I really loved it because there was always someone around, no need to arrange meetings with different people (which gets complicated proportional to age).
Though these half café, half co-working places might be more comfortable if they cater specifically to the laptop crowd.
I’m not the only one that has this opinion because the number of Anticafes in Paris was very quickly growing and they were normally full at peak times.
I'm struggling to see the benefit of paying for time and having sustenance (e.g. coffee) be free, instead of paying for sustenance and having the time be free.
I've never once been asked to leave a cafe after I've paid for __, and subsequently spent a few hours there.
I guarantee the proprietor will be complaining as soon as you have left.
If the place was busy and you were occupying a table without ordering anything, maybe. But if the place was otherwise fairly empty, they probably don't mind very much. It can even be a benefit to have a few tables occupied so that the place doesn't look completely dead.
This is a very nice system that I'm sure they do to attract laptop people during the day (it's otherwise always at least half empty during that time).
There is a sign on the wall that kindly tells people to put away the laptop after 21:00 which is when they get busy. I think it's a fair deal. You get office space for the price of a coffee and they get someone in an otherwise empty café during the day. (Who often order a bit more than just a coffee anyway).
Once you find a place you like, it's not like most people are just anonymous singletons coming in and ordering a coffee and taking up a table for a whole day. You keep the place busy during slow periods, other people see the place has custom, and depending on what's there you'll invite friends or other people over or drop by at other times for meals.
On the weekends or during particular busy times, sure. But usually you need lunch or dinner during those times as well, or you'll invite people for those times.
The successful cafes around here got quite skilled at appealing to the different groups and swinging demands throughout the day. The after-work crowd is different from the workday crowd is different from the tourists and the weekenders is different from the locals, and you need to keep all of them happy to keep the place ticking over and remain profitable. It's not just a substitution between all types of customers...
> Do young people in big European cities have no problems with finding a place to meet friends?
It's a mystery to me too how people do this. From what I understand it's mostly through studies and/or work.
For university, yes you can get the actual education for free, but a diploma is a very good safety net, at least in France, and usually a requirement for people to consider your application. I also liked the freedom it gave me, I had a few years to "breathe" between high-school and working. University is also very cheap in France, I paid less than 1000€ for a master's degree in computer science/software engineering.
Neither do I, but exactly the second part. Those are people you would probably feel sympathetic to, care about and enjoy a drink with occasionally but not have sex with (this can ruin everything), invite to your wedding or actually want to visit your home any often. But an Anti-Café is a totally different story: you meet relaxed, intentionally open complete strangers there, having no interest in you other than your actual person and having good time with you, and the magic happens. There I had some happiest moments in my life (without alcohol - almost unimaginable when colleagues meet outside the office) and met the only people who I consider my "soulmates". Needless to say we never mentioned our jobs until years passed and a genuine reason to discuss something job-related emerged.
> but a diploma is a very good safety net, at least in France, and usually a requirement for people to consider your application
Outside IT, right? According to my experience a diploma (unless it's a PhD in machine learning) means little in the IT sector. They mostly want experience, knowledge and some also intelligence of some sort (you know, the Interview puzzles), also some basic EQ perhaps.
Well, increasingly, they just don't – physically.
More people are living alone(1) – which I interpret as a decent indicator for decline of physical connections overall – but since the feeling of being alone is not increasing(2), internet/social media seem to make up for the difference(3, 4).
(1) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/one-person-households
(2) https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/12/declining-lonelin...
(3) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/users-by-social-media-pla...
(4) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-time-spent-on-the-i...
If you remove the semi-american notion of being 'stink-eyed' or hurried out of the cafe, then I become more confused about how such a space has sufficient demand to keep surviving.
I admit the thought of being charged by the minute irks me in a particular way...
Otherwise, some places have public "ludothèques" for playing board games, like public libraries; but these are non-profit associations, and they usually don't sell anything.
Here in Europe there are places like cafes, restaurants, bars, parks, libraries, museums, galleries, shopping centres, town squares, gyms, clubs or just plain outdoor areas that people use to hang out with one another.