Coffee shops used to be full of conversation, chill music, and the smell of fresh espresso. Nowadays, they’re mostly people hunched over laptops saying, “Nothing on my end.”
Driving the news: Cafes across Canada are struggling with remote workers settling in all day at a table while only making one small purchase. Antoine Vautherot, the manager of several 10Dean cafe locations in Toronto, told The Peak that they have had to implement a requirement for customers to buy something every two hours to keep a table.
Vautherot says that since the pandemic, his spaces have become an ocean of laptops, with people coming in to work for as long as possible, looking to spend as little as possible.
“We tried to cut off laptops entirely when we opened our new location, but we couldn’t sustain it,” he said. “We lost all our revenue because we kicked out laptops.”
Zoom in: With average customers making $5 to $10 purchases, cafes rely on turning over tables as often as possible — even more so than restaurants. For that reason, cafe owners have been trying all kinds of strategies to stop serial table hoggers.
Some have tried to designate certain tables just for remote workers, while others have even started charging hourly rates. According to a Square survey, only 12% of Canadians say they would pay a cafe an hourly fee to work or study there.
Why it matters: The remote work boom has created a delicate balancing act for cafe owners. They can’t afford to alienate all of the laptop people, but they also run the risk of neglecting regulars who can no longer get a seat and complain that their favourite cafe has turned into a WeWork.—LA