It was a flashpoint even before the recession, but Web-surfing visitors who sit all day without spending much are now being shown the door at some cafes.
A sign at Naidre's, a small neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., begins warmly: "Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day . . ."
But, it continues, "people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit." At Naidre's in Park Slope and its second location in nearby Carroll Gardens, Wi-Fi is free. But since the spring of 2008, no laptops have been allowed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekends, unless the customer is eating and typing at the same time.
Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading.
In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.
"You don't want to discourage it; it's a wonderful tradition," says Naidre's owner, Janice Pullicino, 53. A former partner in a computer-graphics business, Pullicino insists she loves technology and hates to limit its use. But when she realized that people with laptops were taking up seats and driving away the more lucrative lunch crowd, she put up the sign. Last fall, she covered up some of the outlets, describing that as a "cost-cutting measure" to save electricity.
So far, this appears to be largely a New York phenomenon, though San Francisco's Coffee Bar now puts out signs when the shop is crowded asking laptop users to share tables and make space for other customers.
Some coffee shops say they still welcome laptop users, if only because they make the stores look busy.
For some, the growing number of laptop-carrying customers with time on their hands is reason to expand. "I had to add more outlets and higher speed" in early June, says Sebastian Simsch, 40, a co-owner of Seattle Coffee Works.
Starbucks (SBUX, news, msgs) coffeehouses, which in some cases charge for Wi-Fi, and bookstore chain Borders Group (BGP, news, msgs), which always charges for Wi-Fi, don't have any plans to change their treatment of laptop customers. Neither does bookstore giant Barnes & Noble (BKS, news, msgs), where the Wi-Fi is complimentary.
But in New York, the trend is accelerating among independents. At Cocoa Bar locations in Brooklyn and on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a 5-month-old rule forbids laptops after 8 on Friday and Saturday nights. At Espresso 77 in Jackson Heights, Queens, owners covered three of five electric outlets six months ago after its loosely enforced laptop use restrictions failed to encourage turnover. At two of three Cafe Grumpy locations -- one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood -- laptops are never welcome.
Laptop backlash poses particular difficulties for people without offices, says Leah Meyerhoff, 29, a film director and freelancer. She long has used coffee shops to interview cast and crew members and to work on preproduction. Now, she says, "it's a constant search for places with the Internet where I can sit and focus without being frowned upon."
"Good luck staying open when you're turning half your clientele out on a Friday night," Hannah Moots, 23, wrote about Cocoa Bar on Yelp, a Web site where customers rate retailers.
When Moots, who aspires to be an archaeologist, met with her boyfriend at the coffee shop after 8 p.m. on a Friday to work on graduate-school applications, she was ushered out, she says, even though the place was almost empty.
"We had to power down or leave instantly," Moots wrote in her blog. She left and went to a different cafe, where she later expressed her dismay on the Web.
Masoud Soltani, a Cocoa Bar owner, confirms that he sent her a Yelp message: "I remember you very well. . . . I would not think you would write such bad stuff about us." Soltani says she is no longer welcome in his store.
Customers' frugality has reached extremes in the recession, the 40-year-old Soltani says. Some patrons show up with tea bags for a free hot-water refill or quietly unwrap homemade sandwiches, he says.
The Soltani brothers tried to adapt by adding sandwiches to their assortment of pastries and chocolates two months ago. And they want to be able to change the atmosphere after dark.
"We lower the light, and it's chocolate, wine and couples holding hands," says Masoud's brother Bahman. "What's the guy with the laptop doing here?"
Some customers are sympathetic. Norm Elrod was "devastated," he wrote on his blog -- called Jobless and Less -- when he spotted "little plastic covers on the electrical outlets, secured with little padlocks" at Espresso 77. "But I knew why they had done it," the 37-year-old unemployed marketing manager says.
"I used to be one of the abusers," Elrod confesses on his blog, "sipping a two-dollar cup of coffee in a to-go cup for hours." But, he says in an interview, now he practices what he considers better coffee-shop etiquette, lingering over his laptop during off-hours and spending more money.
At Cafe Grumpy in Chelsea, Ty-Loer Boring, a 32-year-old chef, says he often uses his laptop at coffee shops but loves it when there are none around because, then, people talk to one another.
"You can isolate yourself behind a laptop," he says, "but look at this place: Almost everyone is having a conversation."