But on the other hand... Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out. At least that's what they say. I often see McDonald's fill that niche for older folks.
That can all be trivially fixed by style of seating and tables, removing all power outlets and so on. People who don't go there to work won't care.
I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.
You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%, 100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food, only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of these office workers. Bar seating is especially space-efficient for this.
The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe owners.
The $10 comfortable folding chairs that recently became available changed the equation for me. Rather than sitting in a cafe, I much prefer to take my laptop and a chair and go sit in a nice park, on the beach, or even in the woods.
The common non-tourist behaviour in a café in Vienna is to sit there talking for hours, buying a few cups of coffee total. It has been like that since before laptops were a thing. Yet the cafés remain viable.
> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out
Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the human perspective.
I think it's pretty common today though. There are a number of cafes with a lot of seating where I see a whole lot of tables with someone seated working on their laptop.
Cafés as a place to be for cheap where the weather can't reach you while you read the newspaper you can't afford or a book or plan a revolution is quite old. Like centuries old, perhaps millenia if you count gossip and include inns.
