What's the protocol for loitering at your local coffee house?
Is it acceptable to set up shop as soon as the doors open, snaring a table next to a valuable power outlet, then sit there all day, typing away on your laptop? Or are you just being a jerk?
"But I'm a customer! See my cup? So what if it was a $1.50 cup of coffee and I've been getting free refills every hour since then. HELLO?! CUSTOMER?! We're always right, remember?"
What if you buy a sandwich at lunchtime, and a pastry or three throughout the day when your blood sugar drops? Is that okay, then?
So the wife & I stopped by one of our local Starbucks last week. There's a couple in the neighborhood but this particular one is close to home, and it's on a fairly major road which gets very little foot traffic so for some reason I don't think of it as being very busy, yet it is. It's also kind of small, as far as Starbucks go, with about half a dozen tables w/ chairs, so it doesn't need to be busy to look busy. When we walked in and looked around for a table we quickly realized we'd be getting our coffees 'to go'. Every table was occupied and almost all of them had a laptop sitting on them. Even the obligatory table w/ two armchairs had a laptop on it.
It reminded me an Improv Everywhere stunt at a New York Starbucks where they had several agents each bring in and set up a desktop PC. The thing about IE's stunt which I found most intriguing was despite Starbucks never having provided PCs for their customers (at least not to my knowledge) some customers assumed the PCs were there for their use.
We naturally assume an unattended laptop is someone's private machine, but an unattended desktop PC? That's fair game, right?
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2 comments:
This is a point of etiquette I never quite figured out myself even long before the ubiquity of laptops / tablet computers. Some folks could sit and read a book all day on one cup of coffee.
I always get very uncomfortable in a cafe myself if I have nothing to eat or drink in front of me. Mind you I have been known to leave the last drop in my cup for quite some time daring anyone to clean it up until I finish what ever I am working on.
Funny you should write about this. I go to starbucks once a Wk. I would never sit in there to write or read . Too freakin noisy. I think it's more of a social thing.
I could be wrong. But when I'm on the computer I like total silence
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