Coffee shops pull the plug on laptop users

By The Wall Street Journal

A sign at Naidre's, a small neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., begins warmly: "Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day . . ."

But, it continues, "people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit." At Naidre's in Park Slope and its second location in nearby Carroll Gardens, Wi-Fi is free. But since the spring of 2008, no laptops have been allowed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekends, unless the customer is eating and typing at the same time.

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading.

In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

"You don't want to discourage it; it's a wonderful tradition," says Naidre's owner, Janice Pullicino, 53. A former partner in a computer-graphics business, Pullicino insists she loves technology and hates to limit its use. But when she realized that people with laptops were taking up seats and driving away the more lucrative lunch crowd, she put up the sign. Last fall, she covered up some of the outlets, describing that as a "cost-cutting measure" to save electricity.

So far, this appears to be largely a New York phenomenon, though San Francisco's Coffee Bar now puts out signs when the shop is crowded asking laptop users to share tables and make space for other customers.

Some coffee shops say they still welcome laptop users, if only because they make the stores look busy.

For some, the growing number of laptop-carrying customers with time on their hands is reason to expand. "I had to add more outlets and higher speed" in early June, says Sebastian Simsch, 40, a co-owner of Seattle Coffee Works.

Starbucks (SBUX, news, msgs) coffeehouses, which in some cases charge for Wi-Fi, and bookstore chain Borders Group (BGP, news, msgs), which always charges for Wi-Fi, don't have any plans to change their treatment of laptop customers. Neither does bookstore giant Barnes & Noble (BKS, news, msgs), where the Wi-Fi is complimentary.

But in New York, the trend is accelerating among independents. At Cocoa Bar locations in Brooklyn and on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a 5-month-old rule forbids laptops after 8 on Friday and Saturday nights. At Espresso 77 in Jackson Heights, Queens, owners covered three of five electric outlets six months ago after its loosely enforced laptop use restrictions failed to encourage turnover. At two of three Cafe Grumpy locations -- one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood -- laptops are never welcome.

Continued: 'What's the guy with the laptop doing here?'

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