Starbucks Still Welcomes WiFi Patrons: I Wonder if This Will Last?

Earlier this month (Aug. 7) I wrote about…

Digital Nomads Getting the Boot from Coffee Shops

However, CNET’s Rafe Needleman reports coffee shop giant Starbucks has a different attitude…

Starbucks: Stay as long as you want

Rafe quotes a Starbucks official response that states: We do not have any time limits for being in our stores, and continue to focus on making the Third Place experience for every Starbucks customer.

The “third place” referred to is the third place of work – the first two places being the office and home. Starbucks has a more restrictive WiFi access policy than some independent coffee shops though. You need to be a paying customer of some hotspot service (AT&T, T-Mobile, Boingo) to get more than two hours per day. Registered Starbucks card holders can get up to two hours of WiFi at a single Starbucks location per day. You can’t just buy a cup of coffee and plop down in a chair all day. iPhone users can use WiFi at a Starbucks all day. But, how much can you really get done with just an iPhone?

And, I suspect that some extremely busy Starbucks locations would prefer to have some kind of limits available to place on their customers. I found that most Starbucks have seating available in the mornings. But, some locations are impossible to work at if you arrive at mid-afternoons. Anywhere near a school seems to have this situation. Quite honestly, I didn’t realize high school kids drank coffee (I didn’t way back when) until I noticed how young some mid-afternoon Starbucks patrons were (especially when I couldn’t find a seat to use to work).

I applaud Starbuck’s attitude. But, I think they may need to give some locations a bit more flexibility in deciding how long customers can plant themselves in shops with extremely heavy traffic.

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