[wirrbel]

It boils down to economics and custom.

A few years ago, travelling in the US we, a group of European exchange students) I remember well how we were after lunch or dinner almost thrown out of restaurants by servers (i.e. brought the bill without having asked for it, etc.). I remember it so well because it really felt rude to me (we were not really hanging around unduly and might at times have ordered a round of deserts with a small break after the meal which the business then lost but that is another story).

Of course from a business perspective its better to get 3 parties to have lunch on a table than 2, and esp. in the US with the enormous tips (and lowered minimum wage) for servers, there are strong incentives for that kind of behaviour. Ultimately landlords/markets also factor this in when setting rent prices for restaurant spaces.

So to come back to the Kaffeehause-style establishments I always wonder how they were economically viable back then. Probably a combination of cheap labor, people spending quite a lot potentially in the Kaffeehaus [studying math, I guess they just rented a room (potentially not even heated) and not an apartment, then socialised outside or in cafes].

I think to pull off a Kaffeehaus for hanging out today it would probably work out more in a 'Club' model where you pay a membership fee which allows for stable operation.

[marton78]

There's many things that seen to have been economically viable a hundred years ago, which would seem crazy today. For example, houses with 4m high roofs, thick, stable walls and stucco.

Or maybe it was economically just as little viable as it is today, but people just didn't think that much about economical viability back in the old days?

[wirrbel]

My grandmother grew up in a hut, every weekend it would be swept out with fresh sand, because it had a stomped mud floor. This was in Germany. Pretty sure the local gentry had these stucco ceilings, but not everyone.

Pretty sure a lot of what was done wasn't done with as tight calculations as it is done today. On the other hand, the markets weren't as unforgiven as today so it might have been easier to turn an investment into a profit.

It would be interesting to see the bookwork (if it even existed in the first place) of the Scottish Café, with supplemental informations by economists / historians putting it into perspective