At least in Europe, success rate is 10-20%. If you spend money, and we're talking 1-3€/hour, it reaches 80%-100%.

Public, municipality-sponsored Wi-Fi is usually a joke (slow, non functioning, requiring you to like a certain facebook page or follow a twitter account, etc.)

In Greece I suggest trying the business' phone number, you can find it on discarded receipts on the ground or on tables.

It's always worth it to try and snoop the password hanging by the counter.

Other good combos are companynamewifi, wirelesscompanyname, wireless, internet, internet123.

t. scrooge that never wastes money on mobile internet subscription and survives on leeched public Wi-Fi

During my university years, back when having a mobile Internet (or even a functioning smartphone) was somewhat uncommon, I've managed to set up quite a collection of such Wi-Fi access points :). I'd casually ask people I spent time with for Wi-Fi access when opportunity arised (I didn't have to invent a reason, there eventually always was a good one). Student life being what it is, I was often out and about at weird hours - so it sometimes happened that on the way from one place to another, I would detour to park my bike in front of some colleague's block of flats, and use their Wi-Fi to sync my e-mails and conversations.

your sophisticated technique assumes social skills!

Ah, social engineering, the most elusive tech skill of all!

Social engineering is also engineering. Can be very interesting to experiment, reverse-engineer, and develop. I do not believe that devs lack social skills, it’s just an area of engineering that we haven’t touched properly yet.

Also when I see NLP, my first thought is Neuro-Linguistic Programming (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming) , not Natural Language Processing.

The North Wind and the Sun had a quarrel about which of them was the stronger...

Social engineering, huh? Reminds me of the xkcd cartoon with a $5 wrench https://xkcd.com/538/