In the freelance economy, cafés double as offices.
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For those who use coffee shops as a workspace, this a beautiful arrangement. These spots are a casual, boss-free environment where you can rent office space for the price of a cup of coffee and a danish. But for some cafés, this relationship is too one-sided.
Those coffee bars say no to laptops, an essential tool of any freelancer.
And if they’re not banning laptops outright, they’re disconnecting the WiFi, removing electrical outlets and swapping tables for standing-room-only coffee bars – banning laptops indirectly.
Snakes & Lattes, a board-game-themed café that opened this week on Bloor West, follows this trend. It discourages the uses of laptops. There’s no WiFi. Tables aren’t set up for computers.
It’s Toronto’s first anti-laptop café.
The goal here is get patrons to play one of the 1,500 or so board games. “I just don’t want people sitting staring at their screens,” owner Ben Castanie told Torontoist earlier this week.
That, not coincidentally, is how the lose-the-laptop movement started.
Coffee houses were the very first to embrace WiFi. The first WiFi internet café sprouted in San Francisco in 2000 when a neighbour beamed a wireless signal into the Martha & Bros. Coffee Company.
From there it took off, and coffee joints became places to set up portable offices. Some shops password-protect their signals or offer limited-time connections, but most are liberal with their WiFi. One jerk famously brought his entire desktop into a Borders in New York City in 2009 to mooch off its free internet.
Now it seems cafés are striking back. In 2005, Seattle’s Victrola Coffee & Art kick-started the trend by disconnecting its WiFi. Owners complained that patrons had stopped talking to each other.
In Oakland, a place called the Actual Cafe cut off the WiFi because the space had become a roomful of laptops instead of a community gathering spot. Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco went so far as to remove all electrical outlets and, adding insult to injury, put in at least one decoy outlet.
In Café Grumpy in Brooklyn, customers draped extension cords across the room. The owners responded by removing tables and seats in favour of bars, making it impossible for laptops to be used in their establishments.
Laptop bans seem like an appropriate reaction to the obnoxious, always-on, lingering-about population who treat cafés like cubicles. But cafés that choose to pick fights with these people will lose out eventually as society shifts en masse to smartphones and tablets.
Still laptop-free zones have their appeal. There’s a niche market of coffee drinkers who don’t want their cafés to be office-like, and for them, places like Snakes & Lattes are a refuge.
joshuae@nowtoronto.com
