KICKED OUT: Publicist Aja Chavis used to work at this Connecticut Muffin — until they cut off the Wi-Fi withno advance notice. (
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Like countless other freelance and self-employed workers across the city, Jodi Lipper relies on her local coffee shop for more than just her daily java fix. Over the past year, the ghostwriter, 35, has adopted a neighborhood joint called Darling Coffee as her makeshift office — the perfect spot to park her laptop and toil away for five or six hours.
“It really works for me, because it’s closest to my house, it’s quiet and convenient and it’s just a great atmosphere,” says Lipper, an Inwood resident who visits the neighborhood spot three days a week. “I’ve gotten a lot of great work done there.”
But early last month, she found the two-top tables that usually served as her workspace were suddenly off limits to laptop users. Signs throughout the establishment announced a new policy: Computers were now restricted to the café’s crowded communal table and bar.
And even though she says some form of laptop limit “seemed inevitable” — given how frequently she’d seen non-working patrons struggle to find a spot to sit — her initial reaction, she says, “was to be devastated.”
Her experience isn’t unique. As the city’s growing ranks of independent employees continue to colonize coffee shops with laptops and power cords, some local establishments are responding with new restrictions that limit where, and for how long, workers can plug in. Some policies are meant to deter bad-for-business laptop “campers”; others are intended to make room for non-working patrons and promote a more social environment. Either way, the wave of new rules is a buzzkill for freelancers — leaving them frustrated and scrambling to find new places to work.
“I understand their position — they can’t become a library or just a workspace,” says Lipper. “But as far as my personal work life goes, it is devastating. I knew right away it would severely change my routine.”
With few other coffee shops in her neighborhood, she’s had to make do with the new setup — and it’s not her cup of tea. She now finds herself fighting for one of six spots at the café’s packed central table (or relegated to one of the bar’s backless stools, which she says aren’t suitable for long spells of work), and battling for an outlet as well.
(Darling Coffee did not respond to requests for comment.)
“After a couple of hours of sitting there, losing juice, I need to beg someone to let me take the outlet for a few minutes,” says Lipper, who now heads to the café in the afternoon, when she’s most likely to nab an open seat.
But even when she gets lucky, she often finds herself contending with the “quite noisy” fellow workers at the table, making it difficult to focus on writing tasks that require deep thought and focus. As a result, she now saves her busy work for her café visits.
Her fellow freelancers, she says, have “shared my attitude of understanding yet frustration.”
But not all frappé-slurping freelancers have been so sympathetic. When Allison Stuart, owner of Bedford Hill Coffee Bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant, instituted a timed Internet usage policy in January — essentially limiting patrons to one hour of free Wi-Fi with a purchase — she says some regular patrons took to Yelp to complain.
While most were just irritated, she says, “one particular Yelper got really offended” — and vowed to take his business (and his laptop) elsewhere.
Despite the simmering debate, Stuart stands by her reasons for the new policy: “We only have 12 tables, and it’s important for business that those tables turn over,” she says. “People tend to get really involved in what’s going on on their computer screen and lose track of time. Adding the Internet timer is just [an attempt] to make everyone more aware of their behavior.”
When Stuart and her boyfriend opened their establishment two-and-a-half years ago, she says, she purposely installed just two outlets in the seating area — to curb power-sucking and space-hogging mobile workers.
Still, one enterprising freelancer found a way around the limited plugs by bringing his own power strip. Stuart says she found this “rude” — but not as bad as the time she witnessed another patron, at a different café, set up a full-size inkjet printer. “That was ridiculous,” she recalls. “I understand people can work from anywhere — but the café isn’t your home office!”
Ken Nye, owner of the East Village’s Ninth Street Espresso, has witnessed similar outrageous behavior from his laptop-lugging laborers. Last year, after increasing problems with “customers who were camping out for too long, not buying product and taking up the space of two or three customers,” Nye blocked all of the outlets with baby-proof caps — only to witness patrons simply “ripping them out of the wall.”
“That was it for me,” says Nye, who hired an electrician to permanently cover all of the outlets in February.
And though he says the pushback was immediate — Nye and his staff fielded complaints and a flurry of angry e-mails — he says the move has turned out to be great for business. “Even just not having wires draped across the floor looks — and feels — better,” he says.
While an unlimited power source and free Internet connection are certainly perks for independent employees, Sarah Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, says they’re only part of the draw for the nation’s estimated 42 million freelance workers.
“It was never only the free Wi-Fi that drew freelancers to coffee shops,” she says. “It was seeing the same three or four other freelancers there every day and knowing you could bounce ideas off them.”
That camaraderie was a key reason publicist Aja Chavis, 32, started working regularly from the Fort Greene outpost of Connecticut Muffin, a mini-chain with locations across Brooklyn, in January.
“It was like an office,” says the Bed-Stuy resident. “There was a group of people that I got to know who would come in around the same time.”
But after two months of working there daily — during which time she made a point of purchasing drinks and food frequently — the establishment stopped offering free Wi-Fi in March. Chavis was infuriated. “There weren’t any signs or any warnings at all,” she says. (Connecticut Muffin did not respond to requests for comment.)
Daryl Montgomery, a 50-year-old finance writer, has a full-time office in Babylon, but he often prefers to work from Union Square-area coffee shops for the productivity-boosting energy of “being around other people.” But over the years, as he’s faced one setback or ban after another — blocked electrical plugs and Internet outages at various Starbucks locations; Wi-Fi time limits at independent shops — he knows he can’t get too comfortable anywhere.
“The best way to deal with these issues is to move on,” he shrugs. “There’s always another place to go in New York City.”