Comment by iancmceachern
7 months ago
IMO this is the kind of tech we should be avoiding.
Let's follow the money.
The sales generated for this thing come from somewhere. The idea is the coffee shops make more by forcing "squatters" to order one drink an hour or whatever. That additional money, a portion of it, goes to pay for this app that enforces it.
I think that money is better spent making the coffee better, paying the baristas better, and maybe even allowing customers to "squat".
Extracting money out of everyday life to make our world less friendly and more expensive.
> Extracting money out of everyday life to make our world less friendly and more expensive.
Ever done the napkin maths for a coffee shop? It's not good. Especially with the way rents have been going...
In Canada a ton of Starbucks locations have closed. Other brands too.
You need to sell a ton of $5 coffees to pay rent, nevermind anything else... This idea that businesses are a common good and business owners should feel bad for not being destitute is why fewer people are opening them (at least here, in Canada).
There are close to 10 cafes within 2 blocks of here. They all charge more than $5 for a cup, sell many other items like food, and are doing very well.
The way to handle the problem you describe is to be thoughtful about the prices you charge.
If it costs you X amount to be profitable, you should be charging Y for your coffee. Not coming up with a cattle prod to sell 2 more cups an hour.
This seems like exactly a win win for cafes and for people that want to easily find a place to work remotely. Who loses out here otherwise?
> Extracting money out of everyday life to make our world less friendly and more expensive.
Isn't this what people are doing if they take up a seat in a cafe without buying things? They're making it so the cafe has to charge more to actual customers to survive.
Something that cafe "squatters" don't like to see: they're using a coffee shop as a shared office space, but gratis. The coffee owners tolerate this in exchange for sales, but the most egregious squatters will buy a coffee and let it sit for hours, and maybe go eat somewhere else when they get hungry.
Maybe a simpler solution is what I've seen some coffee shops discretely implement: chairs that are uncomfortable to sit for hours.
It really depends if it’s “rent seeking” - getting money from people occupying seats that would normally be empty (no revenue loss) or if it’s encouraging people to “pay what’s being lost” - the laptop campers are using seats that are causing other people to NOT buy coffee.
If it’s the latter, it’s not really rent seeking as much as trying to enforce an existing social contract.
I've never mot bought a coffee somewhere because there were people using a laptop. If the seats are full I still buy my coffee and go sit on a bench nearby.
It's not cut and dry, someone using a laptop doesn't reduce the spending of others. It's not a formal restaurant where you need the table to make the sale.
In theory we should "cut intermediates" indeed, but if you read the article, she explains her product: a way to avoid confrontational conversations in coffee-shops, all while ensuring people who are staying a long time are not blocking a table without ordering. This is "orthogonal" to improving the coffee.
If anything this should "displace" (obviously it won't) some of the salary of waiters, who were before tasked to go yell at people with laptops, and now no longer need to do it. So it shouldn't theoretically take from the "money" for better coffee, but rather smooth out the atmosphere in the coffee shops
I get it, I just don't agree.
I would say we should just have the uncomfortable interaction.
Why do we need to pay to make our world less interpersonal?
In my opinion it's already quite unfriendly to have an unpaying customer wasting limited time in your café.
This solution by itself would function like this, but you are leaving out a crucial point that it also doubles as a hub to advertise your café as a place that will welcome you as long as you pay.
The client can know beforehand which cafés are ok with you using it as a cowork space, and cafés make sure they don't have dead space, which in many parts of the world is very expensive.
Those who disagree with the system can always default to just paying for an actual coworking space.
I have the opposite experience.
I am friends with the Cafe owner on my street.
He has a ton of regulars that hang out there all the time, myself included. I spend a lot there, so do they. Often times they are having their real estate sales meetings there, startup discussions, etc (you know, doing business).
They all, including me, known the owner well, we are friends.
Something like this would completely ruin that dynamic. It would push away the customers like me and the others I described that regularly spend a lot there in favor of getting $5 from the "randos".