Re:Oakland Cafe Owner's Banning Laptop Experiment
by andyking on Thursday February 25, 2010 @06:50AM
(#1150479)
I was wondering about this myself when I read the article. I live in the UK and while you very occasionally see the odd person sitting in the corner of a cafe on a laptop, it's nowhere near as common as it seems to be in the US.
It's certainly pretty much exclusively a city thing - I know what short shrift I'd get if I walked into a cafe in my rural town, bought a £1.50 cup of coffee and whipped out my laptop to spend a couple of hours working. (The lack of wi-fi isn't an issue - people here heavily use those little 3G USB "dongles".) I really couldn't say why there's such a marked difference, though.
Slightly bizarrely, last time I went in a McDonald's in some grim Manchester suburb they had large signs advertising free wi-fi. Don't we study and work hard so we get to work in places that aren't McDonald's?
A lot of European establishments I know have decided to never join the wifi movement. And even if many cafes now offer wifi it's very hard to spot people actually sitting with their laptops. Why would you want to, there are so many other things you can do in a cafe. Read, think, draw or just plain talk to the people in your party.