Turn Off the Cafe Wi-fi

Hipsters and Sponges Ruining a Cafe

Northampton, Massachusetts is one of New England's great coffee towns. Within the three-square-block section of the downtown there are at least 28 places to sit down or carry away a really good cup of Joe. Four miles away, the center of Florence has just a handful of stores, but coffee is on offer at 9 of them.

I'm fortunate that Northampton has a café culture, as there are several places I choose not to sip. I won't name them, but one is in the middle of Main Street and the other is on Pleasant Street. Their brews are terrific, but their business plans irk me. They offer free Wi-Fi.

Yeah, I know. We live in a connected world. Me too.  I have no gripe about that. I do, however, have issues with turning cafés into repositories for the tragically hip and the cheap-as-hell crowd. The dominant décor of the two places I avoid is one table, one laptop, one screen-stupefied typist, one cup of coffee last lifted to lips an hour ago, and a muffin that a sparrow could decimate more rapidly. Add a dash of incivility and it's-all-about-me narcissism, and you've got the picture.

Café laptops have replaced bowling alone as a symbol of our atomized society. A good café is the modern agora—a public meeting place where friends and strangers interact. See the same strangers enough times, conversation happens, and strangers become new friends. My favorite café, Woodstar, is precisely such a place. It's a mini Grand Central of people filing in and out. Those who score a table are seldom alone for long and, if you think the yakers are clogging the capitalist machine, check out how often the baristas are re-firing the brewing urns and count the food platters coming out from the back.

This, of course, is how a café must run in order to survive. The minimum wage in Massachusetts is $11 an hour, but that's low for Northampton. Translation: Coffee places survive on volume. Why is Woodstar so busy? Because it has no Wi-Fi. You'll spot laptops here and there from those who can pick up a hotspot, but they tend not to linger. Woodstar hums with the energy and low murmur of dozens of people interacting with each other, not the listerized quiet of private surfers.

I've no idea how the two places I avoid stay in business, especially the one of Pleasant Street where even the big tables are dominated by a single laptopper guarding turf by splaying papers hither and yon. Every time I see this phenomenon I want to recruit a posse of former café owners and throttle the fool. This person is a self-interested sponge who threatens the survival of local business.

Perhaps you might think my reaction extreme. If so, try this experiment. Sit down near to a solitary laptopper and begin to converse with a friend. First the person will look up. Then comes a glare and a sigh. Headphones will be pulled from the pack and clamped over the ears. The moment an empty table opens, the power cord will be yanked from the wall, the laptop will loudly snap shut, and its owner will clomp off in a huff.

If ever the phrase "get a room" is apt, it's for those who think a beverage entitles them to a cone of silence and a place to be alone. There are such places; "coworking" space is all the rage these days. This will, of course, cost more than the five bucks for a coffee and a muffin. And that, really, is the point. A café isn't an office, nor is it a place to publicly exude attitude. Heaven forbid that our cafés become nothing more than places to preen and work. (Not that they could afford to be such a thing!)  

We all must work, of course, and I'm one who occasionally needs a change of scenery to regain my creative mojo. I've even been known to plug in at a non-busy café. But the moment business picks up I pack up and leave because I want that café to be there the next time I crave a well-made cuppa. If I need quiet, I go to the ultimate shhhh kind of place: the library. Those one-table one-laptop coffee houses of the living dead should turn off the Wi-fi—for their own good, and in the name of community.   

Rob Weir