Panera Bread actually restricts WiFi access during their heavy lunch hours, giving laptop users a half-hour limit at certain hours of the day. It makes sense and, since I can get unlimited WiFi there at all the other hours of the day if I so choose, I don't mind it.

I mean, they're trying to run a business. If every single table was being taken up by laptop loiterers, I'd be annoyed too.

I'm guilty. I nurse a cup of coffee 90 minutes sometimes. It's not a Laptop thing, I just like to hang out drinking coffee.
I sometimes meet customers at coffeehouses too! I never buy lunch, if I wanted lunch, I'd go to a restaurant. I don't view a CoffeeHouse as a restaurant, it's more like a bar with coffee.

Why not put a price on the menu- Laptop use--------$10-15 per hour or whatever.

If SBUX did this, the comment board would EXPLODE with hate, rancor and vitriol.

Finally someone stepped up and actually talked about ethics and manners in coffee shops!!! I much appreciate this subject and I agree - there is as much abuse going on for the coffee shop owners as it is for the customers. I don’t want a person who talks to client after client after client to be next to me when I relax with much desired cup of coffee. Mostly, because I just left this environment to relax! But trouble is that people simply have no manners anymore – and this is the problem. There is a guy at the gym working out next to me few times a week; he talks to his staff on the cell phone… while flexing his muscles. I am surprised he has no sunglasses on. Ha-ha, don’t worry though, you chase them out of coffee shops – they will get you at the gym.

Four or five years back, Victrola up on 15th in the Capitol Hill area started turning off their wi-fi at some times, complaining that people weren't being social enough. While I'm sick of cell phone users whose constant chatter degrades others' enjoyment of the public space, this computer thing in coffee shops is hardly new. I wrote most of my senior thesis in coffee shops decades ago, the coffee I could afford to buy my toll. The coffee shop occupies an important place in a community's cultural life -- Hemingway wrote of its importance in "A Clean Well-Lighted Place." If a business owner doesn't want to deal with people hanging around and reading books or working on their computer for hours, maybe they should try another business that is not so prone to lingering.

By the way, it would be great to see restaurants and coffee shops in Seattle posting No Cell Phone signs. If there is concern about people truly using cafes as a full-time workspace, the inability to make business calls would surely diminish some of this. Otherwise, it's difficult to tell the difference between a laptop user who is working on a novel, one who is working remote from the workplace, or one who is just writing a college paper. There are other locales where No Cell Phone signs, small and unobtrusive, are in wide use, and welcome.

> "So far, this seems to be a trend unique to New York"

You have to be kidding. This has gone on for years in San Francisco, for example. Entire cafés have been built from the ground up with "no WiFi" policies just to counteract this.

Just because it starts happening in New York City does not mean it doesn't exist anywhere else.

I'm with Sabatier. If you want to "relax in quiet," then YOU should go to a library.

And guess what? The loud guy on his cell phone probably is a loud guy when he's talking to someone across the table, as well. The problem isn't the cell phone.

I strongly doubt that you, Ms. Goodman, only work from home, as well. So why are you all hot and bothered about people who would like to be around actual other people when they're completing the banal tasks for which they get paid?

Frankly, as a business-owner -- which I know, Ms. Goodman you are NOT, no matter how much you value your personal ability to type and write -- I would never kick out an otherwise-decent customer, no matter how long he or she lingers in my shop. He or she likely would be a repeat customer. And he or she likely has friends who can be customers, too. Why risk losing that over some spoiled, nanny-state white idiots concerned about their blessed "clean well-lighted places?"

Since time is the issue, and to be fair, all food-service vendors are in part renting space, do readers (whether merchants or patrons) perceive an unwritten rule of thumb out there, perhaps varying with the price of a cup? To take a couple extremes, I recall working years ago in a moderately-priced Pierce County restaurant where customers ordering a solo cup of coffee received free refills and about 20 minutes before being asked if there was "anything else" they'd like; at the other end of the scale are bohemian-style cafes in Tokyo where a single cup o' kohii runs the equivalent of $8 or more, but it's understood that customers will linger and the waiters refill their accompanying glasses of ice water for hours, with a smile. So ... on a busy day at the neighborhood cafe in Seattle, what does/should a $2.75 latte get you before the staff begins getting concerned ... 45 minutes alone with your newspaper?