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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 num
by kaib 17y ago
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.
- andyking 17y agoI 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?
- gaius 17y agoThe 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.