Yeah I don’t see that having the desired effect. Most devices can last for hours without charge.
So that business might be putting off people who would have bought food and drinks if they could have charged their device, and yet still be fine for many moochers who either buy nothing or buy some token thing and stick around for 2+ hours.
It’s to free up space for more customers during the day. People won”t even order if there is no place to sit. This limits most customers to about an hour. Most of his shops are in two college towns where students are notorious for taking up a table for half a day for the price of a beverage.
The whole point of those great European cafes is that you can sit there all day if you just order one drink.
Yeah, but how many laptops do you see? The workspace folks take up a lot more square footage than seven guys sitting around a tiny table talking sports and politics or an individual with a book or newspaper.
Here is an article that explains the situation a bit WRT laptop workers taking over a cafe…
It’s impossible to sit in peace without being interrupted by the grating din of people taking back-to-back Zoom conferences and virtual job interviews, according to perturbed San Francisco residents.
When I visited the cafe on a brisk Wednesday afternoon, I was immediately confronted by a sea of laptops attached to their users’ bodies. The air was so warm and muggy, it reminded me of a sold-out concert venue, or a university library on the eve of midterms. I skipped lunch and settled for an iced coffee instead.
I can see the strategy of removing power outlets as a subtle way to let customers know when they run out of power, it’s time to go (and make room for someone else for a while).
I’m not sure that I buy that a person with a laptop takes up more room than someone with a newspaper. And for a group of people chatting round a small table, you might also have a group of highschoolers looking at each other’s phones round a table.
Anyway, it’s a tricky balance for a cafe. You’d like to kick people out who aren’t spending money, but a lot of those people might be elderly who need somewhere to sit for a while. I think the laptoppers overall make you more money than that group, but what you gonna do?
The thing is, if someone settles down with a newspaper, you expect them to read for a while and leave. If someone sets up a little mini office complete with computer on a table, they are likely to be there for hours, monopolizing space other customers could use.
I hate Starbucks. The coffee is bitter, and their ‘food’ is usually a sugary, goopy mess. No wonder there is an obesity/diabetes epidemic. A grande frappuccino is 600 calories! Add a ‘punpkin scone’, and you’re at about 1100 calories and an additional 41g of sugar over the 64g of sugar in the drink.
That is half of your entire daily caloric needs and more than twice the daily sugar you should have, in a drink and a bun. And it’s expensive. Compare this to Tim Hortons: A coffee and a donut is around 300 calories. A breakfast sandwich is 350. Of course due to competition with Starbucks they are now sugaring up their foods as well, so you can now get some horrifically high-calories drinks and foods there as well.
I also hate the cute names they make you use at Starbucks. The only coffee place in the airport we went through a couple days ago was a Starbucks. I went up and asked for a large coffee, and they looked at me like I was from Mars. After trying to get across the concept of just coffee in a cup, she finally says, “oh, brute? Vente?” I had no idea she was a Roman.
Finally I realized she was saying ‘brewed’. Is there another kind of coffee? Perhaps crushed beans and sugar in cold water? And she would not accept ‘large" as a descriptor. She just said, "we have vente’, grande, or tall". Thinking that a tall cup would be a large and ‘grande’ probably extra-large, I ordered a ‘tall’, and of course it’s their smaller one. A ‘tall’ coffee appears to be the shortest one.
And as a diabetic, I had to hold up a cross to even be near their ‘food’ offerings.
Did I mention I hate Starbucks? We are in the US right now, and as a Canadian the first thing I always notice is just how many people here are obese. Starbucks and other crapoy food places are part of the problem. They should probably be taxed for the externalities they cause to the health system, like we tax pollution.
Yeah, and if you get a milkshake from McDonald’s it’s going to have more calories than a bottle of water. What a weird comparison.
This is like a bit from the 90s.
Don’t get me started on Geocities.
About the only thing I can kind of tolerate at SB is a soy latte. But it’s too sweet and has too many calories, which is confusing to me…soy milk only has 80 cal per cup, so what are they putting in it?
Sweetened soy milk
Close:
Stranger
Hacky comedians were doing the “confused by Starbucks” years before that movie came out. That’s why the scene is even there.
Of course, lots of times people miss that the whole point of the scene is that Paul Rudd is the asshole here.
Do they? It seems pretty clear to me.
Stranger
Right, these days with the rise of smartphones, you are far more likely to have a bunch of people staring at their phones rather than chatting about sports or politics (and the later could be an issue for one’s business depending on the political side they are on)
I see it reposted a lot as a gif or meme with just the Paul Rudd complaining part.
Starbucks uses Silk brand soy milk, and it looks like the original Silk soy milk product contains 110 calories per 8 oz, and it does contain added sugar. A grande is 16 oz, so that would be close to 14 oz of soy milk, putting you at around 190 calories, which is pretty much the same as the milk version.
I think Starbucks is perfectly fine for drip coffee and iced coffee. I wouldn’t go there for an espresso, and I’m not into any sweetened drinks. My kids do love the pink refresher or whatever it’s called (Pink Drink, it seems.) Key is to order it without ice, and ask for a couple cups of ice on the side. They’ve never balked at the request, and I can get a venti or trenti and split it with the kids and have some left over for less than the price of buying two. (Some random woman at O’Hare passed this tip along to me.) Or even if you order it for yourself, you basically get like double the drink.
They’re a test subject who just escaped from a cryogenic suspension lab or time traveller from the future who missed their target date by at least a couple of decades forward.
Stranger