The coffee shop environment has become a place in between home and the office – somewhere you can bring your laptop, post up for a couple of hours, and crank out some work or send some emails that just weren’t going to get done in any other setting. All while enjoying your favorite coffee.
If a coffee shop doesn’t offer WiFi, or has a paywall, our general response is annoyance. After all, the reason you’re willing to shell out $4 for a latte is so you can set up shop for a few hours and knock out some work on your computer.
But have we become spoiled by Starbucks culture into expecting too much from our local joe joint? Should we really be leaving the laptops behind and enjoying a quality cup of coffee and some old fashioned face-to-face interaction?
NPR recently published a story about August First Bakery, a Burlington, Vermont coffee shop that not only no longer offers WiFi, but has banned laptops altogether, and doing so has apparently boosted their sales.
It isn’t just this Vermont shop that has chosen to go WiFi free. Several Boston-area coffee shops have opted to either not offer WiFi or to offer it at a premium.
The Thinking Cup, with locations in the North End and the Boston Common, has never offered WifI to its customers. But a lack of connection has not hindered business at all for this popular and growing Boston shop.
In an e-mail, Thinking Cup owner Hugh Geiger elaborated on his decision to keep the coffee shop without WiFi. Geiger wrote that a desire to foster the traditional coffee shop atmosphere was the inspiration for creating an unplugged store.
“We wanted to avoid an ‘internet cafe’ scene but instead encourage conversation and just some old fashion newspaper and book reading,” Geiger wrote.
Geiger also added that part of enjoying comfortable seating and a relaxing atmosphere means that there has to be a reasonable turnover of tables. As anyone who has visited a Starbucks during prime work hours knows, fast turnover is hard to facilitate when every customer is looking for a place to plug in and settle down for a few hours.
Geiger stated that the WiFi-free atmosphere has had an overwhelmingly positive response. “We never intended to make a statement against ‘WiFi Squatters,’ but this was merely an unforeseen result,” he wrote.
Pavement, another popular Boston coffee chain does offer WiFi to customers – but only one hour of it, after which a paywall prevents people from unlimited internet mooching. The shop offers payment plans for a day, week or even whole month if customers desire unlimited internet access.
“We charge because we are providing not just WiFi but the environment of our cafe and a table,” wrote Andrew LoPilato, Director of Operations at Pavement, in an email. “We don’t want to police our customers or fore anyone to buy another drink just because they’ve been working for a while. So the paywall results in customers being a little more productive with their time,” he added.
Pavement implemented the paywall in September, and the results have been positive for the business and the environment, wrote LoPilato.
Charging has caused tables to turn over a little faster, and added revenue from the paywall helps to cover the cost of supporting WiFi at Pavement. And an added bonus is a more stable signal, since less laptops are trying to connect, Lo Pilato wrote.
The decision these successful Boston coffee shops have made, to not to offer unlimited wireless access, has garnered positive results for business. But what about us discerning coffee shop customers?
Well, if you’re looking for that perfect out-of-home, out-of-the-office work environment, take comfort in knowing that you can probably sit for hours at a Starbucks. But if you are looking for quality local products and some stimulating conversation, local coffee shops may provide a better environment.
Besides, unplugging for a little bit and enjoying some quality time with some quality coffee may be exactly what you need.
Image via cafeapostrophe.tumblr.com
