“Genuine Customers Only”: Cafes In Rebellion Against “Laptop Squatters”:
“This is not a library, it’s a coffee shop”. This was how Raquel Llanes, manager of the Departure Cafe in Barcelona’s Raval area, cited by the Euronews correspondent Rebecca Ann Hughes, vented her frustration regarding the people who arrived, ordered only an expresso, occupied a table for eight hours or more, asked her to turn down the music so they could have meetings online and even brought their own food to eat. So to deal with this, she put up a sign saying “we don’t have laptops here, but we do have good coffee”. Since the ban was introduced, her customer 
numbers and the atmosphere in the shop have vastly improved.
Llanes is not an exception. Indeed, Hughes and her colleague
Kevin Fraser Park have emphasised that cafes across Europe have tired of “space-hogging digital nomads” and so taken similar action to deal with them. In Valencia, Spain, for example, some establishments prohibit
teleworking between 8am and midday to ensure that their tables are available during the busiest times of the day. Others take the simple, albeit drastic, option of turning their WIFI network off during peak hours. Nor is this just in Spain. As the two Euronews reporters have observed, cafes in other
cities such as Paris, Berlin and Lisbon are now also taking a stand against “remote workers”, partly to improve their cash flow but also to protect what they see as their business’s primary function, namely to provide a convivial place where customers can interact face-to-
face.
The rules can vary according to the location and the proprietor. Katrin Koch,the boss of the Cafe Kropka in
Hamburg, as reported by the Pedirayudas journalist, Sandra Fernandez on 4th March, restricts laptop use to the spaces close to the windows on Tuesdays and Fridays, but forbids them completely at weekends.
This trend is now also increasingly evident in the UK. On 17th March, the Guardian columnist Olivia Lee, highlighted the many cafe
proprietors across Britain fighting back in the name of tranquillity against the incursion of keyboard invaders who “for the price of a cappuccino hammer away all day on their laptops while their shouts on video calls can be heard above the mechanical grinding of coffee beans”. 
Chris Chaplin, the owner of “Milk and Bean” in Newbury, Berkshire, explained to Lee that his dream had been to open a cafe that “felt like home” featuring lots of laughter and conversation and so he’d become quite disillusioned when people started to come in, work as a group, huddle around one laptop and “treat us like an office”.
Vestina Pranaityte, the general manager of Grounded in Bow, London,acknowledged
that her decision to introduce a laptop ban from 11am to 3pm on weekdays received mixed reactions from customers: “One regular used to come in literally when we opened around 7.30 am and stayed with her laptop, ordering one long black, until 3 pm. She wasn’t happy with the new policy and unfortunately left us”.
For the management of Fringe and Ginge in Canterbury, Kent, the decisive moment was when their staff were told by 
computer users to keep quiet because they were interrupting Zoom calls. The Coffee Talk website agrees entirely that this constitutes unacceptable behaviour, but does also contend that what it describes as “Coffitivity”, working within the lively yet calming background sounds of a coffee shop, “can provide a boost in creativity and productivity.” Furthermore, it points out that the axing of public services across the UK “has left a void that cafes have inadvertently filled”.
According to a BBC study, móre than 200 council-run libraries in
England and Wales have been closed in the past eight years hence, declares the Startups contributor Helena Young, remote workers and especially students have had to find alternative environments away from distractions such as loud neighbours or flatmates. Not everyone, states Coffee Talk, has a quiet office space at home at their disposal. On the contrary, at least 1.6 million people in Britain live in house-shares.
In a recent YouGov survey, 48% of respondents felt that anyone involved in a
video call while in a cafe should wear headphones and 38% considered this shouldn’t be allowed at all. One participant in a TripAdvisor debate on the topic lambasted people with laptops “sitting on their own at a table for four, with a glass of water, occupying prime space all day”. The most respectful solution, in the view of 
the freelance writer Emily Watkins in the
Guardian on 22nd March, is to limit cafe-laptop time to four hours, spending about £5 every two. “If you insist on being there all day, you should buy at least one meal as well. Absolutely no Zoom or phone calls and you should take the smallest table available”.
Despite all this apparent animosity there are still plenty of “laptop friendly” cafes
in both the UK and Europe. A comprehensive list can be accessed on Digitalnomadcafes.com. Among the many in London are: Bluebells in Portobello Road W10, the Lumberjack, Camberwell SE5 and Stir Coffee, Brixton Hill SW2. In Paris, Le Grand Breguet in the Bastille area and Strada Cafe close to the Pantheon. In Berlin, the Cafe au Lait, a few minutes from Charlottenberg station and the Coffee Circle Cafe in the Scheunenviertel neighbourhood, though there you can’t use the regular tables, only the higher wall-mounted ones with stools.