Restaurants have long had to deal with customers who order little food and then “camp out” at a table for hours. Table turnover is crucial to eatery profitability, and the price of a cup of coffee and a pastry is not enough “table rent” to pay the building’s rent.
But in the past few years, walk past any coffee shop and you’ll see something that looks like a throwback to the 1990s internet cafe. In the days before home Internet service was common, many people visited these spots to rent time on computers to surf the internet for business or pleasure. Today, the windows of many coffee shops in quaint towns feature a row of workers tapping away at the countertops facing picture windows.
But some coffee house owners say the problem has gotten so bad that they’re having to ban customers from bringing laptop computers during certain hours. Why? They say that since the pandemic, the number of remote workers who order a coffee and then use a table as an office-on-go has skyrocketed. Some cafe owners also say that the number of customers treating a coffee shop as a working office changes the atmosphere, making it less pleasant for other patrons, including those who might spend more money than the tech worker who nurses a single espresso for two hours.
In the UK, a coffee shop named The Collective, located in Caversham, has banned the use of laptops during the lunch rush on weekdays, and won’t let anyone bring them in at all on the weekends. Similarly, the Milk and Bean in Newbury has limited laptop use to an hour on weekdays and none at all on weekends.
Milk and Bean owner Chris Chaplin said the atmosphere created by a bunch of people pecking away for hours at a keyboard “isn’t really ideal.” It means slower turnover of the tables, and such patrons usually spend very little on food and drink compared to customers who are there to enjoy a bite instead of completing their workdays.
Over at The Collective, manager Alex Middleton said the business was trying to balance customer preference with the fact that laptop-table hogs cost them a lot of money. They don’t want to “disrespect” working customers, he said, but the fact is that the laptop set simply doesn’t buy enough for the cafe to pay its bills.
Most people understand the policy, he said, although a few customers “get antsy about it.”
