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If I bought a cup of coffee at your shop and sat down, only for you to tell me that laptops are "not allowed," I'd be very unhappy with your store. Anyway, thi
by kenning 9y ago
If I bought a cup of coffee at your shop and sat down, only for you to tell me that laptops are "not allowed," I'd be very unhappy with your store.
Anyway, this is why coworking spaces exist.
- keypress 9y agoNot so sure, depends if someone is taking the proverbial.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoYour $3 coffee doesn't entitle you to sit there for an hour though. If I was running a cafe, I'd expect that you'd be leaving within 5 to 10 minutes of finishing your coffee. The very few times I've worked in a coffee shop, I've done that myself. It's not a coworking space.
- inDigiNeous 9y agoSays who? I would understand it if the cafe place would enforce rules like this. But they would also lose many current customers. Many people just come to a cafe and stare at their phone. Or read a book. How I see it this is a problem for the providers of the cafe service to solve, not the customers.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI've walked past cafes that have no seats available because they are full of people with laptops, they have lost my business because they don't enforce any rules.
- chrisseaton 9y agoI don’t get it. Those people shouldn’t sit at the tables... because you want to be sitting at the tables instead?
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoTraffic, would you rather have four customers using a table in an hour or just one?
- chrisseaton 9y agoI think you're just assuming a lot - about how many coffees they'll buy and how profitable these people are. But we don't even have to guess. Big businesses that are very careful about monitoring things like this, such as Starbucks, actively encourage laptops (with tons of power, wifi, rows of single-person desk tables) so maybe your intuition about what is profitable is just wrong? I mean you've thought about it for ten minutes and were already coming into the situation annoyed because you want to sit down and someone else was there, and Starbucks are running this business full time with I would guess people dedicated to thinking about this kind of thing. I'm more inclined to believe their reasoning on it.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI mean you've thought about it for ten minutes Sorry, did I say something to offend you?
- jdbernard 9y agoThe way I interpreted the parent post: that was intended to note the contrast to businesses who probably have several people who's full-time job is to think about these things.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- poisonarena 9y ago"expect that you'd be leaving within 5 to 10 minutes of finishing your coffee" hah... Living in Spain right now.. That attitude wouldnt fly
- closeparen 9y agoCan I ask where you're from? The purpose that you seem to imagine coffee shops serve us totally foreign to me. Neither I nor anyone I know would ever dream of staying in a coffee shop for only the duration of a coffee. Either you're passing through and you grab a drink to go, or you've come to hang out for a while (either with friends or to pass the time in a "3rd space" working/reading/studying). All my coffee shop visits are either less than 1 minute or over 60. It would be truly bizarre to leave my apartment and spend 10+ minutes getting somewhere, only to stay for 5.
- mnm1 9y agoThe $3 coffee most certainly does entitle you to sit there for an hour. That's the whole point of getting a coffee in a coffee shop. And if you told me to leave after 5 to 10 minutes, I'd tell you to call the cops and make me. With that kind of attitude, however, your coffee shop won't be in business long, so it shouldn't really be a problem that you treat people with so much disrespect.
- EliRivers 9y agoif you told me to leave after 5 to 10 minutes, I'd tell you to call the cops and make me. Presumably the owner would actually have asked your mother or whichever other adult is with you, though.
- IIIIIIIIIIIIIII 9y agoWhy do you insult OP? If they had signs stating their policy clearly upfront I would accept it, but if not, in the cultures that I know the purpose of a coffee shop is exactly to sit there for quite a while. I'm in Germany and I used to live in the US for a decade. If I go to a real Italian coffee shop (i.e. the owner is an Italian), of which there are quite a few, I see people sitting and chatting for long times, an hour is not unreasonable at all. They don't order much after the initial purchase either. Also, the entire history of coffee shops is that they are places of meeting people, not vending places. So if a particular coffee shop wants to have a "10 minutes only" policy I'm certainly fine with it, everybody can lead their business as they wish, but to what I know this is against all expectations, so it should be stated right away. For laptop policy it depends more on the local context and I would not always expect to see a sign if they don't want it, but just the acceptance of larger amounts of time spent sitting there alone is a more global thing I would think taht cannot be easily deduced just from looking at a place.
- EliRivers 9y agoWhy do you insult OP? Laughably childish responses - "call the cops and make me" - indicate that the OP is childish. With childish people, reasoned discussion is less likely to carry the message that such behaviour is ridiculous than the public humiliation of having such childish behaviour highlighted. There will then be a small tantrum, probably involving turning it around and blaming me in some way (I expect I simply don't understand - that's the usual childish response, typically from teenagers) which shall be ignored. Act like a child; get treated like a child. Nothing at all to do with the subject matter.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Your $3 coffee doesn't entitle you to sit there for an hour though Read up on the history of cafes. This is what they historically were—places for people to be, not grab and go. If a coffee shop owner wants grab and go customers, they’re a glorified vending machine. (The article notes a conversation-versus-quiet dynamic that I can better empathise with.)
- carlmr 9y agoIn Europe they still are places to sit down. But people that chat with one another still tend to order much more, because they're more aware of their surroundings, in touch with the smells of the freshly baked croissants. The laptop pulls you into a void where you might even forget to drink.
- andrewshadura 9y agoOh, when I'm working at a café, I tend to drink much more than I otherwise would.
- newsbinator 9y agoWhat does your $3 coffee entitle you to do in a cafe?
- ThePadawan 9y agoI actually cannot relate to this at all - I'm assuming that in your city, $3 is a cheap for a coffee? For reference, typical Switzerland prices are: instant, homemade: $0.20 Keurig/Nespresso, homemade: $0.50 supermarket: $2 bakery/coffee-to-go-place in a train station: $4 nice café: $6 Starbucks: $8 So what exactly would I be paying the extra $2 ($6-$4) for when ordering at your café? Assuming here that it all tastes the same to me - after all, if I really cared, I just made it myself.
- narrator 9y agoMeanwhile, Starbucks encourages people to sit around for as long as they'd like to and is pretty much taking over the world. What does this corporate giant know that every stingy corner coffee shop owner is ignorant of?
- Jaruzel 9y agoA good share of Starbucks locations worldwide actually run at a loss. The mega-busy ones elsewhere make enough profit to cover the loss making stores. It's simple economics of scale. Obviously independent coffee shops can't do that, so if you want to sit in a coffee shop all day working on your laptop, try to pick a large chain, instead of an independent.
- retsibsi 9y ago> A good share of Starbucks locations worldwide actually run at a loss. The mega-busy ones elsewhere make enough profit to cover the loss making stores. It's simple economics of scale. I'm probably missing something obvious, but how does this work? What is the purpose of keeping the loss-making stores running?
- Jaruzel 9y agoTo create brand loyalty. If you regularly get coffee in a loss-making Starbucks, you are more likely to always get coffee from Starbucks where-ever you are.
- always_good 9y agoWorked on me. I associate Starbucks with a place I can go to work for as long as I need after buying a large coffee. These sorts of submissions have made me self-conscious about going to non-Starbucks to get any work done, heh.
- kbos87 9y agoI haven't read this about Starbucks in particular, but that is a pretty common trade-off for large retail businesses to make. They accept the fact that a certain percentage of stores will operate at a loss, but keep them in existence for other reasons (branding, in most cases) if the losses can be managed. A friend of mine is a middle manager at a retail kitchen goods chain you've probably heard of. I've heard from him that many of their stores are always struggling to break even, and that most of the business is supported by a small number of stores that do an outsized amount of business.
- jclos 9y agoWhile I tend to get mad at the cafe dwellers that spend 4 hours on a table sipping on the same latte, I disagree with you here. It's all about finding the middle ground. I have had to work in coffee shops before and if you hold yourself to a code of conduct (e.g. consume something regularly, don't take up too much space, pack up and move somewhere else when it gets busy and you see people looking for tables) you are literally costing nothing to the coffee shop, while making it appear more full. The problem isn't laptops, it's people being assholes.
- vorpalhex 9y agoThat's kind of an odd assumption. I suppose for a coffee stand that only has a chair or two that might be true, but most cafes around me have a dozen or more seats and I've never sat down just to drink a coffee or have a snack. It seems if you don't want people to hang out, then don't have seating?