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Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S.
- SilverElfin 7mo agoGreat. It would be nice to normalize that as a feature. A cafe near me sort of has this by simply not offering WiFi and having a sign about it, and it works - there are people having conversations with their kids and with friends and with strangers there, while all other cafes seem to be mostly people on their phones and iPads (especially kids) and laptops. Also we need a total ban on meta glasses and other similar surveillance devices.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoThe former (traditional personal devices) and the latter (wearable surveillance platforms) are not even remotely the same thing.
- le-mark 7mo agoI don’t see kids glued to devices in public as much as I used to. Now its around 50/50. I feel like there’s a growing social stigma about it now. And rightfully so imo.
- quchen 7mo agoThere are a couple of communities that have almost no phone presence. Certain kinds of music festivals are an example, and it's really quite nice not having to worry about being filmed.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoWhat are you doing that has you worried about strangers filming you? I'd be pretty offended and creeped out if a total stranger was following me around filming for no apparent reason but that isn't something that happens presumably because I'm not particularly interesting. I opened this comment section because I was perplexed by the premise of the title and after scrolling a bit I remain entirely unable to comprehend the underlying motivations.
- tayo42 7mo agoSelf conscious about dressing, signing badly, dancing. It's fun in the moment but I wouldn't want it recorded or show up in a promo video or something.
- anonymousiam 7mo agoThere's a breakfast spot that I visit sometimes, with a sign on the wall that reads; "We do not have 'WiFi' -- Talk to each other -- Pretend it's 1995"
- Teever 7mo agoI totally support the phone-free bar and restaurant experience and encouraging people to socialize verbally instead of online but the thing is that I like to eat breakfast alone. It's a meditative process to me. There's nothing better than sitting in a greasy spoon looking out at a rainy day eating bacon and hashbrowns while sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. Just watching the world and gthe people go by while flipping and folding the pages of a large newspaper. That's bliss. Now that newspapers aren't really a thing anymore I like to read the news on my phone, or a paper about a topic that interests me. It's good to promote socializing as long as it doesn't come at the expensive at reflective processes.
- senko 7mo ago> It's a meditative process to me. [...] I like to read the news on my phone. I don't think reading news, especially on the phone, is meditative. With paper you might pause & reflect while turning a page, with phone even that is lost. > Just watching the world and the people go by while Why not do that without looking at the phone?
- Teever 7mo agoI knew someone was going to pull on that little thread. So let's use a dictionary definition: meditative -- of, involving, or absorbed in meditation or considered thought. In that context I have for decades now enjoyed sipping coffee, reading the news, and watching peope go by, smiling at the waitress, and considering how it all fits together. The cream in my cup, the man crossing the street, the price of tea in China -- it's all connected. Sometimes do this without a phone or a newspaper or a book. Sometimes I don't. This is just how I like to spend my Sunday breakfast. Alone. Not talking to people. Watching them and the world.
- gosub100 7mo agoYou could enforce this by making a farday cage out of the building. I looked into this for an irrational (5G is government poison) family member. I wasn't going to debate how RF works, just buy some points by helping her indulge her fantasy. But actual RF blocking copper mesh material is very expensive. I wonder if this could be done via wallpaper and printing using a conductive ink printed on the same pattern?
- madaxe_again 7mo agoJust run a jammer - much easier and just as illegal - although if you use a busted microwave from the 80s it gives you good plausible deniability.
- wikibob 7mo agoFaraday cages are passive and not illegal. Jamming is.
- gruez 7mo ago>although if you use a busted microwave from the 80s it gives you good plausible deniability. Not every radio runs off 2.4G, the frequency that microwaves would affect. Even for wifi there's 5ghz and 6ghz bands. For cellphones there are far more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands
- gosub100 7mo ago"just"
- cyanydeez 7mo agoSImilar, except their belief is part of a illness that's some kind of dementia. It went further into all kinds of radiations, including things that are meaningless, like the 911 frequency. It degraded slowly over a decade. It's "stabilized" but just a bunch of word salad.
- gosub100 7mo ago
- throw949449 7mo ago[flagged]
- amazingamazing 7mo agothe vast majority of restaurants are already dog-free. which cities are you in where this is a problem? in Manhattan for instance basically all of them prohibit dogs under very particular circumstances like there's an outdoor area.
- throw949449 7mo agoNot my experience, everyone has assistance dog and ban does not apply to them.
- amazingamazing 7mo agoso you're in the USA and want service dogs to be prohibited? again, where is this an issue? most people do not have service dogs...
- throw949449 7mo agoI want refound, if the establishement does not follow basic hygiene rules for serving food!
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo agoActual service dogs are uncommon. Lots of emotional support proxy children out there but they have no business around food service.
- lagniappe 7mo agoYoure getting baited by a green name, Boudreaux
- 7mo ago
- wolvoleo 7mo agoHmm I love phone free nightclubs (or rather camera free, they tape off the cameras). Like techno clubs. Not so much of a fan of this in bars and restaurants, sometimes you need to stay in touch with friends who are still arriving etc. Or often they change their mind "this place is cool, why don't you come to us instead of us coming to you?". But ok plenty of places to choose from.
- jermaustin1 7mo ago> sometimes you need to stay in touch with friends who are still arriving etc. Do we need to? We are way too communicative now days. Back before everyone had cell phones, you said on Monday to friends and/or co-workers, "Let's get drinks on Friday at 7pm at BarClub" - Everyone put it in their diary, and on Friday at 6:55-7:30, people showed up where they were supposed to. We now have this anxiety around not being in constant contact with people, when just a couple decades ago, we wouldn't talk to a person for days/weeks at a time, but still manage to get together without (m)any issues.
- wussboy 7mo agoHumans used to get on ships and sail away, perhaps never to be heard from again. We can absolutely survive several minutes of confusion around eating arrangements. "Text me when you get there." Let's all just calm down and live with a little uncertainty
- afron_manyu 7mo ago[dead]
- webdoodle 7mo ago[flagged]
- logicchains 7mo agoNot everybody has such a troubled personality that having the ability right at their fingertips to access all the world's information and communicate with anyone in the world somehow causes them problems, maybe you should touch grass.
- Acrobatic_Road 7mo agoNo, he's right. Smartphones are a socio-demographic catastrophe. The fact that they exasperate mental illnesses is just a detail.
- Acrobatic_Road 7mo agoYes! Phones should be treated like smoking.
- wussboy 7mo agoI like this idea. You can use your phone but you have to go outside to do it.
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago++1
- tayo42 7mo agoSmoking and non smoking sections, separated by a small plastic window?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- raincole 7mo agoTo increase table turnover rate for the restaurant.
- frollogaston 7mo agoThere are cafes that disallow laptops for this reason
- markus_zhang 7mo agoWell if they don't want businesses from phone-carrying people that's perfectly fine with me. Restaurants are too expensive anyway. A random breakfast in a random diner now costs around 60 CAD (include tax and tip) for two persons nowadays in my city. It is difficult to justify eating out unless I'm financially free.
- hdbebdhdh 7mo agoI don't get it. If you don't want to use a phone, simply don't use a phone O_o
- Dig1t 7mo agoIf you all agree to not have phones, then the group social dynamic changes. You can't lean on your phone as a crutch when there's a lull in the conversation, you can't look up facts on the internet. So you're forced to think a little harder about things, to discuss a little more, be less distracted. It's fun for group outings.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoWhat group social dynamic? This is a restaurant or bar as a whole, not a personal friend group. If you prefer a certain dynamic then talk it over with the people you spend time with. Maybe they'll agree, maybe they won't, but either way that's entirely separate from the policy of a dining establishment.
- Dig1t 7mo agoAn example: I went to a phone-free drink lounge with a group of people. Before the event I texted the group saying "this place takes your phone at the door" and everyone said they were cool with that and that it sounded fun. We all knew going in that this is what we were signing up for. It's like going to a club with a specific dress code. You go there for the atmosphere and the unique experience. And yeah everyone agreeing to not have a phone in their pocket does change how people in a group interact with each other.
- Fargren 7mo agoIt's easier (or at least different) to say to your friends "let's go to a phone free bar" than it its to say "let's go to a bar, phone-free". In the first case, a third party came up with the idea, and you are subjecting yourselves to their idea. In the second case, it's your idea, and your friends are subjecting themselves to your idea. Really if you are proposing, there's always a bit of "your idea" there, but the "blame" can be shared with someone else who's not in the group.
- 28304283409234 7mo agoIf I had a bar I'd ban phones and call it The No Bars Bar. Alt: The Bar Without Bars
- petcat 7mo agoNo need to ban phones, just coat the walls in magnetic paint and install faraday cages on the windows. You will get "No bars". (and also maybe no customers and a safety code violation?)
- drum55 7mo agoIntentionally interfering with 911 would probably be a poor decision.
- petcat 7mo agoOh yeah definitely. Also your own POS system probably wont even work unless it's hard-wired.
- fragmede 7mo agoHave staff/employee wifi for the PoS to use.
- petcat 7mo agoWifi wont work at all (or at least be very packet-droppy) in this configuration
- myself248 7mo agoHi, I have worked in numerous shielded environments, built one, and am in the process of building a second. Wifi works perfectly fine inside a shielded enclosure, if both the AP and the client are inside the shield. It should not work across the shield, if the AP is inside and the client is outside, or vice versa. (If that worked, it wouldn't be a very good shield.) It is entirely plausible, practical, and not even all that hard, to build precisely the environment described up-thread. "Magnetic" paint is not necessary, it just has to be conductive. Ecofoil® Ultra NT® is my favorite shielding material, it's good as a radiant energy barrier (say, to keep your hot roof from radiating heat down at your attic) and as a radiant signal shield. Which makes sense, when you consider that RF is just RF is just RF. Filtered power passthroughs aren't particularly hard (Start with the Delta 20DBAG5 and add some ferrite beads), and if you really want to be snazzy with your data passthrough, use fiber. There are all sorts of cheap-and-cheerful ethernet switches with SFP slots now. The door seals are the tricky part. Commercial shielded enclosures go all-out with complicated lever-actuated doors that wouldn't feel out-of-place on a bank vault, but I've found that simply sanding the paint off a commercial steel door and covering the bare steel with copper tape, then engaging it with beryllium-copper spring finger-stock around the doorjamb, is sufficient for about 60-80dB of isolation, which is plenty in many environments.
- bawolff 7mo agoPhone free resturants if you're eating alone sounds kind of miserable. Sometimes i want to read something while i wait for my food to come out.
- Aboutplants 7mo agoGood news! If your alone there are other options!
- bawolff 7mo agoCan you be specific what you mean by that. Are you just saying if you are alone you should go to other resturants? I mean, sure that is true, but that logic would also apply to a resturant that spits in your food.
- troymc 7mo agoMaybe bring a (printed) book, brochure, flyer, or treatise on the nocturnal behaviours of silkworms?
- bawolff 7mo agoDo you commonly carry those around with you? I'm not mistaking a resturant for a library, i just want to kill time until my food comes out. Is there a reason why someone sitting by themselves reading a book on the e-reader app on their phone is more offensive than someone sitting by themselves reading a dead tree book?
- Acrobatic_Road 7mo agoIt's not hard to bring a book with you. People did it before phones. And I don't know what you're doing when you're transfixed by your phone and I'm not going to peer over your screen to find out.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
- crazygringo 7mo agoWhen I think of places where phones aren't a problem, I think of bars and restaurants. So why on earth would you even need to make them phone-free...? People are socializing plenty. I've never walked into a bar or restaurant that's full of people where they're all on their phones. It doesn't even make sense.
- Upvoter33 7mo agoReally? I see this all the time. Maybe I'm going to all the wrong places. I see "couples" on their phones, I see groups of friends on their phones, etc., etc. Maybe different parts of the country / world?
- mikkupikku 7mo agoI don't see the problem; when you're out drinking with buddies, sometimes you're talking and sometimes staring at the sportsball TV in contemplative silence. Or a phone instead of the TV, it serves the same role. It doesn't have to be talk all the time. Somebody who's not talking now might have been talking a minute ago, and will be again in a few minutes.
- valleyer 7mo agoIf you're all staring at the TV, you can at least share your thoughts on the thing you're all watching together. If you're all staring at your phones, your minds are in different places. It doesn't serve the same role at all.
- crazygringo 7mo agoI'm in New York City. I do not see this. I see single people use their phone while they wait for their date/friends to arrive. Or while their date uses the restroom. I see groups of friends where one person is temporarily texting because the babysitter reached out, or a friend is asking where they are, etc. Going to restaurants and bars is expensive. People aren't going out to use their phones.
- gentleman11 7mo agoHow do you prevent people from having phones while inside? Do you just get in trouble for whipping it out? Or do you have to drop it off with a phone valet at the entrance? If so, how do you prevent theft or mixups? Are all the staff comfortable confronting people who have taken their devices out, risking their tips and personal comfort levels? What if somebody gets cranky after being asked because they didn't know and it's halfway through dinner? It's a tricky policy to enforce smoothly
- frollogaston 7mo agoThey don't take your phone. People just follow the rule.
- pajamasam 7mo agoThe article mentions some of the places use Yondr phone pouches.
- yalogin 7mo agoPhone/device free venues have to become a thing. Social media has taken a strong hold of people but the ai chat bots are upping the game even more. If anything phone free areas will become an incentive to visit these establishments for me
- Dig1t 7mo agoI am so surprised at the negativity about this idea in this thread. It's a novelty, and it's pretty fun, if you don't like the idea you can just go to the 99% of other bars or restaurants that do allow phones. I personally like going to these types of places. When you go with a group of people it does change the social dynamic, not being able to ask ChatGPT the answer to a question you don't know off the top of your head, or scroll through your messages as a crutch when there's a lull in the conversation. Everyone is more fully engaged. It's just a fun novelty, an experience you can't get elsewhere.
- junglistguy 7mo ago[dead]
- lemax 7mo agoThe worst has been the post-covid assignment of seating and QR code driven ordering in bars. So few opportunities to mingle. I miss standing in bars, talking to bartenders, chatting with random patrons. This has recovered much better in large cities but I find that restaurants and bars in US suburban environments are deeply impersonal now. It’s no wonder singles are stuck meeting partners on apps with so little unstructured social opportunities left. Not to mention no one is going to bars anymore anyway.