Table Disservice (e.g., banning iPads and Kindles in coffee shops?)

No Kindles in cafes? You’ve got to be kidding. This is an affront, not only to readers and gadget lovers, but also to the spirit of cafes!

Many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, too many coffee shops in town have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Sure, that phenomenon can be depressing — whether you’re a scornful lady who lunches or the nomadic freelancer who fields glares. And full-dress computers are perhaps too much personal furniture for cafes to accommodate. But banning devices the size of books, like Kindles and iPads, is going too far, and it’s anathema to the character and history of cafes.

As martin noted, there are places which offer time-limited web access for a modest cost. There are also places like the burger chains which do that, or offer it for free, with cheaper coffee and a full menu. It’s not as if anyone (in, say, France, in an open-air café) never spent the morning reading their entire newspaper while nursing a single cup of coffee. Or in a diner where their single cup of coffee was freshened up by a helpful waitress.

The real thing at work here is that there are alternatives now which didn’t exist before, and it’s become more difficult to sell a $4 cup of coffee and $3 bagel. Throw in gratis web access (which plenty of these java places do) and fairly small numbers of tables, and it’s obvious that, since their floor space hasn’t changed, and their prices have gone up, that their margins have declined due to rising costs, and cutting free web access — which is their prerogative — is the one place they can easily cut their costs. It also helps (they think) with turnover.

What they’re about to find out is, there won’t be any more customers than before, and in fact there will be fewer.

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