Digital Nomads Getting the Boot from Coffee Shops

The year (more or less) I spent as an office-less full-time blogger was a lot of fun. If I had to do it all over again, I would. There is, I think, a kind of mystique surrounding the notion of being an officeless digital nomad. There’s the belief I think that you can walk into any random coffee shop, find free WiFi, plop into a comfortable chair for a couple of hours and get to work blogging, writing an article or book, or write cool programming code.

This does happen reasonably frequently enough to make the experience a good one. But, I also found myself in crowded venues filled with people with the same idea who arrived before you and grabbed every single chair and table in the place. And, once comfortable, these people have no more intention to move than you (or I) would. I often wondered what the proprieters of these places thought of the situation. Were they happy to have a busy looking place even though the people sitting were not buying much (or anything) in the hours they sat around using WiFi and, sometimes, using A/C outlets to charge their notebooks?

Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, here’s what some of them thinnk…

No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users

It looks like the days of the homey coffee scented nearly free office space enjoyed by digital nomads is going through some growing pains and will probably look quite different when things settle down. Perhaps its time for co-working zones to be identified and, more importantly, funded by the digital nomads using those facilities. I recall speaking with a few people about this kind of co-working zone last year to reduce the problem of not being able to find a convenient hotspot work area now and then.

The idea of being a digital nomad without an office is an attractive one to some. But, the reality is, it is good to have a spot you can reliably call your own to comfortably work in day after day.

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