Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... it's nice to continue working..." yes, this is also the problem with so many cafes. People go there to get some work done but also to interact. To strike up conversations about work or life with people outside your usual bubble. If you didn't want to be around other people you could stay in the office or at home. But in recent years everyone wears headphones and has so many devices that walking into a cafe at lu…
From my view... there are cafes for working and cafes for socializing, and to me they have different vibes and regulars. Or perhaps I'm fortunate enough to live in a city where there's such a distinction, I'm not really sure. For example, there used to be a cafe around here with a designated 'no laptops, no work' area and some board games (R.I.P. Longfellow's). There's a local chain that doesn't even provide WiFi. Co…
I think if people had an awareness of their surroundings in these spaces, the spaces wouldn't have turned into sterilized off-campus work sites. But that may be asking too much from people who've never experienced it. I think this is what some of the 90s/00s startups were trying to replicate with their play rooms, but that's a far cry from sitting with a local dev and a taxi driver and a drunk musician spitting out ideas To me that's what the cafe is for.
(edit) I don't mean this to come off as the rant of an old gen X-er... it sounds to me like you had a real appreciation for the counterculture of ideas that could bubble up from having some limits and creativity in those spaces. You woulda loved the 90s. But maybe if enough people get sick of Blue Bottle Coffee and Starbucks, we can claw some humanity back. As it is, the less work-centric and more friends-and-family-centric parts if the world mostly reject the cafe as workplace model. They didn't used to find it so rude but they do now. I hope we have a backlash in the States if only because people really need that space to be verbal, interacting humans with each other. Especially on a lunch break.