Showdown brews between cafés, remote workers as owners say coffee shops aren't offices

financialpost.com:

Remote workers flooded Book Club Bar, a popular bar/café/bookstore in Manhattan’s East Village, when pandemic restrictions were lifted in June 2021.

“They would plug in their headphones, they wouldn’t speak to anybody, they often wouldn’t buy anything, and they would just sit forever,” Nat Esten, the bar’s co-founder, said.

During the pandemic, employees started working from home instead of the office to comply with public health measures. In May 2020, 37 per cent of the Canadian workforce worked from home, and it was roughly the same in the United States at 35 per cent.

Some workers returned to the office when restrictions were lifted, but not all. Many are still working from home, except they don’t always stay at home. They get bored. Seeking company and atmosphere, they work from cafés, and that’s setting up a showdown between coffee shop owners and remote workers.

“Ninety-nine per cent of people who come into Book Club are wonderful customers and community members,” Esten said. “However, one per cent of the people who were coming in, would … sit for seven, eight, nine hours. If we get more people (who) want to spend all day here, we’re going to go out of business.”

The post-pandemic era has presented owners with a challenge: They must figure out how to preserve the coveted atmosphere that entices customers inside even though there’s a subset of them who sit hunched over their laptops, appearing, as Esten puts it, “zombified.”

If we get more people (who) want to spend all day here, we’re going to go out of business

Cafés are now a proxy for the social environment that offices once provided, said Thomas O’Neill, an industrial and organizational psychologist at the University of Calgary. Whether a person prefers to work