Sitting in Coffee shops
That may not sound an interesting title but wait.
I work in catering in a department store. In out coffee shop we have people who buy one coffee and sit all day at their computer. Some get a glass of water and sit for 2 Hours (we will never refuse a customer a glass of water). Meanwhile customers coming in are waiting for seats. In the current climate businesses need all the sales they can get and restrictions mean that there is less seating so we can take fewer customers anyway. Of course this happens in all coffee shops.
Thanks for buying the coffee but get your backside out of that seat.
I work in catering in a department store. In out coffee shop we have people who buy one coffee and sit all day at their computer. Some get a glass of water and sit for 2 Hours (we will never refuse a customer a glass of water). Meanwhile customers coming in are waiting for seats. In the current climate businesses need all the sales they can get and restrictions mean that there is less seating so we can take fewer customers anyway. Of course this happens in all coffee shops.
Thanks for buying the coffee but get your backside out of that seat.

Comments
Sorry you're dealing with that. Here, many people hang out in Starbuck's, etc., that way, and have since long before Covid. Does your coffee shop offer free wi-fi to customers? If so, that might be one reason the customers hang around.
Ohhh to sit in a coffee shop with good friends. Ours have been closed for months and months 😢
Exactly. This is not news. They were doing it in Vienna well over 100 years ago.
But here you are with your new-fangled ideas about how people ought to do nothing more in a coffee house than drink a coffee.
Or set up a model like Ziferblat, where you aren't charged for what you consume, but for the length of time you spend there.
Once I was waiting for a bus on a very hot day. As I was feeling peaked, I sat down at an outdoor table at a coffee shop near the bus stop. There were no other customers in sight. Someone came out and asked me to leave. "But there are no other customers here" I protested. To no avail. I was tempted to add, "Oh, I didn't realize there was such a swarm of customers waiting for this table. I can't seem to shoo them away no matter how vigorously I wave my arms" but I just got up and left.
Needless to say, I never patronized that coffee shop in the future.
Seems to work - our local ones are staying open and staying busy.
I'm detecting a recurring sense in Hugal's threads that Hugal has a firm belief in Hugal's ability to run the world far better than anyone that Hugal has ever worked for.
I recognise myself in this post. I don't think I'm alone, either.
Likewise. Though in fairness I recognise that there are management tasks I wouldn't be good at. It's just that my response to that is to not seek management roles, and I rather wish those who currently occupy them had the same level of self-awareness.
Then you are not correct. I have been with the company I work for for twenty years so I do have trust in it.
Next I said it was not just where I work.
The situation. Is more complicated than you would think.
There is no company policy in this. I wish there was.
Hell is for rants. I ranted.
One of the joys of pre-pandemic life for me was not only meeting friends in coffee shops but taking my journal and books and sitting in one for the morning (no wifi required or even desired). I'd choose one of our local establishments, though - definitely not a department store cafe. During the course of the morning I'd buy a couple of coffees and if I wasn't going to stay for lunch I'd make sure I left once the lunchtime queues started.
In fairness, Hugal hasn't criticised management, it's people like me who've been saying 'Why doesn't management just do xyz?' as though xyz would be a dead easy thing to implement.
And it's a department store? You work in John Lewis, and I claim my £5
(Hey, if I'm right, _you_ own the place. Not that it's going to do you much good this year. My (genuine) commiserations about that, but at least you're not in Debenhams. Though thinking that through, maybe you could all borrow a shit load of money on the basis of that ownership, pay yourself a massive dividend, and then sell the company on to some other poor shmuck who would also somehow be responsible for that loan you took out. In fact, I'm off to remortgage my house, and then sell it to someone who will buy it on the basis that it (the house) owes someone a load of money, while I retire to the Canaries! How cool will that be!)
A friend of mine lived in Vienna for a year in the early 1990s and would occasionally sit for an afternoon in a coffee shop. But “occasionally” was the operative word because they would charge something like $4 for a cup of coffee (about $8 in 2020 dollars).
I admit to finding Starbucks frustrating sometimes because there are times when I really need a sandwich or a snack and a coffee and a place to sit down for about 20 minutes, and there is not a table to be found because it looks like people have been sitting with their laptops nursing a single coffee for hours. Their business, and their business model, but I still find it frustrating...
I might, in that situation, add something like 'I'm not feeling too well, and if I don't sit down, I'm going to be SICK...'
As you say, chatting to them can be quite a revealing, and rewarding, experience, for them as well, one hopes.
It was well-known that I am a lay minister at the nearby Parish Church, so the conversation sometimes took interesting theological turns!
You may say that I couldn’t possibly comment.
Sort of like church, eh?
In some ways, yes, though in a church, it's more likely that there would be more general awareness of these people among the other people who use the church. And in a church, often more priority is given to the people of a higher social standing, while the oddballs, while tolerated, are more pushed aside and treated as second class citizens. So a coffee shop may be a more of a welcoming place for the oddballs than a church is.
I am extremely familiar with what Starbucks has to offer, all over urban and suburban Ontario and at various times of day, and frankly this description strikes me as absolutely surreal. Perhaps Starbucks is a different experience in your part of the world. I go to Starbucks because I like their food, coffee, and decor better than some places (in Canada, start with Tim Hortons) where you might encounter a wider cross-section of society. At least I do not delude myself into thinking I'm a virtuous person for doing so.
As as an aside, I think Starbucks' marketing as a community space is often quite at variance with the reality - most of their locations offer relatively little seating space, compared to their competitors, and I suspect that most of their profitability comes from their takeout (and now increasingly drive-through) business. They are very successful at creating an image based basically on having nice decor and few arm chairs in a corner somewhere that you're extremely unlikely to actually be able to occupy unless you arrive at exactly the right time. Again, I'm a faithful customer, and I'm not complaining, but let's not get carried away.
I *think* we have had a pretty good post-lockdown bounce in the retail sector. Our support schemes have meant that people have money to spend, and this is the spending time of the year for us, it being warm and Christmas. I am hopeful that economies around the world will respond as well as ours as the crisis moves into its next phase. That is a prayer, by the way.
Hugal, do you have people who stick around for ages but guiltily buy extra coffee or cake at regular intervals?
That might work in a place where there weren't any free coffee refills. I presume Starbuck's doesn't give them, unless maybe for basic, regular coffee. But some cafes do.
OTOH, a polite "May I get you anything else?" might be enough of a nudge to briefly break their concentration, realize how long they've been there, and figure out whether they can afford a pastry or another drink, or whether it's time to go.
FWIW.
Though, now I think of it, when I went to coffee shops in Canada (around 25 years ago, so might be different now), there were quite different, more impersonal, not so much of the relaxed, cosy, stay-a-while sense that you can get here. However, in Canada, coffee shops opened much later, and you'd get groups of people going late in the evening for an hour or two, kind of like how people go to pubs here. The way I use coffee shops in the UK is very different from how I used them in Canada.
And, FWIW, the various Starbucks I have been to here in the UK have tended to have more space and sofa areas than their competitors. It's not part of any marketing I've seen - that is simply my lived experience of going to coffee shops. They often have an upstairs space full of soft seating. So the fact that this isn't your experience in Ontario doesn't mean I'm getting 'carried away' when I describe my experience in various locations in the London/Surrey area and the South West of England. I'm not someone with a tendency to get carried away.
I think their use (as opposed to marketing) as a community space is often demand rather than necessarily supply driven, simply because the alternatives no longer exist or have also been commercialised.
OTOH despite London's reputation for high commercial rents, there are quite a number of Starbucks in the centre which seem either absurdly large, or are have a first floor where students camp for much of the day.
It's a choice for the coffee shop, isn't it? Their ideal world is to be run off their feet with customers that nip in, down an expensive coffee, and run away, preferably with an overpriced gift tin of fudge or a mug with a reindeer on it or something.
Actual people don't work like that. So your cafe setting its policy for laptop campers has to find a balance between keeping those people there (they tend to spend consistently, if not at a high rate per table-hour they occupy) and evicting them to make space for more valuable customers at peak hours.
(Although if I want to sit somewhere with a laptop, I'll go to the library, which is quieter, and doesn't have anyone trying to sell me pastries my waistline really doesn't need.)
(I think there's also a sense that a department store cafe doesn't feel so much like a real cafe, where people might feel guiltier taking up space, but more like a place for customers to have a sit down and refresh themselves for another couple of hours looking at crystal bowls and curtain fabric, so perhaps people feel less guilty taking advantage.)
I don't know where Hugal is from, but in the U.S. wait staff get a significant part of their wages from tips. The management does not pay them a living wage. So, at least here, it is not just of managerial import.
I'm not going to try to do a class analysis of who goes to Starbucks, though it does strike me as on average a more middle-class kind of place than the ubiqitous Tim Hortons (where incidentally I've never had trouble finding a seat). I do find the idea that someone with $10 to spend on lunch and 20 minutes to eat it in is somehow a priviliged person who doesn't understand coffee shop culture more than a little surreal.