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Some LA Coffee Shops Are Taking Wi-Fi Off the Menu
As New York is putting Wi-Fi on wheels, reader Hugh Pickens notes a counter trend in Los Angeles coffee shops. (We remarked on a similar backlash in Seattle in 2005.) "Coffee shops were the retail pioneers of Wi-Fi, but Jessica Guynn reports in the LA Times that now some owners are pulling the plug after finding that Wi-Fi freeloaders who camp out all day nursing a single cup of coffee are a drain on the bottom line. Other owners strive to preserve a friendly vibe and keep their establishments from turning into 'Matrix'-like zombie shacks where people type and don't talk. 'There is now a market niche for not having Wi-Fi,' says Bryant Simon. After Dan and Nathalie Drozdenko turned off the Wi-Fi at their Los Angeles cafe, the complaints poured in, but so did the compliments: Lots of customers appreciated a wireless cup of joe at the Downbeat Cafe, a popular lunch spot in Echo Park. 'People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted.'"
Yeah, like that "novel" they've been "working on."
'People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted.'
This is something that I suspect will be lost on about 95% of the slashdot-reading population -- net access isn't necessarily critical to everyone's ability to do their work.
I have not been too keen to spend my day hanging out in the coffee shop just to browse the internet. It always has seemed like an odd fit to me, similar to fishing and collating.
Now if they had someone playing light jazz and maybe a collection of weird art books that would be really cool.
Tisha Hayes
Piff, noobs just can't handle the power of wireless freedom.
Less of a problem. Bandwidth is cheap. Non-paying customers take up valuable table-space.
Lots of customers appreciated a wireless cup of joe at the Downbeat Cafe, a popular lunch spot in Echo Park. 'People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted.'"
It was wireless before. Do you mean 'connectionless' or something? :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"get work done and not get distracted"? Sounds like they are still the ones considered by the cafe owners to "camp all day nursing a single cup of coffee".
WiFi at these places is a privilege, not a right. You don't get to just buy a $2 drink, take over a table and hog it for hours during the busier part of the day. These cafes should have made it clear that if you want to stay during the busier time, that's fine and welcome, but you WILL be buying food and/or a steady supply of coffee.
It'd be painful in the short term because they'd have to tell some of these entitled hoity-toities that it is a privilege, not an entitlement and if they want to complain they can just GTFO.
Indie coffee shops used to have free wifi as a differentiator, while Starbucks charged. Now Starbucks has free wifi, so they're going to no/limited wifi as their differentiator. I guess it doesn't matter how it's different, so long as they just do something different.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Everywhere else in the world they have temporary tokens (Usually just a card with a number or they just tell you a number) which lasts for a certain period of time until expiring, you get one per purchase or whatever. This shit isn't hard.
Cutting off wireless access is pretty pointless. The better solution is to give 2 free hours and then give a code when you buy something else that gives you another 2. That at least keeps the freeloaders at bay. Caribou does something similar to this already. You aren't going to keep people from sitting there and surfing the internet though just by cutting off wi-fi. I like to take my iPad to coffee shops and read the news and it's tethered to my phone so I still have free internet regardless. I think had you done this in the early 2000s yeah, you would have stopped people from turning your coffee shop into an internet cafe, but in 2010, it's a little late.
How is surfing the internet different from 'just getting work done', as far as shop atmosphere is concerned?
Going to a coffee shop to find every place being used all evening by single persons with their laptop and a cup of coffee (that's most likely cold by then) is really frustrating. It's probably even more frustrating to the owner who sees is investment monopolized by clients that bring only little income to the place.
But I think the summary went totally off track by associating wireless network access in coffee shops with global city-wide wireless network access. Once you have global wireless networks, the need for local public networks is obviously much reduced. Furthermore, having a global city-wide network may even limit the problem forcing coffee shops to removed their local wireless network. On the other hand, it may then affect establishments the willingly refused to have wireless network access. In the end, it's really difficult to state that one is a counter-trend to the other.
I think they mean "wirelessless". Note wirelessless != wired.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
"I'm sorry boss, how was I supposed to know you'd sent me the big file by email to work on during lunch? The coffee shop didn't have WIFI so I couldn't connect and see my email!"
When a customer buys a coffee their receipt should contain a unique PIN which is good for X amount of minutes from the time of purchase. The customer would have to enter the PIN to get through the firewall. Seems like a no brainer solution, one which discourages freeloaders and still allows coffee shops (or anywhere else) to offer wifi.
MacDonalds (uk) seem to have a good compromise. They have coin operated terminals, one per restaurant.
I wonder why they just don't put some custom software in the router to block a specific MAC after X amount of time? Give people their cake and eat it too so to speak...
Entirely agree. They should lock the wifi and your receipt comes with a code for a free 30/60 minute wifi key. They do this at the local Burger Kings in my area. Wifi is free, but you have to purchase food to get a limited amount of time to use it. The problem here is the trading/asking for receipts. I guess the local Burger King does this right too, they only print the code on the receipt if you _ask_ for it. It's sort of like asking for no pickles on your sandwich, there is no charge or deduction, just a note that you want no pickles.
Bandwidth is cheap
For now... :)
" you WILL be buying food and/or a steady supply of coffee."
They need to make it easier to keep buying coffee and food. At the moment, people have generally 3 choices when it comes to buying more:
1) Leave your stuff (including laptop) at seat while you get more coffee (and risk theft)
2) "Decamp" then buy more stuff (and risk losing your seat)
3) make a cup last as long as possible to avoid options 1 & 2
Basically, if coffee shops want to make more money from the WiFi hogs then they should look into something like table service, at least for people who have already been to the counter once. It gives people an easy way to spend money and the "nagging" effect of somebody asking if the hog wants to order more will make most of them either pay up or move on. It shouldn't be that much of an extra burden on staff as you need to have people going around and cleaning up tables anyway.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
If they require you to purchase food for a limited amount of time, then it's not free. That's subsidized or possibly included in the purchase price.
So being 'connected' is no longer trendy. Yay. There is a certain segment of society (IT workers, mgt., etc.) that truly needs to be connected all the time to make their lives easier. That's a very small percentage. What I want to know is, what will the trend-followers jump on to next? Whatever it is, there's money to be made.
The greater Los Angeles area is huge. If you looked up "urban sprawl" in the dictionary, you'd find a picture of LA. Consequently, services like WiFi and GSM/CDMA are not as heavily concentrated as they are in cities like San Francisco or New York, where the population density is higher. In general, I find the idea of being able to drive around the city and expect to find open access points to be laughable. So where does that leave those annoying Hollywood hipsters and aspiring screenwriters? They can't be "discovered" if they stay at home, but they can't write their next big screenplay if they go out. That's why you see them crowding around the Starbucks and Coffee Beans plaguing nearly every street corner, trying to strike some self-imagined balance of trendiness and importance.
If more shops shut down their WiFi, that would further concentrate these pretentious jerks in those shops that still offer a connection. Maybe that's not such a bad thing--you'd know which places to avoid. There's nothing wrong with spending a half hour in your local coffee shop having a drink and a snack while checking up on news or whatever floats your online boat. But really, who has nothing better to do with their day than to spend all of it huddled over their laptop, browsing the web, in a noisy and crowded coffee shop? I see students use coffee shops like it was an annex to their dorm room--wearing pajamas, headphones on, textbooks sprawled everywhere. That's just beyond sad.
I imagine that that would be too blunt to distinguish between "scammy freeloader with his small coffee, it has been two hours" and "friend and regular, snackin' and hackin', for two hours". Plus, any "mysterious" failure is going to get the poor counter guy a torrent of whiny demands for tech support.
You could go with some sort of captive-portal system, which just starts redirecting all your traffic to a login page, which you could escape by typing in a code printed on your order printout, good for X time after the order was logged. Not frictionless; but would prevent freeloading.
"Atmosphere" is another matter; but that probably has to be solved socially, not technologically.
This is why places like starbucks charge for there internet because if people have to pay they will think twice before sitting there for hours especially if the internet is being charged at and hourly rate. I personally love free wifi while I am enjoying my coffee but a lot of people do take advantage of this service at coffee shops. Table space is money considering free wifi is something the coffee shop is giving away for nothing and has to pay for out of there profit.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
If you're sniping from across the street with a Pringles can, you probably know how to spoof your MAC.
Or instead of the "you have x minutes left" counters that get displayed in a web page on some hotspots, have a "more coffee" button, that places your order at the till to be delivered to you at your table. I like this idea.
They also need to provide barf bags, catheters, and diuretics stronger than caffeine. Or at least, a lack of desire to freeking eat more has always been my biggest problem when camping out at these places, but perhaps this isn't a problem for most americans.
We're talking about coffee shops here . . . how many starbucks employees caneven setup a physical secure network?
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
I suspect that there are two problems with this granular, technically sound solution:
1. BK is a major chain corporation, economies of scale and whatnot. Per retail establishment, the cost was probably near peanuts to integrate the code printing into the POS software, and the code verification into the captive portal on the wifi, and so forth. For Jimmy's Indie Brewz, locations 1, the wifi is probably just some router on a DSL line. Integrating a code system would either mean forking over $$$$ to his POS vendor, if they even offer that, or hoping that his cousin is one of those "linux hackers".
2. Indie coffee shops obviously aren't immune to economics, and need to make sales to survive; but part of their appeal is "atmosphere". Any system that mires the customers in codes and makes explicit the subsidy of the wifi by the coffee has the potential to degrade the perceived atmosphere. What they really want is for freeloaders to feel social pressure, from disapproving patrons that surround them, and move along. Unfortunately for them, either the freeloaders don't care about nasty looks, or the availability of an open AP creates a critical mass of freeloaders that impose their own social norms, rendering them immune to other customers. BK isn't aiming to give you the warm and fuzzies, they just want you in, eating, and out, so they needn't be as concerned.
Versus having people come in and just mooch without pay or paying so little it costs you money? There are obviously pro's and con's on both sides, but if you think you can just go in and pay $2 and sit there for multiple hours surfing their internet, you need to wake up.
But I don't equate "customers only" to "fee". I understand that bathrooms in nice restaurants are for their customers only. I understand that those call in numbers on receipts for a "chance to win" isn't simply given out and you need to be a customer. Wifi should be the same way. You can use it proportional to how much of a customer you are. The problem with a fully open system is what they are seeing now. People who simply leech off their good will, take up space and create a less than enjoyable atmosphere.
"Not free" might be technically true. But totally free doesn't seem to be working as well as hoped and I understand, no, suggest that they lock it down a bit. Simply put, if you're going to Joe's Coffee Bazaar merely to use their internet and not purchase anything, you shouldn't be allowed to mooch their WiFi all you want. Purchase something and you're free to use their services.
You hit the nail on the head. For a while I would camp out at Taco Bell, as they had free wireless and nobody cared if someone sat there for hours with only a drink because they're all being paid shit. The problems you listed are exactly why I would only buy anything once.
It's only speculation, but I suspect that they got tired of me and just let the wireless router go into disrepair. Oh well.
I would imagine that most folks drinking coffee don't know how to spoof their MAC. No system is 100% secure. I could see the above working, or possibly a portal like you see at the airport.
D-link used to sell a product that was ADSL router, small till-roll printer and embedded software that managed printing out each user a unique access code, and a no-cat-auth style login web page for access. Cost was under 200 dollars as I recall.
I'd imagine as well as the points in the rest of this thread another reason for wifi decline is a) the economy means that any business cost that doesn't bring in a profit gets squeezed, and also the risk of an unidentified customer doing something naughty with the internet connection and the coffee shop being prosecuted for it.
These coffee shops should just start giving out a free 1 or 2 hour "Wi-Fi Voucher" with every purchased cup of coffee. This way that customer who sits there all day now has to repeatedly buy additional items throughout their day. I would think this solves it relatively quickly and its good for the consumer and the business owner.
Each code gets you so much time of wi-fi. If you want more, purchase a second cup of coffee. This would be very easy to implement.
But when's the last time you lounged in a chair in torn jeans and $150 dress shoes, a dress shirt covered nicely with a sweater vest, horn rimmed glasses and just-greasy-enough hair, looking up casually at the passers by before returning to one-handedly surfing for the latest website for wholly organic silica gel packets, at your local Burger King? That kind of policy just doesn't have the right flow, man.
"...And who wants to make buttprints in the sands of time?" ~Bob Moawad
put access code on reciept and change the key every 2 hours
in oher news can we implement a spelling test for slashdot post editors?
..except that wi-fi at Starbucks is now free.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
If you are talking "basic WPA2, with an easily human-rememberable password that we hand out to customers on request and change from time to time" probably at least one per location, possibly more. Average employee age is relatively low, setting up an ordinary wifi router isn't exactly an uncommon task in that demographic.
If you are talking "radius authenticated captive portal integrated with unique one-time-codes generated and printed by the POS system, complete with analytics and so forth", obviously virtually none, unless they just happen to have an unemployed software engineer on staff. Which is why, being a huge chain and all, they'd just contract out the integration project and have the routers shipped to the franchises in "plug in, press 'on'" condition.
...but our cantennared friends are also not taking up valuable seating in the cafe and as has been stated previously, bandwidth is cheap
Surf the web? Mike's Deli in Brookline has only a few tables, so they don't even let customers read while sitting and eating.
I always get take out, because I am physically incapable of not reading while eating by myself.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If all you added was a Linksys wifi AP then you deserve to have a freeloader there in your store. Quit being a cheap bastard and buy a Real captive portal setup that when the customer buy's their Double caf-decaf soy latte they get a code on the receipt that gives them 1 hour. That's more than enough time. Now your freeloaders have to buy something once an hour to stay online.
Problem is most of these coffee shop owners are cheap bastards that balk at the cost of a proper setup that would work fine for the next 5 years. If they cant cheap out with a $59.00 toy and have cousin timmy who is handy with 'puters do it for free, they dont want it.
They will discover what many here have... Drop the wifi they lose a lot of customers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not going to care, as a business owner, if ultra cheapass wants to mooch wifi. I don't care about the wifi. I care about the sloth who isn't making me any money taking up a chair or a sofa or a table for hours on end.
Paying customers walk in, see that the wifi slugs are taking up all the places to sit, and just leave. That is the problem. It's not about the wifi. It's about getting the douches who think all businesses are charity operations designed to give them what they want for free that are the problem.
Are you stupid? Of course it isn't free. Do you think the cafés are just offering a public service? Should they release their scones under the GPL?
Safe to say she will be happier with your $1.50 in business taken across the street, freeing up a table.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wah.
Here is a news flash for you. the Coffee shop is not your office. if you are one of those douchebags that set up camp in a booth then you deserve the risks involved. If the place is so busy that as soon as you get up to get your next coffee that someone takes your spot, Then you are leaching off them. Sorry, but grab another spot, it's not yours, you dont own it. Wah!
as for risking loss, ever heard of a laptop lock cable? oh wait, you have at least 80 pounds of other crap there.
This doesn't already exist in the states? If i tried to sit in a coffee shop (even one without wi-fi) for over an hour on a single cup of coffee they'd tell me to buy something or get out.
it's under construction
Do you somehow think that the free wifi offered by stores is not included in the purchase price?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
What's the matter, Malda, wife want a new car so you need to increase the
number of bullshit "stories" in order to generate more revenue ?
Stories like this insult the intelligence of the intelligent readers who make
Slashdot worth reading. Slashdot is becoming the equivalent of the movie theater
which used to show cool art house films but now shows Disney films because they
attract more customers. If you think that's an insult toward Slashdot, you're right.
Who could have known that coffee drinkers were rude. Well, butter my biscuit...
Do these people never go to the bathroom, esp after a high caffeine drink? Seems like 1 & 2 are not very valid.
There seems to be a large market for easy implementation of a passcode system either with or alongside your receipt. Whee are all the products?
When I'm visiting the seaside I always go to the same café to check my emails. At the bottom of the bill there's a code which gives me about half an hour of free wifi (depending on how fast they bring me the drinks)
Look - security is a pyramid. At the peak of the pyramid are like national spying organizations, and at the bottom are literally animals. You usually only need to stop part of the problem to be effective. A doorknob stops feral cats or raccoons from getting in, but not criminals. A padlock stops hooligans, but actual criminals can break it. A deadbolt is better, but can still be picked by higher-end criminals. Vault doors and lasers stop all but the most professional of criminals or spies in their tracks.
But I don't need to worry about "what if Michael Westen or James Bond wants to raid my cash register?" because the odds of that are so low, I'm just not a target as a coffee shop. So if all I've got is some expresso machines and a few bucks in the register, I get a normal lock and some insurance, not armed guards.
This is the technology equivalent. I'm not worried about "what if he spoofs his MAC" or "what if he's war-driving from a remote controlled helicopter". I can solve 95% of my problem (people mooching off me) for 10% of the cost/effort, so I'll probably stop there.
I think this is a fair compromise.
Another solution I had once considered was having times when you could use wi-fi freely and others when there are more customers you have to chip in either by buying a coffee or paying for the connection. It may work, but some people I have spoken too worry that this may end up being too confusing to actually work.
On the subject of PIN based wireless internet, with time limitations, are there any solutions out there that are either available off the shelf or via something like OpenWRT?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Excuse me? You mean American coffee shops don't do table service? That's only the big chains, no? Certainly the small ones wait tables?
For Jimmy's Indie Brewz, locations 1, the wifi is probably just some router on a DSL line. Integrating a code system would either mean forking over $$$$ to his POS vendor, if they even offer that, or hoping that his cousin is one of those "linux hackers".
If Jimmy doesn't know how to run his WiFi then why is he trying to sell it? I know nothing about coffee; if I tried to sell coffee I would go bankrupt. Even if you "sell" WiFi access for free as a loss leader, it's still a product. Stick to products you understand or hire someone who knows the product you're trying to sell. That's Business 101.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
On my Nexus One (or substitute your favorite Android phone running Froyo 2.2) and keep on surfing. Ho hum.
Personally, I don't abuse the privilege. I will take my notebook with me when I go to a Coffee Shop, buy coffee and a snack and enjoy reading Slashdot (and others) while I sip my cup. I suppose they could ban anyone bringing in a notebook computer, but then they would lose me as a customer.
Into CoffeeShops in Amsterdam, back in Europe, you never needed Wi-Fi to stay in contact with all your friends at once.. real and colorfully imagined ones....
I've used such a device. It is in use at Bergen Science Center and it was insanely easy to configure and use... The printer has 3 buttons on it and you just push one to get a code printed.
The software lets you decide on the time to link to each button. Works wonderfully.
I highly applaud this move.
Some nice places were starting to have a similar problem in Washington D.C., so the owners decided to cut WI-FI access off during the weekends. Seating was limited. Some people would come up, set up their lap tops and camp out at a table all day despite seeing that people who bought food had no place to sit. Some of these people would even put their feet up on other chairs and refuse to share their table if asked.
Rude and as some of the owners figured out, bad for business.
I like to go and read a book in public places sometimes, but if I see people not getting seats I pick up and go.
When I got online my surroundings vanish, so I don't see a point in going out somewhere nice to get on the computer. I can do that at home. If I am going to be somewhere nice, I want to be there.
Plus, BKs tend to be a lot larger than coffeeshops.
There are plenty of coffee places where there is literally just one row of tables, maybe eight or so. When four of those tables have freeloaders with laptops on them...
Whereas most fast food places are rather bigger than they need to be, and it's really not important.
When i go and see a movie somewhere alone, I often stop in some fast food places, order some food, and eat it and, sit and keep reading a book until the movie is near, sometimes for an hour or more. They don't mind, because I'm taking up 1 of the 30 tables.
I'm sure there are busy times that they would mind, but fast food places have a lot more slack space than coffee houses in general, at least around here, which are often jammed into 35-foot wide strip mall places, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anything after the coffee-making area is put in.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
two of the cafes I frequent in Beirut do this, when you purchase something from the counter you can ask for an internet receipt which allows you to use the internet for either 30 minutes or 2 hours, depending on the cafe. Of course people just go to the counter and ask for an internet receipt, which is usually freely given...but the system is in place for when they decide to enforce it.
--- b2b.mallaidh.org | www.mallaidh.org | www.kidsalive.org/article/kahlil-pfaff/
American coffee shops closely follow the Starbucks model. To get table service you usually need a more food-oriented place, but ironically the quality of the coffee either suffers or is even more expensive (especially when you factor in the tip).
The U.S. in general has a very large segment of do-it-yourself dining, like fast food or its slightly more upscale cousins in the form of Noodles/Panera/Chipotle/etc.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
It costs even more money than free wifi.
Having someone walk around asking for orders takes more time away from making orders, cleaning the equipment, grinding the coffee, etc. The biggest expense of any US business is it's payroll. Plus in a coffee shop environment, some people might find it annoying because those people have come to expect that they won't be bothered every 15 minutes. In an upscale restaurant where I don't pull my laptop I expect someone to visit my table regularly. At a coffee shop I personally want to be left alone. It's one of the many coffee shop paradoxes.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
No. No coffee place does table service. Coffee places in American are like fast food places that don't serve food. I think you're probably thinking they're more like 'cafes', which also exist, are a different thing, and they often will do table service and have actual food.
If you think it's insane to have fast food restaurants that exist solely to serve coffee, and that's it, a lot of us agree with you, especially as someone decided we needed them everywhere. But, they exist, you stand in line and get extremely overpriced coffee, and leave.
Although, although they have no table service, for some reason some of them apparently think you should tip them.
Um, no. When I go up to the counter and order there and carry stuff away, you don't get a damn tip. I tip people who wait on me.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Oh, that's easy.
Have less comfortable chairs. The place I go to I can stay about 2 hours at the max, before I lose all feeling to my legs.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
One of the local places, bordering on a chain, practically, used to offer free unlimited wireless.
They recently evaluated their offerings - both in drinks and service. Now you get a key (voucher) good for two hours of access.
It's triggered by your MAC (though I have used two devices on the same key) and when the timer kicks over, you aren't routed to the tubes anymore.
A small cup of coffee is what? About $2.00 in most cities? With that, you get pretty decent throughput, and no filtering for things like torrents or any apparent throttling.
Darn fine value in my book. Even college students and the unemployed can afford $2.71.
The best part? Plenty of people show up without computers. In fact, so many chatters are there, its often a requirement to bring the noise canceling headphones!
Sure, but I fail to see the difference between the guy on WiFi for 3 hours and the old dude reading the 3 papers he brought with him, or the woman reading a novel. Mooching is mooching, WiFi or not. Also, because the WiFi for most independent coffee shops is the same connection they need for credit card auths and running their business there is no additional cost to the business.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
There was a story on Slashdot several years ago now about a Coffee shop that got rid of its free wifi and saw it's profits jump as table cloggers didn't buy one cup and then block up the shop for the day. It seems like other places are coming to a similar conclusion.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
If we had more widespread free wi-fi, this wouldn't be a problem.
A month or so ago, I ran across an article, pitched to small-business operators, about how to make the best use of free WiFi at Starbuck's, for your business. and while I found the article itself reasonable enough, a few of the commenters in the comment thread made me very glad I don't operate a coffee shop. There is evidently an entitlement sub-culture out there that really believes that, by providing free WiFi, coffee shops have effectively invited people to come in and operate their business full-time, hold meetings, and so forth, and if these proud representatives of the new economy deign to buy a drink, well, isn't that lucky for the coffee shop?
It's easy to see where a few such individuals could poison the atmosphere the coffee shop was trying to cultivate, causing their free WiFi experiment to fail.
PS: Finally found the article, it's here. Repeating for emphasis that, IMHO, the article itself provides reasonable-seeming guidelines, it was the commenters that scared me.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Hm, I've seen one cafe that offers a wifi login on your receipt, the duration of which is dependent on how much you spend.
buy a cup of coffee, get 15 minutes of wifi with it. enough to check email, perhaps update the NYT app on your ipad, etc. spend more, get more. a benefit for paying customers, not vagrants.
even in places with free wifi, i always thought it was uncool to take up a seat just surfing when the place was crowded. i mean, aside from being a jerk to the business, other people are just trying to eat. if you're that much of a dick, perhaps you should take it somewhere more private.
You aren't going to keep people from sitting there and surfing the internet though just by cutting off wi-fi.
You can do so by choosing a location where AT&T drops to EDGE. Or, as teh kurisu suggested, you can do so by choosing a location where only avid coffee drinkers can afford find 720 USD per year for mobile broadband.
Unless there's nobody competing for the table, there is simply no way that a wifi hog is going to be a money maker, even if they continue to buy coffee. You can't drink coffee that fast. Well, maybe you can, but I can't. You're going to walk out of the shop with a brutal headache and a nervous twitch that could break bones.
The bottom line is that people who show up at the coffee shop and sit there all day spread out over a table, not sharing and not socializing, are not good customers. They have every right to *want* to be able to do that, but the coffee shop isn't benefiting from their presence, and *can't* benefit from their presence.
There's no clean way to fix this--another person who sits at the table all day might have friends who drift in and out and socialize with him or her, resulting in many more coffee purchases than would have occurred otherwise. That person might be a real boon to the same cafe that doesn't benefit from the loner who sits there all day.
And of course with the proliferation of decent 3G, the loner could just bring his or her own broadband connection. So there's really no way to deal with this other than on a case-by-case basis. It sounds like this particular coffee shop is in a location where there are a lot of leeches, and they've done what they have to do to re-balance things. It's almost certainly the case that they still occasionally get people who sit around hogging a table all day and don't buy enough coffee, but probably now there are fewer such customers, and so the balance is right again. It's too bad for the other customers, but that's life.
Every time I see a restaurant cut Wi-Fi, they go out of business in six to eight months. Most often it's because the owners are delusional about how many turns a WiFi camper is preventing. By delusional, I mean 10-15 turns (which amounts to about $150-250 in revenue) instead of 1-2 turns (which is about $10-$20). The rest of the time, it's because something else has gone incredibly wrong, and the hired help is blaming WiFi instead of their toxic customer service and/or bad kitchen management.
So instead of focusing on why traffic is down, the owner attacks the WiFi using regulars, who never come back, and never bring their friends, and never will say anything good about you. WiFi campers are regulars, so it's a lot like tossing Norm, Fraiser and Cliff out of Cheers because they aren't drinking enough. Regulars are important because they bring in others.
Also, where camping is a real problem, all that is required is a manager willing to have a polite conversation with the customer: "Would you mind coming back when we're not as busy? I've got six groups waiting for a seat, and well, I hate to ask... but we really need your table so we can get the line down. Would you mind?" The answer is nearly always, "Sure, and I really appreciate you having WiFi."
-- $G
This works to a point. Having people there all the time, even when slow, makes your coffee shop look trendy. Nothing like an empty store to scream loserville.
Adapt the above mentioned scheme of free access per order with a variable rate of time. During the slow periods have 2 hrs while the rush hours have 30 minutes of access.
WiFi at these places is a privilege, not a right. You don't get to just buy a $2 drink, take over a table and hog it for hours during the busier part of the day. These cafes should have made it clear that if you want to stay during the busier time, that's fine and welcome, but you WILL be buying food and/or a steady supply of coffee.
That's certainly what I did when I used to beam wifi to the sbux across the street from my house back in 2001, but because I'm a stubborn learner it took me two days to learn that (a) they have decaf espresso and (b) I really needed to switch to the decaf after noon.
You are correct that it will cost money to implement a coded time share system, but that is the only solution that is guaranteed to work.
If you offer "free WiFi", then people will assume that it is a free service that they may partake of as they wish. Some few will stop and think and realize that there really is no free lunch, but most people won't care.
If you tie internet access time to food sales, say 15 minutes per dollar spent, then you cover your costs and discourage mooching.
If you are super concerned about atmosphere, then you can offer your best customers free WiFi. Or, allow the purchase of a monthly limitless-access subscription.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This is why places like starbucks charge for there internet <...snip...> has to pay for out of there profit.
Fucking hell, you moron: there =/= their.
The "friend and regular" problem is trivially solved: you give them a new pin whenever they ask for one. The scammy freeloader knows better than to complain, and if they do, you just look at them patiently until they shut up. Come on, you work in a coffee shop--you haven't perfected the superior stare yet?
What's "expresso?"
Not really... it's free, but limited.
A burger is $4 or whatever without internet... and a burger is $4 WITH internet. Temporary != not free.
I'm not going to care, as a business owner, if ultra cheapass wants to mooch wifi. I don't care about the wifi. I care about the sloth who isn't making me any money taking up a chair or a sofa or a table for hours on end.
I'm not a business owner, but a very regular customer for a local Starbucks in my town. I use to go there after my daughter's violin lessons and have a treat, coffee, and some nice father-daughter time while we ate.
This was before a group of scrap-bookers decided that Starbucks was their personal workshop. They take up almost the entire store and parking lot, bring in all their equipment, and (from what I've seen) buy only a few drinks between the group.
I've stopped going to the store and take my girls someplace else. So your moral is true: it isn't wifi, it is the free loaders who have no consideration for other patrons that cost the business owner. At least if I have to have a coffee, there's the drive through...something the little shops probably don't have.
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
My only experience with phone internet access is through my blackberry, which I find painfully slow. It reminds me of the old dial-up days.
My latest blackberry I think is 3G, and is faster than my old phone, but still painfully slow compared to my cable internet connection at home.
What sort of upload download speeds do you get with your tethered connection?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
WiFi isn't the problem. It's clueless and/or inconsiderate people who are the problem. I've seen plenty of cases where one person takes over a large table, spreads all their books and papers all over it, then proceeds to work and/or study for hours.
These people need to get hit with a clue-by-4 that one person taking over a table that can seat 4-8 people is just inconsiderate and that a public cafe is not their kitchen table for them to spread all their crap all over. At the very least, go to a library instead.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
What's "coffee"?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
It's like espresso, except with less caffiene to calm the frayed nerves of internet pedantics.
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
A local coffee shop (with full bar and good lunch type menu) tried exactly what you suggested. They went whole hog with the wired, social networking laptops everywhere deal and allowed you to order via Twitter of all things once you'd opened a tab at the counter. It actually worked pretty well - @CofffeShop - large coffee, back patio please - and they'd bring it to you in a few minutes and put it on your tab. The manager running it really believed in embracing the idea of letting people 'office' out of his shop and encouraged people to work there and hosted a ton of networking events and built up a large, loyal customer base that pretty much lived there. He was so dedicated to those customers that when he booked bands to play the patio on weekends he would often ask them to turn down because the people inside were trying to work!
The owners fired him, covered up the outlets, restricted the WiFi, stopped booking social networking events and started making it an uncomfortable place to 'office' out of. Why? Even with Twitter ordering they still had the problem of too many cheapskate douchebags with "Social Media Consultant" business cards camping out all day at a four-top table and maybe spending $20 over a ten hour day. I'm glad for the change as I had really enjoyed their patio during to cooler months for grabbing a drink and a snack after work but stopped going (and stopped spending my $25 during an hour visit) because all the decent tables inside and out were always occupied by douchebags and their laptops.
Cheers,
Josh
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
The Zyxel Hotspot Gateway G4100 v2 does this, it's not under $200 but around at $500 with printer it is a affordable solution.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
what if he's war-driving from a remote controlled helicopter.
Damn dude, finish THIS story!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I run a coffee roasting operation and do some consulting for other coffee firms so I can tell you that in a lot of cases it isn't. What are the costs here? There's the cost of Internet access, which the business would have been paying anyway because they're using it to order from some suppliers, check bank account balances, and so on. There's the cost of a wireless router, but that's a pretty cheap one time cost that amortizes to 0. There's the cost of the electricity needed to run the router, but if that's significant on a per-cup-of-coffee basis that shop has bigger problems than wifi moochers.
The trade journals have been covering this trend for a while, but wifi is really just a convenient scapegoat for the real problem of a lack of customer engagement on the part of staff. While wifi might bring in a different demographic of moocher, this isn't really a new problem. Some years back I went into another coffee shop, ordered my single espresso, a large coffee, and some food, then found no indoor seating available at all. The seating area had been completely taken over by students. You'd see even at the largest tables, one student with their stuff spread all over it. I was later in a meeting with the owner of that shop and I told him about this. I also told him about my customers who also like to take over a big table and spread things out, but when the place gets busy, they pack up and move to a smaller table. He was impressed as his customers never thought to do that. This was a place that didn't offer wifi at the time, but it was the same problem with the same solution. Get to know your customers and when seating starts getting scarce, get out from behind the bar and suggest to the person using the largest table that he could move to a smaller table so the family of 4 that just came in can sit together, introduce customers to each other and ask if they'd mind sharing a table, things like that.
My policy on wifi is the same as when I put it in (and customers know this policy). It's free, it's open, but if it starts causing problems I'll get rid of it. So far it's been beneficial. Customers who spend a lot of time in the shop (but keep buying things while they're there) are there longer (and buying more) because they no longer have to run home just to check email. It's brought in more customers. It's also made it easier for me to make certain workflows data-aware (for example, the computer in the roasting area communicating with a database keeps inventory figures current and makes the roasting log both more detailed and easier to use, see my homepage for more details) without running ugly cables all over the place. That said, the coffee market in many major American cities is such that some independent shops can afford to pick their customers and if your customers think you have the best coffee in town, they'll be willing to deal with the minor inconvenience of lacking access, or rather, instead of laptops, they'll be on their cell phones. Personally, I'd rather have the laptops, but then again, my customers talk to each other.
Remember RFC 873!
Yeah, because free wi-fi is a right. Oh wait, it isn't!
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Basically, if coffee shops want to make more money from the WiFi hogs then they should look into something like table service, at least for people who have already been to the counter once. It gives people an easy way to spend money and the "nagging" effect of somebody asking if the hog wants to order more will make most of them either pay up or move on. It shouldn't be that much of an extra burden on staff as you need to have people going around and cleaning up tables anyway.
One of the few things that British teashops get right and American cafés get wrong, is that in a teashop you almost always get waitress service, whereas in an American café you almost always don't. Teashops are one of the very few British places where waitress service still persists.
I can't stand waitress service in pubs (bars), but in teashops it is required. In a bar, the beer is already brewed; just stick it in a glass, there is no need to delay. In a teashop, the tea needs to brew, there is nothing to be gained by having it arrive faster. Coffee, ditto; I don't want to be standing around waiting whilst you perform all that rigmarole; just bring it to me when it's ready - if I wanted to watch theatre, I'd go to the theatre.
A lot of big town British teashops have converted to cafés (notably, Costa, who seem to outnumber Starbucks now), but thankfully in smaller towns the independent teashops are doing as well, if not better, than they have ever done.
And I like the historical connection between the British teashop and computing. The world's first business computer did stock ordering calculations for Lyons teashops.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I really doubt that these shops are actually getting customers actively coming to them and saying how much they prefer lack of wireless. It is an invisible service... if you do not actively use it then you have no idea if it is there or not. The only case I can really see is complements from those people who bitch and moan that other people are online rather then audibly socializing with each other, since some people seem to be obsessed with the idea that a noisy/chatty environment is high grade social interaction.
>This is why places like Starbucks charge for there internet..
Umm.. Don't know where you've been but since July 1, I believe, Starbucks wifi has become free/unlimited, and before that, it was
free for 2 hrs if you had a Starbucks card...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
This, exactly. Many coffee shops in the vicinity of college campuses have had time limits on how long you could sit long before they had free wi-fi.
I remember several of my dorm-mates complaining when the Hillsboro street Cup-A-Joe started asking people to leave after about an hour if they didn't order anything else.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Seems like that would work really well. You could even just print a timestamped code on every receipt that deactivates X hours after the purchase.
If you want to seriously reduce the freeloaders then just simply remove or lock the electrical plugs around the shop. Whenever I'm in a coffeehouse and someone comes in for a serious session on their laptop, the first thing they do is look for a table near an electrical outlet and plug in. Most laptops will get between 2-4 hours of battery life doing mundane stuff, and less for anything more serious. No plug = self imposed time limit.
Better yet, put all the plugs over on one side or a specific section of your coffeehouse to keep the geeks away from your [cough] premium customers.
Espresso, but FAST!
douches who think all businesses are charity operations designed to give them what they want for free that are the problem.
It's like those douche internet slugs who think music is free.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Less of a problem. Bandwidth is cheap. Non-paying customers take up valuable table-space.
This is a silly idea, to remove the wifi to regain table space, though I'm sure that's what business owners are thinking. It's penny-wise and dollar-foolish. All restaurants, all of them, have always had to deal with limited table space. They don't eliminate specials to regain it... the specials are necessary to bring in customers. Freeloaders can be asked to leave: "order something, or please leave, we have a lot of customers that need the table."
More likely this is greedy owners that don't want the extra bill, and are too shortsighted to recognize how hit helps their business. Its the same thing as charging for water, or using pay toilets. They will lose their customers to the competition. Unless there is something really special about the coffee or the location, these places will become extinct.
The Admin and the Engineer
There's nothing even remotely resembling this in any of the Matrix movies (or animes).
Nothing to see here. Move along.
That's how the toilets work in McDonalds in various European cities with large numbers of tourists. Prague definitely had a system whereby a 4-digit unlock code for the toilet door was printed on the till receipt. I think it changed daily, though, not any more frequently than that.
The idea is to stop backpackers, druggies, tramps and, well, any freeloaders. I doubt they care whether you're a heroin addict so long as you spend some money and don't frighten off the other money-spenders (if they cared about heroin addicts, they'd use UV lighting; they don't).
The golden arches are sometimes referred to as "the international sign of the clean toilet" by British tourists on the continent. You'd be *shocked* what some Europeans think is acceptable as a public loo, especially in southern or eastern Europe.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
McDonalds do this pretty well, between the sharp plastic furniture and the food, I generally last about five minutes before seeking fresh air or the toilets.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
GASP! what!? I can't get FreeWiFi anymore? Come on now the great democratic republic of California can't afford to give free WiFi to all it's netizens?
Oh the horror!
If they require you to purchase food for a limited amount of time, then it's not free. That's subsidized or possibly included in the purchase price.
The building isn't free either, it's subsidized and certainly included in the purchase price. Why do you think that the wireless was ever free? It was just being subsidized and included in the purchase price.
The problems come whenever people opt to use too much of a convenience. If you start taking 100 paper napkins each visit, expect them to be relocated behind the counter. If you start grabbing rolls of toliet paper for your home, expect the restrooms to be locked and unlocked on request.
At the point in time when the cost of providing a convenience outweighs the cost of monitoring and regulating that convenience, expect it to become monitored and regulated. WiFi access is meant to draw customers, and if you deny the customers they intend to draw seating space, it's a fool's folly to complain about having to pay for it with a subsidy, because it was subsidized all along.
Count your blessings, as at least they aren't calling the cops. Loitering is a crime in most places.
That is actually an extremely good idea. But that is why it will never be done. Instead of finding new ways to monetize the current reality, companies would rather change the new part, and expect people to go back to the old system.
Ex-presso is what espresso used to be....
how much coffee can a person drink in a sitting?? can i get an evain?
Or, looked at a different way, you're paying for the Internet whether you want it or not.
Or, instead of "free wifi with your coffee," they could offer "free coffee with your wifi." You pay for the wi-fi per 30/60 minutes, and get a cup and all the refills you want, and they'd still make money. Then the guy who sits around all day nursing one cup of coffee and web browsing is transformed from a leech into their best customer.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
At least if you leave your seat to refresh your beverage you have a good chance of being able to see your kit from the line. If you're worried about theft you're taking a rather larger risk by going off to evacuate all that coffee from your bladder.
I've only had my kit disappear once on me, and that was because it was packed up by a friend while I was in the can because he'd arbitrarily decided I'd had enough beer and we were now leaving.
I'd have thought that they were already doing this. If they're not, the service, not to mention the store, is being badly managed. Jeezuz, how much more simple could it be. Buy a thing for x dollars, get a token for y minutes of free wi-fi. Turn-key systems for this exact thing have been available for many years.
"Please limit your time to an hour if you are just browsing the internet, during our peak hours of -----------
Thanks,
Management"
The "atmosphere" of the coffee shop is the atmosphere of mutual communication -- the customers listen too. There is no need for these weird "receipt" codes, or things like that. I'd simply go to Starbucks. I mean, I've refused to go to a coffee shop because they fired a barista I've known for a long time -- if they suddenly said -- "Hey, you're not welcome here, freeloader" -- without a polite explanation, as above -- then there would definitely be backlash.
My point was more that stores have to pay for providing the wifi, whether they explicitly charge customers for it or not. That might not show up much in the purchase price, but the accounting has to get pretty magical for it to not show up at all.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I think that while for some owners this may be true, but for the owner mentioned in the article, he's talking about filling a different niche. His business sounds like it's doing fine by offering service to people who DON'T want wi-fi, and like the idea of being in a shop where people aren't using it. He's just changing his business model to fit a different subset of consumer that he wants to work with.
This was before a group of scrap-bookers decided that Starbucks was their personal workshop. They take up almost the entire store and parking lot, bring in all their equipment, and (from what I've seen) buy only a few drinks between the group.
Even though the Starbucks/ATT wifi access times out after 2 hours?
Zyxel do quite an easy to use one
http://www.zyxel.co.uk/web/product_family_detail.php?PC1indexflag=20040520161256&CategoryGroupNo=4E14C850-478D-4204-8C85-2994C9552426
but it's still going to be quite a few hundreds of dollars and with the margins etc on coffee that could take quite some time to recoup.
I am not a Frog. I am a Free Womble!
I don't think that group is using much wifi. The issue is that they are doing their scrapbooking projects and taking up the whole store.
Come on, you work in a coffee shop--you haven't perfected the superior stare yet?
Especially the very unique "I'm not just a Sysadmin, I'm a Barista-Sysadmin" stare.
It is thought that a single glance can rewrite your boot sector AND defoam your latte...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
A technological solution to a social problem isn't usually a solution at all.
The problem is that people are taking up too much table time. Joe might do it with wifi, so your receipt scheme will work there. I might do it by tethering my EVO to my laptop. Jane might do it by reading a book on her Nook, etc.
Your solution only addresses one of several scenarios. What management needs to do is put in a policy about how long you can use a table, regardless if you have a wifi laptop or not. I don't see why this is so difficult. Restaurants do it all the time.
Right. I provided a breakdown in the first paragraph of what they're paying and it's mainly a one time expense that's insignificant when split among purchases (the AP, though some ISPs are starting to include that with service now) and an ongoing expense that the business would be paying if they offered the service or not (Internet access). There's nothing magical about the accounting, it just really doesn't cost that much. Now, if you start adding fancy features like receipt access codes, registration before login, and the like, the costs get larger but a shop that's just using a COTS wireless router and throwing it out there, my breakdown is accurate. Here's the real test for you. Have prices gone down at the shops that are no longer offering the service? I doubt it, just as there was generally no price bump to go along with introducing the service in the first place.
Remember RFC 873!
There are coffee shops in Austin that have turned off their Wi-Fi networks as well. And their business actually has picked up:
More tables are available so people stick around and buy stuff, as opposed to people playing FarmVille all day.
People tend to chat or read books, and not just be in their own worlds.
The people that really want/need Internet access can pull out their phones, flip on tethering, and go at it.
IMHO, there is a happy medium, because there are times when a person does need to get out of the house (or dorm), take a laptop and do some studying in a different environment. What a coffee shop wants are some tables taken to make the place appear busy, but so jammed full that people just walk off, or don't have a place to sit. This can be done in two ways:
1: Turn off Wi-Fi during lunch or peak times where people are going in to eat. This clears out the table campers for paying customers when demand is high. Alternatively, restrict it to 10-20 minute increments during these hours.
2: There are may ways to limit Wi-Fi access. I like the idea of "preferred" accounts for people with unlimited wireless, and 30-120 minute tickets if one isn't on the list. This way, at least people using the Wi-fi have bought something recently, while people in the "premium" club with a yearly membership have a perk to keep renewing.
3: Use a WISP service and let someone else manage the Wi-Fi stuff.
Or you could just get up and keep an eye on it while ordering another coffee. I have yet to go to a coffee shop that was so big that you couldn't see every table and booth from the counter. Are you so fat and quiet that you can't yell or run after someone if they try to snatch your laptop?
My god, the level of entitlement around here is sickening.
Gosh... I thought Snarfbucks was selling a lifestyle, not (just) coffee. It must be gratifying for the folks that operate your local franchise to know that "real father-daughter time" can be had within the confines of their little caffeine-sugar shack. That having been said, as far as I can tell, there's nothing inconsistent about the mentality of people who want to take all they can from a company that wants to take them for all they can.
There really isn't a difference. I think they are just noticing more of a trend with wifi slugs.
If you're sniping from across the street with a Pringles can, you're not taking up space in my coffee shop.
doesnt seem that hard....if you are running a business and you see ANY kind of squatter, walk up to them, tell them (or maybe post a clear set of rules or time limits AND ENFORCE IT) and kick people out when there time is up. every Panera Bread has free Wifi and they also have a clear set of rules posted. Honestly, TFA talks about being "disconnected" but they wont even walk up to these squatters and kick them out. instead of trying to preserve "the atmosphere" maybe they should be more concerned with maintaining services AND evicting deadbeats. Just eliminating a service seems like a lazy and spineless way to claim that you are being "unique" and preserving an specific atmosphere
What do they do about people like me that bring their own modem (and then turn on its router) and use my own UNRESTRICTED network? would they let me sit there all day and nurse a coffee for hours because they dont have have the balls to tell me to leave?
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
This is especially topical since this was spotted at the Barns and Noble on Rittenhouse square in Philadelphia last month.
If you think it's insane to have fast food restaurants that exist solely to serve coffee, and that's it, a lot of us agree with you, especially as someone decided we needed them everywhere. But, they exist, you stand in line and get extremely overpriced coffee, and leave.
The market, at the time, thought we needed them everywhere. Go to a Starbucks, it's busy, go to the one on the next block. There was a time when Starbucks couldn't get them built fast enough to keep up with the demand. Kind of like the .com era when everyone was starting a business to sell something online. Except this time the crash wasn't as big.
Although, although they have no table service, for some reason some of them apparently think you should tip them.
Um, no. When I go up to the counter and order there and carry stuff away, you don't get a damn tip. I tip people who wait on me.
Um, no. The tip jar is there for people who want to leave the barista a tip. If they thought you should tip, there would be a line on the receipt for writing it in. The tip jar at a coffee shop is no different from the tip jar on a piano at a lounge. That guy doesn't wait on you either, but you're free to tip him. Same goes for the coffee place. They put the jar there, I'm sure, initially because some people want to tip. If you don't want to, then don't. That's why it's called a tip or "gratuity", because you don't have to do it if you don't want.
Are you ok with bars? The exist largely on the same concept. You go in, stand in line (they don't all have waitresses), and order an overpriced drink. Someone decided to apply that to coffee and you're all up in arms.
In the Barnes & Noble I used to work at, it was the nursing students that were the most egregious offenders. They would grab all of the review books off the shelves, buy one cup of coffee (some individuals seemed not to bother even with this), plop themselves down in the cafe, and spend the entire Sunday afternoon studying for their exams. When they were done, they just left all of the review books they had spent the afternoon paging through on the table. Heaven forbid they purchase one.
Once, when we had a performer invited to play the cafe (acoustic guitar and drum machine, or something), one of these clowns actually had the audacity to ask the manager how in the world he was supposed to be able to study with the music blaring.
People can be absolutely shameless.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Man, that's the saddest story I've heard on Slashdot all week. Taco Bell employees essentially throw you out because they don't like you. How low can you go?
You need a hug.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes. Every lazy slug in the coffee shop would surely be paying for coffee refills if only they had table service. Until then, they are miserably confined to their seats.
WiFi at these places is a privilege, not a right. You don't get to just buy a $2 drink, take over a table and hog it for hours during the busier part of the day. These cafes should have made it clear that if you want to stay during the busier time, that's fine and welcome, but you WILL be buying food and/or a steady supply of coffee.
I'm assuming your policy should apply to business lunches, dates, book-reading, or any other activity that would normally consume table-space without continuous purchases? So you're all for chasing out every customer who doesn't come into your shop and consume, consume, consume? For your own sake, please, stay out of the food service industry.
It'd be painful in the short term because they'd have to tell some of these entitled hoity-toities that it is a privilege, not an entitlement and if they want to complain they can just GTFO.
If you've ever owned a business, you know that serving your customers is the real privilege. They're entitled to take their business wherever they want. FTFA: "I turn off the Wi-Fi and in 10 minutes all the computers are gone." And with those computers go your customers. If you've ever owned an eating establishment, you know the last thing you ever want to see is an empty business. Doesn't matter if those people are consuming or not: most people will instinctively pass up an empty restaurant for a busier one because the assumption is the service/coffee/food is better. What you're describing is a recipe for a failed business.
Between longer battery life and cellular data connections, I'm seeing less of this in Palo Alto. A few years ago, I did see places with people on laptops camped at every table. Neotte, a high-end tea shop on University Avenue, offered WiFi and power outlets at every table. Nobody talked; once in a while, someone would order tea from the striking young redhead behind the counter. Neotte went out of business after a year. They were replaced by a coffee shop with fewer power outlets. Power outlets encouraged camping.
The portable gadget thing seems to have peaked. A few years back, I saw a teenage couple come into a coffee shop in a strip mall in Palo Alto (yes, Palo Alto has strip malls). Each took out and set up 1) a laptop, 2) a cell phone, 3) an iPod, 4) a graphing calculator, and 5) their homework. They went quietly to work, barely talking to each other. I haven't seen that in years now. Today, there's been enough mobile device integration that one or two devices is enough, and carrying around a backpack full of gadgets is no longer cool.
I've been to Coupa Coffee, the place mentioned in the article. This in a place with tiny round tables, no power outlets, heavy traffic, and a high noise level. The layout doesn't encourage camping. Their management doesn't really need to disable WiFi. They do have WiFi; I've been there with an overachieving friend who set up her laptop and iPhone. But that's unusual for the place.
Coffee shops aren't your only option for WiFi access these days. My local public library offers it, and I can sit there all goddamn day without spending even the $2 on coffee if I please. If businesses are tired of the WiFi road warriors, we'll go someplace else.
That said, not all coffee shops are as busy as some of the comments here make them out to be. My regular place always has tables open, and admittedly, I'm one of those "bastards" who will buy a cup of coffee and sit for a couple hours net-browsing. Is my regular patronage and positive comments toward the business worth seeing a few less laptop lids open? If it is, I can certainly take my business elsewhere.
All that said, I see nothing wrong with coffee shops taking out their WiFi. But they better be prepared with a customer base that can do without it.
Or have an account system with a "member card" Each $1 you spend gets you 5 minutes, or you can purchase time by itself if you dont want to buy anything else (say $1 for 15 minutes or so)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
A deadbolt is better, but can still be picked by higher-end criminals.
Actually, a criminal would just kick in the door. The deadbolt doesn't help much.
Creepy... that is the box I used :p
I've stopped going to the store and take my girls someplace else.
Fortunately, there are probably 4 dozen other Starbucks locations within walking distance of the one usurped by the scrap-bookers...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
WHOOOSH!
You don't need 2 hours to sip coffee.
Most coffee shops I've been in offer access to a commercial wi-fi operator's services - I had an account with BT Openzone for several years that I used, that cost me about £12 a month. It wasn't worth it, so I've switched to using a prepaid 3G mobile broadband stick - reception's not always great but it means I only pay for what I use. The truth is, public wi-fi just hasn't worked out the way people thought it would - in Norwich where I work they set up a municipal wi-fi network but it was never that great. Mobile broadband's generally cheaper and more flexible - means I have more options on where to sit with my Dell Mini.
That's Insightful? You do realize, that you don't own that table and that chair, or do you? If I come in and I see all chairs occupied by laptop trolls, I leave, I don't bother staying in that coffee shop, so this is a coffee shop owner's problem so they have to deal with you, not me, or their business will die off.
You can't handle the truth.
Whoa, a "bring your own PC" Internet café! That's brilliant!
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
People really can be shameless, and it's usually a sign of bad management when "customers" (I use the term loosely) are allowed to get away with that. Most competent managers would ask such a group to either buy the review books or leave.
There's a difference between going up to get a drink instead of waiting to be served, and not having a waiter at all.
And there's a different between going to a bar, and having someone come over to serve you even if they just have to walk down the bar...vs. standing in line, as I've done the few times I've gone to Starbucks.
You are, at that point, even if you don't use a waiter, tipping more the concept of service. Yes, you didn't ask for it, but in theory if you had waved your arm and attracted their attention at the table they would have come over. Someone is standing there watching your table or bar location, ready to help you, even if you never ask for you. Usually they come over and see if you need service. And you tip them for that, even if you didn't need any.
Meanwhile, at Starbucks, there is not even any hypothetical service, last I checked. I might tip waiters that don't do anything for me, but I don't tip non-existent waiters. Nor do I tip people I stand in line to buy things from. (Where exactly does that end? I start tipping the people at Taco Bell? The checkout clerk at the grocery store?)
I wouldn't tip if I was in a bar without waiters either, although I've never even heard of such a place.
Meanwhile, I do tip if I'm in a coffee shop with servers, as I've been before. (Although that was more a cafe with coffee shop attached.)
If you don't want to, then don't. That's why it's called a tip or "gratuity", because you don't have to do it if you don't want.
Maybe you think that way, but most people see tipping as a responsibility. I always tip, usually 20%. Except when I don't get any service, even if they've put up jars to try to get people to tip.
Meanwhile, I'm sure there are some people working at Starbucks who are annoyed at me because they get paid assuming they get tips, which is a totally and utter scam on their management's part. 'Hey, I know, let's cut their wages and see if we can get people to nonsensically tip the difference for the imaginary service being provided!'. Don't blame me for that nonsense, speak up.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This is the perfect response. I just want to add that it's amusing to see people come up with technological solutions, when the problem is so clearly a human one. If someone has been sitting at a table for the last four hours after buying one cup of coffee, and the place is packed with people looking for seats, then ask him to relocate. He's not generating any revenue for your store, and he's driving away other customers. What an amazing thought, that a manager should actually manage the store!
Why aren't these shops just limiting DHCP lease time to like 1 hour and refusing to renew DHCP leases on each MAC for 24 hours? Sure, most of us could defeat that measure, but most jackoffs hanging out at coffee shops for free Web browsing won't know.
Do they have a different culture in L.A. ? Out of the tons of places that say free Wi-fi here in Ohio, I can't honestly say I've ever once seen a person on a laptop using it in the past 6 months. In fact I wondered if some of them might shut it off because it is an expense that seemingly attracts no one.
You can run a small business on dialup if you're tight on funds, or DSL if you're impatient. That's much cheaper than any internet plan with enough bandwidth to handle freeloaders.
Wifi would be ridiculously cheap. Even in Australia a coffee shop can easily run on a DSL plan. If you cant recoup A$80 in a month your business model has bigger problems.
Here you make a very good point, rent, power, heating/cooling cost a bit but getting rid of Wifi wont help. This is a social problem so you'll have to deal with it socially. You need to make it clear that they need to purchase more drinks/food or shove off. Give them the subtle hint by sending a waitress over to take their order and if that doesn't work be a manager and kick them out, its not like you're losing a valued customer.
Personally I've been guilty of buying one cup of tea and using a coffee shops wireless for 45 minutes. I've done this a few times but always when I've been 1000's of KM's from home and have no idea where a cyber is and need to access bank, email and so forth. If there is one connections you can count on almost anywhere in the civilised world is that you can get Wifi at any self respecting coffee shop. If this changes it will be at the coffee shops peril.
I've also changed my MAC address to get around the 2 hour limit at KLIA LCCT (airport). The starbucks Wifi was free but they were playing the world cup and I wanted to get as far away from the Vuvuzela as possible.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You must work for a phone company as they have tried to tell me the same thing, but the typical high volume use here is a guy doing video conferencing with his girlfriend, a girl playing some game on Facebook, someone else on youtube, a real estate agent uploading photos, others doing light web browsing/email/IM, in addition to the business use traffic. DSL plans around here are more than enough to handle peak usage and most of the time it's much lower. I just don't see a dozen people all trying to torrent half of the Pirate Bay. A DSL connection is all my shop has and nobody has yet complained about that. It works just fine. Then again, for places with heavier users, going with lower bandwidth could be a gentle way of making the problem self-correcting as the people who are only there for the network will find it not very useful and move on while it doesn't really affect the people who use it as the nice convenience that it's intended as.
Remember RFC 873!
That is a fine post. I was going to point out that people showing up at coffee shops and not buying much if anything has been happening way longer than coffee shops have been offering internet access. Coffee shops are bars for people not wanting to drink liqueur. They have been set up that way for that last couple of decades. They are specifically built to encourage people to hang out for long periods of time. That's what putting in big fluffy couches and bookshelves filled with books will do.
The funniest part of the whole situation is that the moocher IS the coffee house demographic. Coffee house owners complaining about people hanging out and not buying stuff seems a lot like a bar owner who complains that people keep getting drunk at his establishment. Sure it would be great if every came in, plunked down their money, stayed long enough to make the place look popular, and then cleared the way for everyone else, but that isn't going to happen in bars, and it isn't going to happen in coffee shops. In either kind of place you will have to deal with the occasional person that gets out of control, the person that nurses his drink for hours, and even the occasional person that doesn't buy anything.
You have obviously not seen some of the incredibly rude signs they put on the tip jars they put up around here. No doubt they started out thinking they were cute and funny, but they have moved well beyond that at this point.
WTF is with the idocy of contemporary "scrapbooking" any fucking way. I mean, look, stupid, if you buy it in a store, well guess what, it isn't a "scrap". As soon as I can afford it, I'm getting the fuck out of this imbecile nation.
Social Credit would solve everything...
Honestly, the whole concept of tipping is ridiculous. Even when you buy a newspaper from a vending stand, someone has provided you service. The providing of service is inherent in doing business.
The ironic thing is that in many if not most fast food places like McDonalds and Jack in the Box, if they are even a little backed they will offer to bring your food out to your table when it is ready. This politely gets you out of their way so they can take the next order.
So, like you, I do tip at the normal places, but I have no illusions that it makes sense in restaurants or bars any more than it would make sense in a McDonalds.
Interestingly enough, that's why I make a point of buying furniture that's slightly uncomfortable rather than the cushy sofas, to get people to stand up now and then and maybe wander back to the counter for another drink or eye the bakery case. Some other shops do the same thing with music that's slightly too loud, bad lighting, or keeping the place too cold. Once upon a time there was a coffee shop not that far from where I live that I'd go to. It was definitely a local youth hangout, but the owner kept the heat off, bad lighting, uncomfortable furniture. He didn't buy coffee from me, but he got good stuff and his staff knew what it was doing behind the bar. The place was always packed and did good business, but one day the owner decided to move back to his home town and sold the place to his employees. They sat down and rather than leave a good thing alone, thought it would be cool if they made it like the coffee house on Friends. They put light bulbs in the fixtures, turned on the heat, brought in the cushy furniture. The place was still always packed, but nobody ever got up to buy another drink and they were out of business in less than a year. I still miss them. None of the other half dozen or so coffee shops that have gone into that location since have been anywhere near as good in terms of serving a delicious drink. That said, I love my customers who stick around all day. They bring their out of town guests, have their meetings at my shop, and are really some of my best word of mouth advertisers.
Remember RFC 873!
Having to sit in a Starbucks and even smell their coffee... No, that's not free.
Next, I want a cafe that has cones of silence, aka cell-phone jamming.
Change the password every half hour. Suggestions for passwords: Arentyouhungryyet buysomething tanstaafl
Peet's gives you an hour only and then you need to buy something to get another ticket. Seems reasonable to me.
In Vienna we have traditional coffee shops. If you want to you can stay all day with one coffee. It even expected. You will never be asked to leave before closing time. We have had free wifi for at least 5+ years.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
There have been times when circumstances are such that one doesn't have much choice but to work out of a wifi/coffee shop, say when your wife has a temp job 80 minutes' drive from home, and she doesn't have a license. Any time I've camped out in a coffee place to use wifi, I've purchased a reasonable amount of product (when edible food was available), and I've literally never seen a place without an empty table, so I don't really buy the claim that someone sitting quietly and consuming packets has anything to do with the bottom line. I've seen a number of places that do just what fuzzyfuzzyfungus below describes -- Cafe Ladro, eg., last time I was in one. When it's done properly, it's tolerable, but I long ago gave up on Tully's, as they seemed to route everything through an underpowered proxy of some sort, making the connection basically unusable.
I'm at the office now. We have a business class connection. I'm pretty sure our cost would go up if we started offering Internet service to the public, and that we'd get in trouble if we simply put on a router and told everyone to go nuts.
My experience does not agree with your hunch. We've been running an open hot spot on a DSL connection for years. The phone company has known that we are doing that for a long time and their only concern is that they don't want to provide tech support our network (fair enough, I don't want them supporting my network either). The only thing that has happened with that connection over the years is that it has gotten faster and cheaper.
Remember RFC 873!
I lie an atmosphere of peoplel quietly working on their laptops.
At least, that's my experience.
Yes, the free loader aspect can be dealt with pretty simply.
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Oh surprised a coffee person with a superiority complex. I am shocked I tell you, shocked.
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That's really nitpicey. Plus, if it doesn't cause any of the prices tp rise, and it hasn't, then it is effectively free.
It is paid for by increase customer base.
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" if you think you can just go in and pay $2 and sit there for multiple hours surfing their internet, you need to wake up."
if they don't have a rule for that, then it's fine.
" I understand that bathrooms in nice restaurants are for their customers only"
a policy I hate..
Do you have any idea what ti's like to try and find a rest room when you have a 4 year old that needs to go?
I mean, really Do you want my child peeing in your restroom, or on your door step?
ALl the tiem I went to that resraunt don't score me points?
reminds me of when I was about 11.
I had to take a dump, bad. I asked the person at the 7/11 if I could use theirs, they refused.
I told them I had to really go. They said no. I left, went to there dumpter are and dropped a big load.
I had no choice. There where no other stores on the intersection. Just apartments.
I had been going to the 7/11 for slurpees/candy/ last minute things for my family*. I wasn't some homeless smelly guy that was going to trash the place.
*the 70's where a different time.
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actually, it's the owners allowing their space to become to crowded and loud for you.
I wonder if you ever asked how much coffee they drank?
Plus, scrapbookers have become a plague everywhere. My wife, and avid scrapbooker, can't stand them anymore. The took a small fun hobby and turned it into a 'thing' and now everyone is trying to be competitive and define their superiority by their time in.
.
As a nerd, I just told my wife: Welcome to my world. Wanna kill all humans?
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I'd have to be a masochist to want a Starbucks 'coffee'.