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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."
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
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.
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
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.
I think they mean "wirelessless". Note wirelessless != wired.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
This shit isn't hard.
Drink less coffee.
I'm almost sorry for that one. Almost...
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.
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.
" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
If my boss tried to ask me why I didn't do the work he emailed to me while I was on lunch, I'd reply "Because I was on fucking lunch!"
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
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!
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.