Everyone’s realizing that happy hour drinks are a lot more enjoyable without the threat of Slack notifications.
Driving the news: With people increasingly craving time away from their devices, a slew of new phone-free restaurants, bars and cafes are popping up, promising patrons a few hours without any electronic distractions.
According to Axios, these phone-less bars and restaurants are now in at least 11 U.S. states., including five in Washington D.C., alone. There’s even a Chick-Fil-A that gives free ice cream to families who don’t use their phones at the table.
A number of Canadian cafes have either banned devices altogether or limited the hours when they can be used in an effort to bring back a more social environment.
Why it matters: Canadians spend an average of over six hours on their devices daily. After finally shutting their laptops at the end of the work day, people are starting to seek out more experiences, hobbies, and shared spaces that allow them to unplug.
Offline social events are now drawing crowds of thousands in cities across the world, while so-called analog activities like knitting, reading magazines, and listening to records are seeing a resurgence, particularly with young people.
Yes, but: Enforcing no-device policies at bars and cafes can be risky business. Antoine Vautherot, the manager of several 10Dean cafe locations in Toronto, told The Peak, “We tried to cut off laptops entirely when we opened our new location, but we couldn’t sustain it. We lost all our revenue because we kicked out laptops.”
Our take: It may not be realistic to completely decouple from our devices these days, but spending time away from them (especially in cool spaces that encourage us to do so) will increasingly become a luxury that people will seek out.—LA
