Almost everyone has been guilty of Wi-Fi squatting at some point in their life—Starbucks just looks (and sounds) like so much more appealing of a place to work than a college dorm or a house with a teething baby, but you don’t really like coffee. What may have been an innocent offense a few years ago is now becoming a serious issue, thanks to mobile devices and the number of people who are now able to work from wherever they have an Internet connection.
Nicole Rupersburg of Fox News reports that these so-called “Wi-Fi squatters” are now adversely affecting business for cafes by consuming both seating and bandwidth (which customers paying proportionate to their duration of stay could have utilized), and the cafes are “declaring war.” Some of the methods that cafes are using to deter Wi-Fi squatting, Rupersburg says, include providing an access code only with purchase (rather than allowing customers to log on without a password), setting time limits on Wi-Fi use, covering outlets to discourage the use of laptops, and, in some extreme cases, disallowing the use of laptops altogether.
When coffee shops are resorting to such measures as providing limited seating to make patrons uncomfortable about sticking around or even having a standing-room only policy, it makes one wonder if the coffee shops’ war against these squatters will, ultimately, damage their own business. By making a coffee shop an uncomfortable place to be or an inconvenient place to meet with friends, or, thanks to both the seating and the Wi-Fi restrictions, a difficult place to meet with business associates, it is easy to guess that these policies will do as much damage as the squatters themselves, did. There is an old joke that, in Texas, all serious business is done in a Dairy Queen. Thanks to free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s, the rest of the country may find itself doing all of its serious business there.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson