Uhhhh…how can I come in and linger if there aint no damn place for ME to sit and linger?
If the business hasn’t locked the damn doors…that means they want MY business AS WELL…which means you need to quit warming seats and mooching the wifi…
Reminds me of the old joke: there’s a lady sitting idly in a coffee shop, and she sees a guy standing outside on the corner, who’s stopping each woman who walks past and saying something to her. She can’t hear what it is he’s saying, but it obviously gets a reaction: some of them laugh, some glare at him, some hurry past, some yell back at him, a few even slap him in the face.
Finally her curiosity gets the better of her, and she goes outside and approaches him: as she walks up he says to her, “Hey lady, wanna have sex?” She’s taken aback for a moment, and then it makes sense. “Is that what you’ve been asking all those other women who’ve gone past?” “Yup. I’m out here every day, askin’ 'em all.” “But you must get slapped an awful lot.” The guy shrugs. “Yeah, but I also have sex an awful lot.”
That approach…one at time?
Hell, he will likely die a virgin.
And I too hate the fact that things seem to work that way.
I apologize, though I refuse to stop laughing at the link and your response.
It’s classic Darwinian evolution in action.
In dis country, you gotta get the coffee first. 'Den when you get the coffee, you get the wi-fi. 'Den when you get the wi-fi…'den you get the women.
If the business hasn’t kicked me out, a fortiori they still want my business, and as long as I’m buying shit, I’m not “mooching” anything, so eat me. If the café is seriously so crammed to the gills that you cannot sit, something I have witnessed only on rare and transient occasions (I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t find a seat immediately), then you can sit when someone gets up, which amazingly always seems to happen by and by, or you can find a different coffee shop – they’re hardly rare. And if I’m not being kicked out in preference to you, well then, I guess they want my business more than yours. First come, first fucking served.
No, common fucking courtesy dictates that “buying” one item every few hours is actually doing nothing but hurting the fucking business whose fucking wi-fi you’re using because there are untold numbers of people who might want to sit down and have a fucking pastry at a fucking coffee shop but these fucks think that buying a single fucking joe gives them nesting rights in-fucking-definitely just because the store manager’s maybe a little too fucking busy doing actual productive business to go around meter-maiding people and kicking them out of the fucking store because he (or she) may be assuming they have the shitfucking decency and common sense god gave a fucking turd to roll the fuck out of the way when there are too many turds in one fucking spot.
Fuck.
Common fucking sense dictates you don’t put wi-fi and big comfy couches in your building if you don’t want people using them. If you don’t want people nesting, don’t invite them to nest.
On the other hand, IMHO, anyone who goes to a coffee shop to read is an idiot. We have libraries and bookstores and classrooms and homes for that.
Well, considering how horribly I’m apparently hurting the coffee shop at the end of my street, they sure act happy to see me when I’m in there working on my translation, and they also seem happy to take special measures to encourage me to stay longer, such as allowing me to run a tab which I pay at the end. This would seem to be unusual behaviour in a business which is apparently so crucially dependent on cramming coffee down your throat and kicking you out the door.
Seriously, you’re being ridiculous. There are some coffee shops that put up little notices that say “Please limit your stay to twenty minutes,” provide uncomfortable but functional seating, and otherwise cultivate the impression that they want you to move along. Those are for drinking your coffee and moving along. There are other coffee shops that actively encourage you to think of them as places to hang out in. They do this by providing more comfortable seating, the fameux WiFi, and a more attractive decor, having no such notices, and otherwise going out of their way to make themselves amenable to being hung out in.
Now either these latter businesses are so pathetically deluded that they adopt a strategy that is directly counterproductive to the desires and interests they supposedly have, or guess what, you’re wrong, and they actually want people to stay there for periods of time, as coffee shops have since they were invented in the fifteenth fucking century.
Well, libraries and classrooms don’t serve coffee, and bookstores often have cafés in them (not just the chains, either – the McGill student bookstore has one, as does this great indie bookstore in Saint-Henri, and the late, lamented SergetRéal, which actually served free espresso, or maybe they just liked me.)
I dunno, what’s wrong with reading…well, just about anywhere there’s light?
Although we recommend against reading in the driver’s seat or operating theatre.
…or under the Space Shuttle, in front of oncoming headlights, on the Sun…
If you must have coffee that badly, fine- but I maintain that 99% of people who read in a cafe do so because they’re posey gits. It’s just one step up from wearing sunglasses while you scribble in a poetry notebook [in a coffee shop].
Well, if you must scribble in a poetry notebook, you could hardly find a better place for it than a coffee shop, preferably an independent one with fair-trade coffee and live music not too loud; but the sunglasses are just counterproductive.
Yeah…I don’t drink coffee, so I don’t hang out there much, but if I did, I’d read there. As it is, I read pretty much everywhere when I’m bored. Have book, will travel and all.
I’m being ridiculous because you’re being ridiculous. And saying “fuck” a lot.
I had a favorite coffee shop where I went to college that I lived almost directly on top of. They saw me every morning and during the busiest times of the day, studying or chatting, paying for refills. But if I saw there were people actually standing around with food in hand waiting for spot to open up, I would have to be a right bastid to stay firm in my spot unless I was covered in weighted chains or translation manuscripts or something.
I can see the my-spot-dammit approach working at an actual local place, but Starbucks is a franchised chain, and I know of no franchise owner in modern times who’s willing to actually ask someone to leave unless they’re on fire or trying to commit a crime. This leaves the onus of common fucking decency to the person wielding the seat, watching the person on break juggling their lunch.
Actually, the ‘coffeehouse in Palestine’ from your link seems to have the right of it. We’ll just make everyone sit on the ground in coffeeshops. Take that, scarcity!
This morning a 70-something woman said “Good morning” to me while I was walking outside. As a 36-year-old, that means there’s an even bigger age gap between us than in the OP’s scenario.
Man, I’m getting pissed off now just thinking about how rudely that perverted old biddy was harassing me. There she was, just leering over her walker at my innocent sort-of youthful flesh, and I didn’t even know it! Fantasizing about whipping out her dentures and giving me a right good gumming. Disgusting!
I wonder if I could get her number…
And my point is she hasn’t lost sight of the fact that he’s not her only realistic chance.
Would it surprise you that I don’t agree with your take on my real objection? Besides, I already stated my real objection; it made me feel nauseous when I was their target. Now that I’m looking on (and reminiscing, yuck!) it just looks pitifully lame to me. Also I felt inspired to point out what old men hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t considered, or don’t care about, i.e. what that young woman is likely surmising about them when they’re trying to catch her eye. (And no, she is not having fantasies about taking the old geezer to her high school prom.) She is really thinking “Oh. My. God. How in the world could he think I’d want a dinosaur like him? Ewww!” She is also crushing on that gorgeous and shy young guy in her biology class. Or stealing sneak-peeks at that kick-ass cool drummer in the college band, or trying to pick out that hunky football player while she sits in the bleachers with her posse… and swooning, and giggling a lot, and hoping her new acne cream is working, and deciding on her major, and learning to become an adult, and getting home before curfew. Ya know, stuff like that.
Feel nauseous? You probably were nauseous. I shouldn’t wonder if you were nauseous yet. 
Now let us old farts get on with our fantasising that a pretty young woman might actually deign to give us the right time of day if we asked just nicely enough. 
Raindrop, get over yourself.