'We don't want to be an office:' Café owners are pulling the plug on WiFi
When HotBlack Coffee opened in downtown Toronto a year ago, it took a risk few businesses would dare take in today's online-driven world: it turned off the WiFi.
"Every day people come in and ask for it," says Jimson Bienenstock, the café's co-owner.
Still, he hasn't wavered.
"In the short term, it hurt us," Mr. Bienenstock says. "It took us longer to become established, but once we reached critical mass, it has become a self-fulfilling virtuous circle."
While most cafés offer free WiFi, including large chains such as Starbucks, McDonald's and Tim Hortons, HotBlack is among a small but growing number of independent coffee shops choosing to ditch or limit Internet use. By not offering WiFi, they're hoping to create more of a community atmosphere where people talk to each other instead of silently typing on their computers.
If coffeeshops come to discourage people working, perhaps that activity can shift to libraries.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 02 2017, @02:18PM
About he only time I've seen it work at all was in a semi-private computer lab reserved for upper-classmen in a small CS department.
I suspect there is a class issue to it. In residential neighborhoods you can pretty accurately estimate crime and income stats based one the amount of litter blowing around. In the olden days reading books probably skewed higher IQ so the disciplined cleanliness traits would have kept a food+drink library pretty safe, but "free internet (pr0n) " is going to skew toward the kind of people that have litter tumbleweeds blowing down their street