Slashdot Mirror
A Coffeeshop's Weekends Without Wi-Fi
Glenn Fleishman writes "Victrola Cafe and Art in Seattle is a popular coffeeshop that offers free Wi-Fi--except on the weekends. In an experiment, the cafe started shutting down its Wi-Fi network on Saturdays and Sundays after watching their culture erode: the shop became full (and was turning away customers) with six-to-eight hour Wi-Fi squatters, many of whom didn't even purchase anything. Their second Sunday without Wi-Fi was one of their best revenue days in some time. I don't propose a Wi-Fi (or free Wi-Fi) backlash, but it's interesting how with some time under their belt, the clash of inward facing technology and outward facing culture hit these particular entrepreneurs' limit."
In an experiment, the cafe started shutting down its Wi-Fi network on Saturdays and Sundays after watching their culture erode: the shop became full (and was turning away customers) with six-to-eight hour Wi-Fi squatters, many of whom didn't even purchase anything.
Considering that most people have Internet at home, on campus, or at work, this is just a rude thing to do. Coffee shops provide Wifi so you can relax with a cup of coffee in a comfortable atmosphere while still being able to get that little extra bit of work done. There's no way that's accomplished by squatting in the coffee shop for 8 hours on end. If that's you, get some manners, and get a life.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This pretty much sums up all the discussion required on this news article, doesn't it? Go slashdot user brevity and succinctness!
In all seriousness though, whatstops wifi users from sitting in a car outside? or in the shop nextdoor?Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
We here in Personal Telco Project ( http://www.personaltelco.net/ )country, that being Portland Oregon, have not seen this particular behavior go on. In fact we have seen the exact flip side in most of the cafes we help get nodes into.
There are several coffe houses who can point to the day the PTP node went in as the day thier revenues went up, noticably.
There are communities that can point to the day some one put up a neighborhood node to as the day folks started spreading the goodness.
We have found that when folks put up a Free Wifi Node and all that it can entail (not just internet access but community based local content (web, daap, zeroconf, ftp, distro repositories , etc etc) the community of users are enriched and the people hosting the node are not abused to the point of wanting to turn it off.
Maybe we are truly in the right place at the right time with the right mix of citizens, who are the riches of any city as b!x will tell you. Im not sure whats cooking up there in Seattle but i hope it gets better.
-tomhiggins
www.personaltelco.net
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
And a very simple way to do it with minimal additional investment is to print a current WEP encryption code on the receipt (or a separate piece of paper), which will be good for two hours. Drop a code and then add a new one every 30 minutes or so. (Most routers can support a number of simultaneous codes. This could be done manually--it's only 16 times per day--or automatically.)
A more advanced way is to give each purchaser a password (unique, or time-limited like above), then run everyone through a magical Linux router that maps all web pages to an "Enter your password" page until a password has been entered for that particular MAC address, then allow unlimited access for that MAC for whatever time seems reasonable. That's what our local university does, although without a time limit, to ensure only students use their wireless network.
Boundless Wifi sells solutions that do these kinds of things for businesses.
It's funny to see how everyone here is an expert in business, marketing, general human psychology, and the like. "Charge for this", "put up signs for that", "only allow this"...it's not that easy.
There is a fine balance between welcoming people that will eventually turn into customers and attracting hordes of freeloaders, from enforcing a policy that keeps paying customers happy while they surf to appearing to be too harsh like you're running a police state in your store. Let's face it...each restaurant, each cafe, each location in a city has its own unique needs. The Panera Bread that offers free WiFi in a college town may need to have a monitor walk the store and ask abusers of the free WiFi to leave while the Panera in a DC suburb may have mindful users that monitor themselves as they come in, grab lunch, surf, and leave. Timed access codes may work for some places, purchase-required policies may be needed in others, and some may be able to offer it 24/7 without incident.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Just set up bandwidth shaping so that each MAC address gradually starts slowing way down after an hour. Slow, not stopped, means they have a chance to finish their work and log off cleanly. They'll get the idea. I've seen this in other contexts; it works well and minimises arguments and overhead.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
Would it kill the freeloaders to buy a small cup of decaf at the very least?
That may not be good enough. In Hawaii there was a vote on outlawing smoking in buildings. One restraunt owner being interviewed pointed out that they had already done so voluntarily and it greatly improved business, contrary to the popular wisdom. They pointed out that they had much better table turnover without the smokers, and that the smokers were often only buying a coffee but occupying a table for a long time.
Yes this is a restraunt not a coffee shop but the point is that wifi'ers, like smokers, occupy a finite resource, table space, disproportionately to their purchase. The wifi'ers can only be tolerated if table space is abundant.
Easy Solution: Make people buy something to use wifi, and propose a 2-hour limit, or however much you deem necessary
Please. You can't fix social problems with technological solutions.
works for The Office. They even have enough to spring for aerons and bose noise cancelling headphones. and i don't have to be guilted/forced into buying a muffin every 20 minutes.
for extra geek cred, joss whedon wrote 'serenity' there.
i've noticed that most of the coffeeshops i still like to go to just to drink coffee and hang out with people have limited numbers of people using laptops. i've also noticed that the reason not many people use laptops is the shop has few or no publicly accessible power outlets. ie your laptop use is limited to the life of your battery - the kind of people who want to spend six hours hunched over their laptop are go elsewhere.
i'm waiting to see how long it takes places drowning in the 'six hour wifi session and one cup of coffee people' to just blank their power outlets off. way less hassle than trying to enforce purchase per hour rules or other annoyances.
i'm kind of waiting for if you want to use your laptop, you're limited to battery life
imo you should either offer free wifi or not. making users jump through hoops with passwords and timed purchases is bad.
this is a coffee shop. they might have just bought an airport express and plugged it in the corner. they probably don't have IT staff.
so what's wrong with integrating the point of sale system with the wireless access point? nothing, so long as it's as easy as flipping a switch and costs nothing to set up and run.
Put the encryption key on the receipt, and automate this process.
Easiest would be to just have no power plugs. Your average laptop doesn't last that long.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
but can someone please give a free / simple way of doing that?
Does anyone know one of those systems that only let ppl surf on the store webpage and to access the rest of the internet you have to put an username/password ?
I've been looking for this for a long time, but haven't found none
It seems social problems beg for social solutions, and most of the solutions I've seen in the replies are different varities of how to make sure only paying customers get the wifi. That's not a bad idea, but it doesn't solve the problem of a lack of atmopshere. (BTW: rolls of tickets like fairs use come cheap. Don't let numbers be used twice, and lock out a MAC after a few wrong guesses.)
Anyway, my solution: On the first hit to any page from a new MAC, or on a new token, go to a site for the coffee shop. Have a web-based chat there. Encourage your patrons to use it, post news there, etc. The idea is to get the geeks to come out of their shells for a bit. Try to get the "missed connections" stuff on there, and perhaps the cute girl on the iBook will see it in time.
And if that doesn't work, well, perhaps turning off the wifi is a good idea.
I was at the beach two weeks ago. Found a Starbucks that offered one hour of access for $3 with the password printed on the receipt. Trivially easy to log in. The one hour limit kept my wife from going ballistic we me spending to much time on the net.
They even managed to sell me some coffee. It was a win-win-win situation.
In Japan, there are an increasing number of locations with similar free WiFi. Most people seem to have the sense not to sit there for hours on without buying more than a single cup of coffee. That still seems to be cultrually associated with teenagers, who usually aren't the WiFi users anyhow. (And they hang out in places like McDonald's where an entire meal costs about the same as a cup of coffee elsewhere.)
That said, there are occasionally some people that will occupy an entire table for 4 with papers etc. It's welcome when traffic is low and no one's really losing anything. But when business starts to pick up (weekends, lunch time, what not) they're usually, quite simply, asked to leave because there are more customers waiting to be seated. No one usually makes a fuss, and it works. The customer is packed up and gone, and business relations are still kept intact.
One thing I can imagine in the U.S. though, is some people throwing a fit at such suggestions from the proprietors. I say kick them out and tell them they're not welcome back. Why not? It makes perfect business and social sense. It makes the frequenters happy knowing that the owners are interested in keeping the atmosphere good. No need for timed-keys activated on purchase, and when business is really slow, it's probably better to have someone in the shop working on a laptop than no one at all. (People attract people, an empty store repels people.)
Post some rules. They don't need to read like legal documents, just point out the obvious. Such rules don't need to be intrusive either, just print them on the menu. Even chain operations can implement this, just make a manual. It's cheaper than reconfiguring the network. Just make sure that you point out the reason why you're asking/telling someone to leave. In most cases I suspect they'll be a bit embarrased that they were being a pain in the ass, and just move on. They're welcome back later.
Again, a common sense solution to a common sense problem. It's not a technology problem, so don't bother applying technological solutions. They'll cause more trouble than they fix. K.I.S.S.!
Unfortunately, coffee-shop type places will still probably have a much higher percentage of campers. Coffee shops tend to have more comfortable chairs and tables than, for example, restaurants which is more condusive to using wi-fi.
If this impacts a coffee shop's business negatively, then I can see one of three things happening:
The purchase rule they instituted seems to have stopped any squatting (except for my friend who uses the connection to play World of Warcraft in his car after hours- and even he buys things during the day!).
I suspect that in the case of the coffee shop in question, the squatters were simply taking up space where the normal coffee-buyers would have otherwise sat. Probably, the ultimate solution would be to institute a buying policy, but a fairly lenient one. After all, sometimes I come in and I can only afford a couple of Cokes over the course of a few hours- but they know I buy stuff whenever I come in (a lot of times the more pricey stuff), and so they don't hassle me about it. That's the kind of thing that makes me want to come back to a business. I didn't even like coffee the first time I came in!
"Sometimes it takes more than an axe and a busload of strangers to work through your anger." -Rikk Estoban
Here in L.A. it's especially annoying because we have lots of actors and screenwriters who use Starbucks as their production office. Personally, I don't think one cup of $4 coffee justifies using a whole table for your office all day, plus electricity. There should just be a time limit for everyone- to give customers a chance to come and go. One thought I had, can you get the WiFi signal if you sit outside the location? Why not have some overflow seating outside for the squatters? Of course, as was mentioned above, removing access to power outlets would probably eliminate a lot of this problem. Then again, maybe these coffee shops need to be redesigned to allow for more people, and for social gatherings- like bars. Have a fooseball table, a pool table, daycare, petcare, etc.
Change the priorities around if you want a different business model and still make some loot. Have a "WiFi hangout shop" that also has coffee and munchies on the side, plus maybe sell hardware??? Possibly get customers and be competitive by offering a faster connection than the "coffee shops with free wifi" guys. Charge by the hour or something like that, maybe make it a club you can join and get a month/yearly severe discount rate. Offer a choice, too, ethernet or wireless at the table. So much an hour (reasonable), and free coffee!
Seriously, though, who ever *wants* to use wifi in a coffee shop? I'd much rather be in my office, using a real keyboard and mouse, or in my house, lounging around on the couch while surfing. I reserve free/pay coffee shop wifi for desperate times -- business trips; times when work is way too hectic an environment, etc. Six or eight hours on a laptop keyboard? I'd be dead.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I think a lot of people here are missing one of the main points of TFA - the interpersonal culture of the coffee shop was disappearing. Instead of being a place where people interact "live" with other human beings, it was turning into a place full of people silently hunched over their laptops. I don't think it's an unreasonable decision to turn off the wifi (at least on the weekend).
If you were a hot dog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself?
"I never understood sitting in a coffee shop" It's called the rule of: doing what makes you happy. I don't understand why certain things make certain people happy, but then I don't have to. I just know what makes me happy. And that happens to be coffee shops and book stores. For you it isn't (at least the coffee shop part). It's really not a mystery.
Sure now they just have to purchase a computer to use as a server, hire someone to set it up, and find some way to print out receipts with passcodes.
Or they could do what they did in the story and simply turn the wi-fi off, have several of their "regular" patrons thank them, make their employees happy, and have a record setting weekend's revenues.
It would appear, my friend, that at least one coffee shop has demonstrated that it does more business without wi-fi than with it. Apparently this particular business had more people buying coffee when the booted the geeks and their laptops.
Now this particular business could go through the expense of setting up some sort of pay as you go wi-fi system, but there is no guarantee that such a system would be a good investment. Especially considering that the business sells more coffee with the wi-fi turned off.
Maybe in Seattle there's so damn many coffeehouses that there's not much loyalty? It's a competitive market, so it's not a surprise to me that there are callous people who take advantage of the wireless freebie. Or, maybe that's how Seattle people are. I don't know.
My own California experience with 802.11-enabled coffee places is very different: there does seem to be an ethic of supporting the establishment.
Yes, I've done four-hour sits at Coffee Critic in Ukiah, CA using their access for work stuff, but I also buy lots of coffee there too (and good coffee it is - they roast it on-premises) and did so without the wireless "loss leader". I've easily bought enough product in a year there to pay for the AP, if not the bandwidth.
...with a password prompt and the message 'your server will gladly enter the password for you'? I'd wager that having to interact with the wait staff to get connected would dramatically reduce the number of leeches.
Making the world a better place, one psychotic episode at a time.
Giving people access codes based on purchases is incredibly lame and hurts the the natural warm vibe of a good coffeeshop.
To All Coffee Shop Owners:
- Give away wifi.
- Gently enforce purchases with use of table space . Aka, more or less ban squatting.
- VERY IMPORTANT: Create laptop zones and/or make laptoppers sit with each other and not hog 4 person tables. It'd probably help people meet each other and it'll conserve space. Alternatively, have lots of little tables that barely fit one laptop.
Problem solved!!
A Victrola Regular
Exactly. A REAL customer is one who _wants_ to buy something from you, not one who only does so when you require.
I'm not a cafe owner, but to be honest I can't believe there are people so shameless they'll bowl on up to a cafe and hop on the lan before getting a drink.
"Just because I can!"?? Fuck you. I just spilt a long-long-long black in your crotch. Just because I can.
I used to work at a video shop, pre 2000. We had a policy, if you didn't like a film, for whatever reason, tell us, we'll let you hire another (of same or lesser price bracket) no charge. No ifs or buts. Sure we'll ask you why you didn't like the film, but any reason was good enough for us.
Why wasn't it abused? Because people were reasonable. Nobody seemed to have the gall to return day after day to say "nah, didn't like that either". Try that sort of thing now...
We've already established that there's now a class of people who aren't bothered even slightly by that....
I was using my laptop in a Barnes and Nobel Starbucks when my battery ran out. I couldn't find a power outlet in the Coffee section of the store so I plugged into one in the Magazine section. I kept the cord and laptop behind some books - out of the way and mostly out of site. I browsed the magazine section while I was waiting for the battery to recharge. I was promptly told by a member of the Barnes and Nobel team to unplug my laptop becuase their electrical system was not built to support that kind of use by customers and it was a liability issue for them.
Take your own advice. Your post doesn't really refute the poster that you quoted. The person you quoted said that you can't fix social problems with technological solutions. Your examples all showed that if you remove technology, you create social problems. Those two things are not the same.
If semiconductors were to vanish tomorrow, wherever you are, your government would collapse
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to support this statement? Because I can think of a number of massive power failures that crippled cities but there was hardly a collapse of government.
millions, if not billions of people would die within a year.
Again, this may or may not be true, but this has nothing to do with solving a social problem. All you're suggesting here is that we are dependent on technology to make our society function. Yanking that out from under our feet doesn't prove that we solve social problems with technology. How has technology solved the poverty problem? Hunger? Drug abuse? Teenage pregnancy? Gang activity? Racism? Homophobia? Alcoholism? Mental health issues? The breakdown of the nuclear family? How is any of this solved with technology? None of these problems are exactly new, either. Technology accelerates society but solves it's problems? Perhaps only to introduce new ones. The automobile improved public health by eliminating the need for horses and their biological byproducts from cities, only to create a whole new type of air quality problem. The sewer system supports your argument more. With sewage and wastewater treatment our cities and homes are far, far cleaner and more sanitized, and technology was the solution. On balance, though, I think technology more often replaces social problems with new types of problems. It's definitely progress, but I quibble with your assertion that we solve social problems with technology. Perhaps in wellness and safety.
Take the same number of people in New York, drop then in a forest the same size as New York, and watch how quickly society implodes upon itself without the technological infrastructure to support it.
This doesn't support your argument at all. All you've said is that if you take people who've learned the ropes of life in an urban setting and dump them into a completely foreign environment, they're unlikely to cope well. Well, duh. I can prove that technology causes social problems by picking up a tribe of bushmen and dropping them off in Santa Monica and observe that they are unable to function.
Clearly, technology is doing something. Technology and society are so tightly tied together that you can't untangle one from the other without destroying something.
That's very true! But that doesn't refute the notion that social problems aren't fixed with technological solutions.
I know some times when we bang things out on the keyboard they sound really insightful and intelligent, but some times we need to respect the preview button, read what we read, and decide if it really is insightful, or a load of thoughtless crap.
Check your intellectual elitism at the door. Your post may have been insightful but you didn't really refute the person you are busily condescending towards here. He said, "You can't fix social problems with technolgical solutions." And I agree with you that this statement isn't true. Some social problems clearly can be addressed through technology, especially in medicine. However, you've failed to demonstrate that with even one relevent example. You've shown that society is dependent on technology, and nothing more.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib