortably work in my dinky condo (I can barely live in it...) and I don't want to pay $100+ for a co-working space. Compared to a $2.50 coffee, that's insane!
It will depend on your city, but public libraries are usually fantastic. The wifi is free, the seating is spacious, and everyone is there with a purpose. They also cost nothing and you never get the "am I loitering?" feeling that you get in coffee shops.
University libraries can also be good, but be mindful of the date. If it's exam season I tend to avoid them simply because students should have priority to the libraries they are paying for.
I think this entirely depends on the vibe and setup of the cafe. There are some I frequent that are clearly not the place to whip out your laptop and start working away, but there are others that openly cater to that crowd and are setup towards that end. Heck one of the better ones I frequent is putting in Google Fiber and wired gigabit connections for the folks that like to work from their shop.
I agree, some coffee shops like it, apparently somehow they make the economics work (the one next to me calls itself a "Platform for Entrepreneurs," ugh).
I'd like to see someone open a cafe that has a communal-only seating policy, perhaps even you are assigned to a seat in one of the communal seating areas, no laptops. The cafe promotes active engagement and conversation amongst people who do not know each other. A return to the original purpose of the London coffee house -- a place to debate[1].
There are plenty of coffee shops where people are buried into their laptops already, but as this article demonstrates, some people really do want to talk to people they don't know, but they find it tough to get out of their comfort zone. If there's a space where this is encouraged and promoted, I think many would welcome it.
One of my favorite coffee shops in SF has no wifi and is explicit about it. It's fantastic. Doesn't stop anyone from tethering, obviously, but it keeps the laptop warriors out all the same.
