'Laptop squatters': Cafes in Europe are fed up with space-hogging digital nomads
euronews.com
euronews.com
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.
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.
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.
Rent an office or go to one of those shared office spaces, they do offer coffee too.
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.