As a sometimes nomad myself I have to agree with the cafe and bar owners.
Almost every coffee shop in the popular areas of Bangkok and Chiang Mai fill up with DNs and wantrapreneurs who sit for hours, ordering one coffee every few hours, running charging cords to the outlets, talking on the phone, editing videos with the sound on. They don't engage with each other, the staff, or the "locals" as they call them. They squat in a place of business and don't respect the spirit of a cafe, coffee shop, restaurant, or bar. I see them in McDonald's in Bangkok, taking up seats that could accommodate four people, headphones on, hunched over a laptop, for hours at a time.
The places digital nomads tend to visit in numbers have co-working spaces, hotels and hostels that have wifi and tables, short-term apartment rentals with wifi -- plenty of places to work. I don't think DNs should shift the costs of doing their business onto cafes and coffee shops that exist to serve coffee and food, not to serve as free hotdesks.
As happens more often than not, the selfish actions of a few will cause a backlash that affects everyone. Someone wanting to check their email for ten minutes over a cup of coffee can't get their laptop out now because too many entitled DNs sat there for hours, mistaking generosity and tolerance for approval.
Some do that. Until recently people understood that you sat in a cafe or restaurant while you enjoyed your meal or coffee, and then left. If you did want to sit there talking with friends or reading you would leave if the place got crowded and customers stood around waiting for a table to free up. Now those unwritten conventions of behavior don't get learned, or some people actively ignore them.
I've seen staff politely ask people to leave to free up a table in the US, but in Asia staff frequently don't want to cause a confrontation, and may not speak English well enough to feel comfortable asking people to leave. So you see the staff in Thailand glancing nervously at the DNs hogging tables for hours, loudly talking on their phones, and getting away with it in a culture that mostly honors social conventions and avoids conflict.
A central problem here is also that they are nomads. They don't live in the area, they aren't from the area, they aren't integrated into the area through work, they simply exist in the area until they get bored and move on. Why would anyone want these people in their neighborhood hangouts?
There’s a conflict of interest. It is reasonable to assume that any DNs budgeting will pivot around being able to have a “free” place to work at.
The coworking spaces pitched in the article charge north of $500 a month for a simple chair to sit on. some get more expensive if you only want to stay for a few weeks.
That makes it easy to go for the free option and just squat a spot at a cafe.
I feel bad for the good guys who behave respectfully and know when they’ve overstayed their welcome. But for those that don’t Cafe owners need to disincentivize the behavior.
I’m online >12h/day and I work on all devices available while awake. Still, I personally would prefer a cafe that has a strict “no notebooks” & “phone calls and meetings outside” policy.
Not just Europe, I regularly see a bunch of students with laptops taking up half the tables at my local coffee shop. They don't order very much. Admittedly in an earlier life, I would spend hours with a laptop in a larger coffee shop, but I made a point of ordering food and beverages.
Seems like pay-per-hour pricing (as the article mentions) would readily address this. Throw in AYCE drinks and snacks and you've got a rather rarely-explored business concept.
There's lots of co-working places around now. Especially in Europe. They are essentially this but also sometimes include meeting rooms and other stuff you might want at work.
I'm aware of co-working places, but the ones I've seen (here in the US) don't have the AYCE drinks and snacks. I'm a fatass, that sort of thing matters :)
Why open a cafe if you don't want people hanging around inside? You could have just started with a drive-through or a walk-up window and saved all this trouble.
Who wants someone who doesn't live in the neighborhood hanging out in their neighborhood cafe taking up space and not interacting at all and not spending any money either?
It's not that they don't want customers hanging around inside. It's that these types tend not to be the most respectful about it.
They are often content creators and do all their editing without headphones on so you just have their mediocre content playing in segments over and over and over again for hours. They run a ton of cables tethered to the wall so they can charge their phone, their camera, their laptop, etc. And they kill whatever internet is available at the cafe by saturating the network with uploads.
And that is just the start.
The problem is that these people hog the services available at the cafe and get very hostile if confronted.
If you just go to a cafe to work on your laptop while occasionally ordering a drink or a snack that's fine. It's when you listen to audio without wearing headphones, run multiple power cables when a single would do (i.e. charge phone, etc with laptop or splitter), render the internet unusable for the rest of the customers, and get into shouting matches on the phone at your seat rather than stepping out for the call that it becomes a problem.
TLDR: Be respectful and nobody cares but the digital nomad lifestyle has unfortunately attracted a very problematic group of entitled people who these cafes do not want to serve.
Almost every coffee shop in the popular areas of Bangkok and Chiang Mai fill up with DNs and wantrapreneurs who sit for hours, ordering one coffee every few hours, running charging cords to the outlets, talking on the phone, editing videos with the sound on. They don't engage with each other, the staff, or the "locals" as they call them. They squat in a place of business and don't respect the spirit of a cafe, coffee shop, restaurant, or bar. I see them in McDonald's in Bangkok, taking up seats that could accommodate four people, headphones on, hunched over a laptop, for hours at a time.
The places digital nomads tend to visit in numbers have co-working spaces, hotels and hostels that have wifi and tables, short-term apartment rentals with wifi -- plenty of places to work. I don't think DNs should shift the costs of doing their business onto cafes and coffee shops that exist to serve coffee and food, not to serve as free hotdesks.
As happens more often than not, the selfish actions of a few will cause a backlash that affects everyone. Someone wanting to check their email for ten minutes over a cup of coffee can't get their laptop out now because too many entitled DNs sat there for hours, mistaking generosity and tolerance for approval.