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| LAMILL Coffee Boutique, Los Angeles. |
This is the original version of a story that ran in Fox News with the much more dramatic headline, "Cafes declare war on Wi-Fi squatters." You can read the published version here.
In the '90s
(remember them? weren't they nice?), it was not uncommon to see hordes of
teenagers and college students at your local Friends-style second-wave coffeehouse chain-smoking cigarettes and sucking down $1 cups of coffee. They
would spend hours on end doing this, every single day. And they weren't sitting
in silence staring mindlessly at their iPhones uploading "selfies" (now in the Oxford Dictionary!) on Instagram. They talked. To
each other. As in, engaged in meaningful dialogue with other humans.
But a lot
has changed in the last two decades. Now, we're all wired. Endlessly wired.
Phillip K. Dick post-apocalyptic-cyberpunk-novel wired. We have our laptops and
our smartphones and our iPads and we are on them ALL THE TIME checking Facebook
and Twitter and Instagram or on Snapchat or playing Candy Crush. (Some people
even do work.) Bars and restaurants are regularly filled with people blatantly
ignoring each other, so much so that "phone-stacking" is a thing that now exists.
And cafes,
the standard-bearers of quality social interaction amongst strangers and
thinkers and activists and eager young adults since 14th century
Turkey, are now full of "coffee squatters" – those who set up shop
with their laptops and spend interminable hours gobbling up the café's
bandwidth and available seating, making it so that other customers can't find a
place to sit and negatively impacting the shop's business, all so they can do
important things like update their Facebook status and download new albums from
iTunes.
It wasn't
always like this. Cafés offering free Wi-Fi did so with the best of intentions,
trying to provide their customers with an additional value in the hopes of
bringing more business. It started innocently enough – college students
researching essays; business people checking emails (bear in mind, smartphones
with email access are still a relatively new thing on the timeline of human
existence). But the service is now being broadly abused, and café owners are
fighting back.
In San
Francisco, Luigi Di Ruocco, owner of Coffee Bar, recently made headlines after restricting access to laptop
users during peak times and creating "laptop-free" seating so
customers simply trying to have lunch will have somewhere to sit. Fellow café
owners all over the country have chosen to place time limits on Wi-Fi use,
require an access code to the wireless network (available only with purchase),
cover their electrical outlets, or eliminate Wi-Fi altogether. Ben Popken of NBC News writes, "While
the measures may seem a bit gruff for coffee shops that have long promoted
themselves as a friendly and counter-cultural alternative to the mainstream
coffee joints, they're an economic necessity. Coffee shops rely on a high
volume of low-price items. Stores can't afford to provide temporary real estate
to people looking for a remote office for which they only pay $1.85 in daily
rent."
Forbes also warns of the financial threat
of squatting. "A coffee shop will never make enough money to pay the bills
from coffee sales alone," says Peter Baskerville in answer to the
question, "What's the secret to a successful
coffee shop?"
He instructs café owners to worry less about offering things like Wi-Fi and more
about increasing turnover and takeaways. "Takeaway customers pay the same
price as the sit-down customer, but without any of the occupancy costs, and you
will serve ten of them by the time your sit down customer has finished sipping
on their first cup of coffee as they enjoy a chat with their friends on
Facebook using your free Wi-Fi."
Jane
Shihadeh previously owned Shoe's Cup and Cork in Leesburg, Virginia, a café by
day and full fine dining restaurant and wine bar by night. "It's difficult
to generate profit from coffee sales alone," she says. "Ultimately
it's more about your average check in general. You really need people coming in
to eat." She wanted to balance the restaurant with a relaxed coffeehouse
vibe, and offered free Wi-Fi to encourage that. "What we found was that
there were lots of people that would come in – if you were lucky they would
maybe order a large coffee but sometimes they would just demand water – and
would sit there for hours." She found that these customers were also the
most demanding, and some would even use her café to solicit business from her
other customers, engaging them in conversation about their web design needs.
Eventually she sold the café (it is now operating under new ownership) and
opened a much more straightforward Wi-Fi-free sandwich shop, Philly Rabe's.
In the
hipsterific Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, LAMILL
Coffee Boutique,
referred to by USA Today as "the white-tablecloth
restaurant of coffee shops," has a two-hour time limit on their wireless
access because, as manager Dave Alfaro states, "It frees up space. We
don't want people sitting there all day long while we have people who want to
come in, get a coffee and eat their food." The Boutique also serves a
thoughtful selection of wine, beer, and sake, as well as a full breakfast,
lunch and dinner menu. Coffee squatters aren't just taking up space and
bandwidth (Alfaro has noticed many use the café's free Wi-Fi for large file
downloads) from other would-be squatters looking to do the same, but are
actually turning away other customers who have nowhere to sit. At Abraco in
New York, which also serves a selection of house-made small plates and baked
goods, it's standing-room-only – ensuring squatting isn't an issue.
Coffee
shops that don't serve food or have only a limited menu of pastries available,
like Verve in Santa Cruz, seem to fare better
than those that are also restaurants. Ashley Epia, shift lead at the 41st
Avenue location, says the Wi-Fi network is password-protected but the password
is given out freely and there is no time limit for usage. The café has a small
selection of pastries and does not offer table service. She says that "squatting"
isn't really a problem and that people cycle out pretty well. But Verve is also
a roaster with a strong wholesale business to support its cafés. Additionally,
cafés like this that rely almost predominantly on coffee sales tend to be
significantly smaller, thus offering significantly less seating – perhaps
making the squatter a bit more self-conscious about taking up one of only a
handful of seats.
But the
hostility towards "squatters" isn't just about people taking up seats
– though the lost revenue for businesses that rely on dine-in food sales is
definitely a primary concern. For many it's also about the atmosphere they wish
to create. New York's Café Grumpy doesn't offer Wi-Fi or allow
laptops in four of their five locations. "For us, yes, it's a space issue,
but it's also about the atmosphere it creates," says Café Grumpy owner
Caroline Bell. Though the cafés only serve their own house-made pastries and
don't face the same challenges as full sit-down restaurants, Bell wanted to
create an atmosphere that was "more inviting," allowing for actual
conversation to occur rather than the pitter-patter of laptop typing being the
dominant sound. "It's less about turnover and more about the experience.
People appreciate it."
Walking
into a café and seeing table after table of laptop zombies, faces bathed in
blue from the glow of their screens, is a much different experience than
walking into a café buzzing with excited conversation, whether it be about
politics or the latest episode of Breaking
Bad. In recent decades coffeehouses have evolved as much as technology. The
ubiquity of smartphones has made the original intent of free Wi-Fi (as an
additional service for customers to use sparingly as needed) obsolete, and
third-wave coffeehouses are increasingly mindful of encouraging a sense of
community – that centuries-old café culture in which cafés served as primary community
gathering places.
While you
could easily make a case that the squatters of decades past – the Beat writers
of 1950s San Francisco, the postmodern philosophers of 1960s Paris, the goth
and grunge kids of 1990s America – probably weren't producing high ticket
averages, they were producing the
kind of human interaction missing from the modern laptop mafia (and let's not
get started on "co-working," i.e., ignoring each other in groups
while taking up multiple seats). In an age of endless connectivity, sometimes
people just want to feel connected;
the retaliation against coffee squatting is just one manifestation of a growing
social movement.
