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I don't know - my personal solution to this problem is one of reciprocity and mutuality in my business etiquette. If I'm going to spend all day working at a coffee shop, I'm going to buy a fair bit of stuff, too. Not all at once, of course, but in some sort of steady trickle. The impact this has on nutrition and caloric intake is left as an exercise to the student. It's not that I'm rich; quite the contrary, actually. But I understand that a coffee shop needs to be able to justify the opportunity cost of giving up a table, let alone the sort of comfortable table at which I often like to work. I think what the coffee shop owners and employees like to see isn't me paying their wages; I can't afford to buy a latte every hour either financially or biologically. But what I can do is buy a latte when I come in, and maybe a few refills of drip coffee throughout the day, maybe a bagel and whatnot for lunch (money that would otherwise be spent anyway if I'm not near home). Oh, yes, and I tip pretty generously throughout it all, which keeps the employees that might otherwise look askance content--although, of course, that is not the only reason I do it. I frequent a variety of local coffee shops with a range of attitudes toward laptop campers, although all of them tolerate laptop users, just some more begrudgingly than others. And yet, I'm one of their favourite customers, it seems, because I at least try to make it worthwhile for the shop to have me around, too. Of course, my story here may not be universally applicable; I spend half my time in a college town, where people who colonise to study or work on a computer all day are universal and if you locked them out you'd simply alienate 90% of your customer base. (Here's a hint: Don't open a coffee shop in a college town, or you will constantly struggle with this problem; there's just not a lot of table turnover, but you can't really tell them to move along when the sort of customer they are is a majority constituency.) The other half is spent in Atlanta, equidistantly from two fairly major state universities. That imparts a vaguely similar quality upon the whole thing, and the local coffee shops are also unusually, uh, 'progressive' in Midtown. |