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'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 Grishnakh on Tuesday May 02 2017, @03:41PM (1 child)
I would imagine most people that want to go to a cafe and work online would simply go to a different cafe, leaving this one to cater to the people who *don't* want that. There was a time when coffee shops were centers of community and conversation...
When exactly was that? By my recollection, coffee shops as we know them now simply did not exist in most of the USA until about 15 years ago, and basically started (probably before that time) in the Pacific Northwest cities of Portland and Seattle. Several decades ago, there was no such thing as a "coffee shop"; people went to a diner for coffee, or they made Folgers at work.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday May 02 2017, @04:29PM
From the mid 1600s through the early 1800s, though their social functions were gradually taken over by taverns, which tended to be more egalitarian (as well as far more common). After that, coffee houses were generally found in larger cities or places with large amounts of immigrants from countries with a strong coffee culture. They became fashionable again during the folk music revival in the 1960s, but generally only in the "hip" areas of cities or on college campuses. Elsewhere, as Grishnakh says, coffee houses were relatively uncommon until Starbucks.
Throughout all this time, however, coffeehouses have been places where deals were made, books were read and politics (and everything else) were discussed, at least until free wi-fi became ubiquitous and coffee shops became mobile workplaces.