Everyday hordes of bloggers trudge down to their local cafes to camp out all day, gorging on free wi-fi for the cost of a latte. But now the cafes are saying "no more!", and it's all because of the unemployed.
What appears to be the problem here is that the places that used to be exclusively blogger wi-fi campgrounds have been infiltrated by the unemployed who are too poor to afford wi-fi in their apartments, so they have to go to coffee shops for internet access to look for jobs and watch porn and whatnot.
Reports the Wall Street Journal:
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.
To make matters even worse, some of these downtrodden killjoys have the audacity to show up with their own tasty goods so as to not have to actually make any purchases!
Customers' frugality has reached extremes in the recession, the 40-year-old (Cocoa Bar owner Masoud) Soltani says. Some patrons show up with a tea bag for a free hot-water refill or quietly unwrap homemade sandwiches, he says.
So there you have it folks— evil corporations are killing blogging by laying off their employees! Or something like that.
Well, okay, bloggers have been doing this very same thing for years, but the coffee shop system in this country can only handle so many freeloaders before the damn thing just goes haywire, and that's what all of you unemployed people have done —you've ruined a perfectly good free market entitlement program. You bastards!
