Very Much Over Coffee Shops on a Power Trip

What is the point of a coffee shop with no Wi-Fi?

There is an etiquette to all this even if it is not quite spoken into existence, but if I pay $7 for a medium iced Americano, I should be able to hang out at a local coffee shop for several hours or use it as a temporary workspace. I know that people who actually get shit done are on their old Lenovos in a hookah bar, but I like to be surrounded by other MacBooks at a coffee shop because I have this familiar reflexive pettiness that compels me to compare myself to people who are likely emailing their parents for rent money. But when one of these coffee shops goes on a power trip, the exuded grumpy grievance thumps throughout, and it leaves a cold and uneasy feeling in my stomach.

The bilious and relentlessly smug authoritarianism becomes clear when you notice there are no laptops in the vicinity. Wi-Fi is banned in these specific coffee shops, and this is allegedly to establish a quaint ambiance—but it grudgingly and intermittently gestures toward the same setting as an airplane that hasn’t reached cruising altitude. In these instances, I’ll just sip on my overpriced drip while staring blankly at nothing, thinking about all the emails I couldn’t answer.

It is remarkable how some coffee shops improbably manage to get even cheaper and more lavishly small-time because this kind of stickler demeanor scans as grubby and boring, especially when it costs $64.99/month to get a basic Wi-Fi setup. I’m tempted to make some back-channel scheme to get the spectrum guy here so I can personally install the modem.

In typical thudding urban satire, there may be a local business nearby that doesn’t lock their Wi-Fi, but this is almost never the case. I’ll scroll through other options like floating through an ocean of hotspots—Daniel’s iPhone, Caitlin’s iPhone, Brandon’s iPhone, Introducing Matt’s iPhone. If I’m feeling particularly retributive and trollish, I will rename my hotspot to the name of whatever coffee shop I’m posted up in and password-protect it.

Also, in further characteristic heedlessness for anyone’s wishes, the most sadistic coffee shops will remove all but one of the power plugs from the table area. This locks everyone into a reviled race against the clock against your laptop battery, unless you opt for a garish and goofy setup of running a 50” bright orange cable across the whole place to the power strip—because apparently, we have to make a detour to Home Depot before grabbing our morning coffee!!

Some coffee shops will be wildly and shamelessly extractive by locking their bathrooms. The worst of these are the bathrooms safeguarded with a nine-digit keypad, as if accessing a toilet should be like a bad remake of Ocean’s Eleven. If there is no keypad, you will have to make a grudging deference to the barista and beg them to reach behind the counter to hand you a comically disgusting plank of wood with a piece of yarn tied to the key. This contraption is somehow even grosser than the toilet rim. These places sell macchiatos, so what in the second-grade classroom did you just hand me??

I’m sure the average barista sees more ODs than an EMT, but even by degraded neoliberal hellscape standards, it seems like a big echoing absence of basic humanity to see coffee shops give every customer a key covered in a dense muck of E. Coli instead of simply allowing homeless people a clean place to urinate. These keys are a cheap and strange and sour amenity to attach to a small business, but if they are required to enter the bathroom of any establishment, you should legally be allowed to get high in it. And if you can secure the key for eternal possession, the heroin throne is rightfully yours.

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