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Thread: Are You A Coffee Shop Camper?
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07-13-2015, 10:34 AM #1
Are You A Coffee Shop Camper?
Curious as to what the collective thinks about this. With 3 colleges within a 10 mile radius the few coffee shops we have get overrun with campers quickly on a daily basis. It doesn't affect me because I seldom go in to sit down but I've heard grumblings and I've noticed several regulars who are always there, spread out across a table with their laptop and books making it difficult for others to find a place to sit and chat.
Is anyone here a regular who Teleworks? Have you encountered push back and what do you think about it?
Teleworkers, coffee shops at odds over etiquette
By Maura Judkis, Washington PostJuly 11, 2015
WASHINGTON - You can get an espresso at Bread Furst, or a baguette, or a perfect piece of pie. But if you want to get some work done, be prepared: Owner Mark Furstenberg just might ask you to move along.
The James Beard Award-nominated baker sees his cafe as a neighborhood gathering place - not a second office for ever-more-prevalent teleworkers. So during peak hours, when he spots laptop lurkers nursing now-cold cups of coffee and occupying precious table space, he asks them to leave. Politely, of course.
A typical exchange, as he describes it:
Furstenberg: "I'm sorry, this is not your workspace."
Customer: "What do you mean? I just bought a cup of coffee."
Furstenberg: "I know, and I'm glad you bought a cup of coffee, and I hope you like the coffee, but other people are waiting for tables."
Customer: "It's a public place, isn't it?"
Furstenberg: "Well, no, actually, it's not that kind of public place. It's a place where people come to eat and talk, but it's not your workspace."
Customer: "You're going to decide how I use the space?"
Furstenberg: "Well, yes, actually, I am."
Furstenberg doesn't mind if people work in his shop when it isn't busy, or if they conduct face-to-face business meetings there. It's the ones he and other cafe owners call "campers" that get to him - you know, the types who buy one cup of coffee, plug in their laptop and earphones and proceed to act as if they own the place, hogging the tables for hours on end. To deter them, he doesn't offer WiFi. But still they come, with their portable hotspots and their FaceTime and their tablets, undeterred.
"We have this notion that 'any space can belong to me, and I can do what I want,' '' Furstenberg said, resignedly. "Technology has made it possible."
The third place
But technology can be a double-edged sword.
It allows more of us to telework than ever before, but then we're, you know, stuck at home - feeling isolated, or distracted, or guilty for not loading the dishwasher or playing with the dog. So we escape to a different location full of different distractions, which fade into the white noise of productivity: steamed milk churning, strangers' murmurs, ambient music. If the chairs are comfy enough, some of us might stay all day. It feels like home.
Public spaces meant for gathering and socializing, even talking business, have been around for centuries. England's stock exchange and insurance industry can be traced to the coffee shops of 18th-century London. But in 1989, sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his book "The Great Good Place," gave them a name: the third place. If your home is your first place and your office is your second place, the third place is where you go to escape the obligations of the first two. But what happens when the third place becomes more and more like the second?
Offering memberships
It might look a bit like Boccato Gelato in Arlington, Va. Over the past three years, owner Cristian Velasco grew frustrated with customers who would "buy a Coke, open their laptop, and take up a large area of my couch - 10 square feet of my space - for a Coca-Cola for $1.50 for five hours." So he put up signs in his restroom advocating proper coffee-shop etiquette: Customers should order something every 60 to 80 minutes, share their tables and not bring in outside food. Tip No. 5 is "Think about leaving the coffee shop."
But frequent teleworker David James saw potential in Boccato's comfy couches. He and his business partner, Ramzy Azar, approached Velasco with an idea: Cowork Cafe, a members-only club that rents half of Boccato's seats on weekdays for workers who want to get out of the house. For $150 a month, members have access to special seating, a small conference room, printers and shredders, unlimited high-speed WiFi and a monthly account with the cafe, so they don't have to pull out their wallets every time they go up to the counter. The company launched in February and now has more than 30 members.
"We're trying to develop a business model where the interests" of the coffee-shop owner and the teleworker "are aligned," James said.
It's similar to co-working spots WeWork and Cove, but in the same comfortable environment that coffee-shop frequenters have grown accustomed to. And because Cowork Cafe pays rent for the space, guests don't have to play by Velasco's rules.
'A two-way street'
"The first couple of months was basically me spending all of my time apologizing to my regulars," Velasco said. "I got a lot of bad write-ups on Yelp, a lot of aggressive phone calls."
He understood his customers' frustrations, but he also hoped that they understood his.
"It's a two-way street," Velasco said. "They are in a public space, and it takes money to maintain the space. It's a mutual responsibility. You have to share, and spend money, to have the place open. You can't just sit there."
Power struggle
A common complaint from business owners is that campers act as if they own the place. According to University of North Carolina at Greensboro marketing professor Merlyn Griffiths, they think they do.
The feeling is that "as long as I have something that indicates that I've participated in an exchange" - coffee, or a muffin - "I have a right, quote unquote, to be here," says Griffiths, who has studied customer territorial behaviors in coffee shops. It creates a sense of "temporary psychological ownership."
And the result is a power struggle: Owners limit WiFi or ban laptops. Customers strike back with nastiness on social media. And now that you don't need a shop's WiFi, thanks to mobile hotspots, a storm is brewing, Griffiths says.
So as new cafes open, they're trying to predict the weather - and avoid the worst of it.
'Organic transition'
At the Royal, a newly opened space in Washington offering coffee and Latin American food, owner Paul Carlson offers free WiFi with a two-hour limit. As long as people are purchasing food, he's OK with letting them linger until about 4 p.m., when the cafe starts to transform into a bar. He won't kick anybody out, he says; he'll just send some subtle signals - turning up the music, dimming the lights - to say, time to pack up the laptops, folks.
"Hopefully that will just be an organic transition for our guests," he says.
Bluebird Bakery founders Tom Wellings and Camila Arango, meanwhile, have advertised their space on social media as worker-friendly - for now. They have lots of room in their wide-open second-floor pop-up in Prequel, a culinary incubator in downtown Washington. But when they move into their permanent bakery, which will be a fraction of the size, they'll tackle the topic of workers and campers as situations arise.
"We want people to feel comfortable, feel at home," Wellings said. Having people linger for a while in a shop, Arango said, can "give it life. It doesn't feel like an empty retail shop."
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07-13-2015, 11:04 AM #2
1st world problem.
Lots of other more important shit to worry about like drought, wildfires and christian fundamentalists writing letters to editors."timberridge is terminally vapid" -- a fortune cookie in Yueyang
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07-13-2015, 11:04 AM #3
What about people who go to a coffee shop to read, or to browse the internet without working? Are those folks in equal violation? For crying out loud, everywhere you go everyone is staring at their phones all the time, why ick on people who are working?
another Handsome Boy graduate
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07-13-2015, 11:10 AM #4
No, I'm not. I need peace and quiet to do my work and am generally not interested in being observed while I do so.
Merde De Glace On the Freak When Ski
>>>200 cm Black Bamboo Sidewalled DPS Lotus 120 : Best Skis Ever <<<
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07-13-2015, 11:15 AM #5
I haven't really been to a place where it's a REAL problem, but I have seen those campers and it is kind of obnoxious when they abuse the free wifi to a fault. I've known multiple people who were simply too cheap to have internet access at their house, so they would bum off of Starbucks like all day to work, hogging up an entire table.
It's one thing to get some work or studying done for a little while, but when you're camping out all day keeping customers from finding a place to sit in a crowded shop, then it's a problem. I'd venture to guess that those same people are lousy tippers too. They're kind of like hipsters who hang out at diners all damn night ordering just a cup of coffee to go with their American Spirit cigarettes, getting a thousand refills, and then leaving the poor waitress like a 10 cent tip because the coffee was only a buck.
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07-13-2015, 11:20 AM #6
we ran out of coffee yesterday so I ran to SB in town. I saw a guy I know that was just sitting there with his coffee reading. It's a pleasant enough pastime, but he has a beautiful house and I walked away wondering what he gets from being there. To each their own.
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07-13-2015, 11:23 AM #7
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07-13-2015, 11:31 AM #8
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07-13-2015, 11:32 AM #9
I work fully remote, I have gone to a coffeeshop to work one day, because the power was out at my home and I was unable to get online there (it was also a rather unique shop in SLC which has loads of space seemingly explicitly designed for remote workers, including conference rooms). I didn't really enjoy it, although it was nice having coffee.
But people who make a habit of this annoy the piss out of me. It's also a total poseur move, since the wifi in coffeeshops inevitably blows chunks, and you're really just there trying to seem more important than you really are. If you work from home and don't have a place to do your work at your home, you're an idiot. When you then clog up a business's usable space to solve your problem you're an idiot asshole.
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07-13-2015, 11:33 AM #10
When you surf porn on a wifi hotspot in a Starbucks, does it make it harder for Google to track?
"timberridge is terminally vapid" -- a fortune cookie in Yueyang
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07-13-2015, 11:35 AM #11
There was a guy who I used to see all the time at Borders with a computer,huge screen,and 2 backup hard drives who never bought anything.He took up a table for 4.Of course Borders is no more,but he is probably elsewhere.A well aimed coffee spill would be ......
“THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” HST
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07-13-2015, 11:37 AM #12
When I was a consultant, I was in a video conference meeting one time. 3 offices, 3 time zones, 2 countries. Daily hour-long meeting to discuss technical issues. One guy opens his tablet (it had the sort of magnetic cover which deactivates the screen) presumably to check his email or something and porn is BLASTING at max volume. He proceeds to freak out trying to shut it off, showing at least 8 or 9 people in-office his super close up penetration porn, while the other two offices (one of which was in another country, which probably violates some international decency law) got treated to the audio version.
It was probably the funniest moment of my employed life.
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07-13-2015, 11:40 AM #13Registered User
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I always cracked up at college kids who study in groups, not a productive way to study IMHO. They used to do it at the school library. Now it's pretty common at Starbucks, but in my town they all love to do it at Barnes & Noble. WTF???
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07-13-2015, 11:46 AM #14
A better solution, rather than hogging space in a business designed to sell its services or goods, is to get into a co-working space. We have a space at South Lake Union in Seattle for $45/mo. in the 'commons'. https://www.wework.com/locations/sea...uth-lake-union
Not only is it cheap space but you're surrounded by others with similar circumstances. Also, check out the amenities:
Weekly Events
Lounges
High Speed Internet
Community Managers
Free Beer
Unique Interior Design
Purified Water
Printing
Conference Rooms
Micro-Roasted Coffee
Onsite Parking Garage
Private Phone Booths
10+ Person Offices
Bike Storage
Dog Friendly
Event Space
If nothing else, you could drink your monthly charge and break even. It's really a pretty good way to go and get away from taking space where you're really not wanted.
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07-13-2015, 12:12 PM #15
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07-13-2015, 12:25 PM #16
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07-13-2015, 12:26 PM #17Registered User
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07-13-2015, 12:34 PM #18Registered User
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Well, even a whorehouse is smart enough to make you buy the whore a drink before you get to the dissecting stage!
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07-13-2015, 12:35 PM #19
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07-13-2015, 12:37 PM #20
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07-13-2015, 12:41 PM #21
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07-13-2015, 01:19 PM #22
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07-13-2015, 01:20 PM #23Well maybe I'm the faggot America
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda
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07-13-2015, 01:26 PM #24
A local coffee shop removed all the outlets in the public area limiting the camp time to one battery charge.
I guess these campers want to live where someone else is keeping the place clean.If you have a problem & think that someone else is going to solve it for you then you have two problems.
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07-14-2015, 08:01 AM #25
I usually plunk down my old typewriter and start writing letters to the editor. Clears the table pretty quick.
What if "Alternative" energy wasn't so alternative ?
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