Why Can't You Work From a Coffee Shop Anymore?

It is getting harder to find a place that lets you sit for a while. WiFi that shuts off after two hours. Tape over the outlets. No laptops on weekends. Ask an owner why and you get the same answer almost everywhere: no business writes a rule for its average customer. It writes it for its worst one.

Nothing is a problem until it is a problem. There will always be someone who turns it into one, and then everyone lives with the rule.

We know, because we just wrote one. This week we announced that starting December 1, No More Cafe becomes a shared workspace for members on weekdays until 5 PM. The first question we got was why. This is the answer, and it is not only ours.

Every version of the rule has been tried somewhere, and every one costs something. In 2005 a Seattle cafe called Victrola turned off its WiFi on weekends. Its co-owner told the New York Times, “We get yelled at by people who feel it’s their right,” and weekend revenue went up anyway. Devoción caps its WiFi at two hours on weekdays and shuts it off on weekends. In Washington, a cafe called Elle opened with no WiFi, got angry reviews, and gave in; it now offers WiFi four days a week until 3 PM and asks people to keep it to an hour and a half. The Barn in Berlin says laptop users held more than 70 percent of the seats in one of its cafes and cost it a quarter of its revenue. Now laptops get an hour, or nothing on busy weekends. In Japan, chains like Doutor put a 90 minute clock on the table. Plenty of places just tape over the outlets.

None of it is new, and none of it is solved. What changed is the size of it. Working from home went from about 7 percent of paid workdays in 2019 to about 27 percent now. And it was never only remote workers. Students have studied in cafes for as long as there have been cafes; in Korea there is a word for them, cagongjok, roughly the cafe study tribe. All of them went looking for the nearest room with a table and an outlet.

Read what owners say and it is one sentence, twenty years long: one drink, hours in the seat, a table for four with one person at it. In England, a cafe banned laptops after customers who had bought one coffee asked the staff to turn the music off for their Zoom calls. In 2025, Starbucks Korea banned desktop computers, printers, power strips and partitions from every store in the country, after printers ended up on the chair next to the table so nobody else could sit there.

We have had both. People have asked us to lower the music for their calls. Someone brought a printer.

The rest of our list is just as familiar. Someone takes a table, opens a laptop, and never once comes to the counter. Someone walks in with a drink from somewhere else and tells us they don’t need anything. People bring in takeout and act shocked when we say there is no outside food; some hide it, eat it anyway, and leave the trash behind. A single person takes two tables because they would rather nobody sat next to them. A group of three or four comes in and each takes a table of their own.

And there is a pattern. These are almost exclusively the same people who will turn the bathroom into a gas station bathroom.

They have one more thing in common. No More Cafe is not a coffee shop. It is the flagship for No More Cocktails, a non-alcoholic space, and the room exists to represent the brand and build a community around it. Almost none of the people on that list spent a minute learning that. For them it does not matter what the place is. It is all about them.

The people who call the rules unfair are, often enough, the exact people they were written for. Everyone else can hardly believe the behavior exists. In 2011 Gorilla Coffee in Park Slope covered its outlets after other customers complained about people with an empty cup holding a seat for hours. The rule was asked for by the people who could not find a seat.

This is the part that makes it hard. The person on a laptop is often the best customer in the room: they order, they come back, they treat the place like it matters. Some of our best regulars work and study here. A ban punishes them. So does a time limit, and so does a WiFi code that runs out. Every blunt rule lands on the good customer and the bad one at once, because a sign cannot tell them apart.

So the real question for any room is not how to get rid of laptops. It is how to keep and encourage the people who treat the place with respect and want it to thrive, and stop making room for the ones who don’t.

We tried the gentlest version first. In September we started asking anyone working on a laptop to open a tab, with a $10 minimum. It was never about the money. It was a very low bar to start phasing out the behavior. It helped, but not enough.

A room built to represent a brand and build a community cannot spend its nights and weekends as an office for people who never bothered to ask what the room is. So starting December 1, on weekdays until 5 PM, No More Cafe is a shared workspace for members, and laptops are for members at any hour. At 5 PM, and all weekend, the room is open to everyone the way it always has been: the bar, the music, the people who come in for a drink.

What we want out of it is balance. More and more people have found that this is a good room to work from, and limiting the number of memberships is how we control how much of the room goes to work. The goal is that people working never take more than half the tables. The rest of the room stays what it is for.

We are also hoping for something a cafe full of laptops never gets. Twenty people in their own bubbles is not a workspace. We want a community of like-minded people, members who add to each other’s day, who talk, trade ideas and introductions, and use the members’ hours to turn a quiet room into a working room with some life in it.

If you work or study from a cafe and you read that list wondering who would ever do that, you are who the room is for. Applications for No More Members are open now, and members start December 1. Apply here.