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

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“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

Nat Esten, co-founder, Book Club Bar

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 from home depends on whether they are an introvert or an extrovert.

“There are a lot of people who get a lot of their social interaction through the office,” he said. “Not everyone is living at home with a family. Some people are living alone in an apartment.”

The latter depend on their colleagues to charge their social battery, he said.

“Without that, you start feeling lonely, you start feeling depressed, disconnected.”

In pursuit of a ‘convivial’ space

Esten founded Book Club Bar with his wife in 2019, envisioning a “convivial” space where people could get together to read and chat about what they were reading over a coffee or a “literary cocktail.” He wanted to provide a haven for people who liked to read in bars.

“It can be hard to find the right bar for that,” he said. “Some bars are too dark, some bars are too loud, some bars are too crowded, some bars are too sports-focused. We just saw a gap in the market.”

Book Club Bar has since gone viral on social media for its innovative concept, drawing bibliophiles from New York City and around the world, as well as remote workers equipped with their laptops, headphones and keyboards.

“Your environment really affects your mindset,” O’Neill said, adding that coffee shops offer a “buzz of activity.”

They also provide remote workers an environment in which they are less likely to be interrupted. At the office, a colleague might interrupt them to chat, while at home, they might be interrupted by their spouse, kids or dog. The coffee shop is an anonymous haven: nobody knows you, so you can get things done.

It wouldn’t be so bad, owners said, if remote workers bought things.

“Some people will just buy one tea or a cup of coffee and sit there for the whole afternoon,” said Alexandre Séguin, co-owner of Montreal’s Café Pista, which has three locations in the city.

But some do spend more than others.

“Although students are also the ones who can spend hours in coffee shops, they tend to buy multiple times during their stay,” said a spokesperson for Laurel Café located in Montreal’s trendy Plateau neighbourhood.

Small spaces such as Book Club Bar are among the hardest hit by the presence of the remote workers. Most of its space is dedicated to bookshelves, so there are only a few chairs and tables, a bench and a patio in the back that is open during the summer months. It isn’t equipped to serve as an office hosting dozens of people.

“We weren’t designed for that,” Esten said.

The problem became so severe that the bar began to lose its regulars. Esten and his wife would bump into former customers around the neighbourhood and they told him that they could never get a seat at the bar because there were laptops everywhere, so they started going to other coffee shops instead.

“That was breaking our hearts,” he said.

Capacity tends to complicate the laptop issue. On its website, Montreal’s Café ISO announces: “Due to our limited capacity, please note that we are a no wifi (sic) and no laptop zone. Thanks for your understanding!”

Ruining the vibe

Aside from taking up space at cafés, remote workers also change the atmosphere, and not in a good way.

“They’ve got their headphones on, they’re on a loud Skype call or Zoom call, and they’re disrupting what we’re trying to do,” Esten said.

They’ve got their headphones on, they’re on a loud Skype call or Zoom call, and they’re disrupting what we’re trying to do

Nat Esten

Esten and his wife have tried to make changes to preserve their vision of a “gregarious” space where people could read, talk and draw.

“We tried a bunch of different configurations. We tried no Wi-Fi on the weekends, we tried no Wi-Fi after seven, we tried paid Wi-Fi, we tried hourly Wi-Fi,” he said. Ultimately, this became difficult and confusing for customers. “It’s easier just to say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have Wi-Fi.’”

In addition to dropping Wi-Fi, Book Club Bar has also put up signs advising patrons that laptops are prohibited after 6 p.m. as well as other signs encouraging customers to share the space due to limited seating.

Similarly, management at Café Pista found that remote workers were making the café a lot less lively. Co-owner Séguin wanted community members to see it as a place to meet their neighbours, relax and read a book — a sort of “bar during the day.”

Now, the café has instituted a two-hour Wi-Fi limit. A customer can log into the wireless, but once those two hours are up, they’re up. The customer must wait until the next day for their Wi-Fi access to reset.

“Some people will be a little frustrated about it, but I guess it’s just like anything in life: you can’t please everyone,” Séguin said.

Ultimately, he said, Pista needs to be able to pay the bills and that means having a steady stream of paying customers.

The Beatrice Society coffee shop in downtown Toronto asks guests to limit laptop use on weekends, holidays and when all the tables are full. Signs on the tables read: “Cafes are great places for social connection. On weekends and holidays, please keep laptop use upstairs only. Thanks for helping us create a lively community space.”

Sometimes, the laptops aren’t the problem, but that remote workers tend to sit by themselves, leaving one or more seats at a table unused.

“For us, it’s less about limiting laptop use and more about trying to ensure seating is available for those who want to eat or drink in the café versus taking items to go,” Beatrice Society spokesperson Taycia Chaplin said in an email. “Our goal was for the signs to act as a bit of a nudge, which has generally been effective.”

Some cafés don’t mind the presence of remote workers, and will offer Wi-Fi with no strings attached.

“Today, Wi-Fi is offered practically everywhere, even in hospitals, so I think it is a must for coffee shops to let their customers access it, especially since the pandemic due to the increased remote workers,” a spokesperson for Laurel Café said in an email, adding that offering Wi-Fi is “good for business.”

Take your laptop elsewhere

Customers in search of an office can go to a library, or to a paid co-working space offered by companies such as WeWork Inc., Esten said.

But people might prefer coffee shops to co-working spaces that require a level of commitment and expense, O’Neill said. A library needs a membership as well, he added, and you need to be quiet, which might make it hard to make phone calls, if that’s what your job requires.

Coffee shops have their drawbacks for remote workers, too. For one thing, they are nowhere near as ergonomic as offices.

“I think (physiotherapists) got rich after the pandemic,” O’Neill said, “because many people didn’t have the right arrangements at home … and now people have back and neck problems, shoulder problems that they didn’t have before.”

An office also gives employees the opportunity to network with one another and learn more on the job, he said, adding that “there is something to spontaneous encounters.”

Esten is empathetic to the plight of the remote worker. He understands why they would prefer to camp out in a café rather than at home.

“I think that people seek out that human connection because you can go a little stir crazy when you’re just sitting inside your apartment all by yourself all the time,” he said.

Séguin echoed that working from home is a lot less interesting than working from a café, which often offers an aesthetically pleasing environment with good music. Most importantly, you’re surrounded by people with whom you can discuss things.

“Human connection is not to be underestimated,” he said. “I think it’s needed.”

But many employees still don’t like working from the office, O’Neill said. Executives are pressuring employees to come back to the office, but they are being met with resistance.

“Maybe they can take some of the concepts from what people love about coffee shops and try to build some of that into their office space design,” he said. “Offices are typically pretty archaic. If you want people to come in for collaboration, innovation, culture, collaborative decision-making, all that stuff, then why do you have a cubicle farm? It doesn’t make sense at all.”

• Email: mcoulton@postmedia.com

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