Global Trends

Coffee Shops Have a Freelancer Problem

The photos spread across Threads in early April 2026: a group of customers sprawled across the chairs at a

By Conor Healy

April 15, 2026

The photos spread across Threads in early April 2026: a group of customers sprawled across the chairs at a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City, eyes closed, bags piled around them, laptops dark. I live in Vietnam. I work from cafes here. The comments were already in the hundreds by the time I saw it.

MÊ bistro & cafe sits in Nhiêu Lộc ward, a quiet neighbourhood in District 3. The cafe markets itself as a workspace-friendly spot, popular with students and freelancers chasing deadlines. A group arrived around 9am. Each person ordered one drink, roughly 50,000 VND ($2). Then they settled in. They brought outside food. They lay down on the furniture and slept.

When the group finally went to pay, the cafe charged them an extra 40,000 VND per person. The surcharge was not posted anywhere. The customers were furious.

The Drama That Followed

Within hours, the one-star reviews started appearing on Google. The cafe owner responded publicly, posting photos of the group sleeping across the furniture. The story exploded on Threads and Facebook. Comments split down the middle.

Some defended the customers: no sign warned them about a surcharge, they were students with deadlines, the cafe advertises itself as a place to work. Others defended the cafe: ten hours on a $2 drink is not a customer, it is a squatter. Bringing outside food and sleeping on the chairs crosses a line no sign should need to spell out.

The cafe removed the photos after complaints about using personal images. The reviews kept coming. A few days later, images circulated showing the cafe dark and shuttered. The owner clarified they had not closed, just opened late because most of their staff are students with class schedules. The story continued generating debate across Vietnamese social media for weeks.

The same week, a different cafe in Hanoi posted its own policy: no photography, no filming. “Đây là nơi uống cà phê, không phải chỗ trình diễn thời trang,” the sign read. This is a place to drink coffee, not a fashion show. Customers had been ordering drinks, taking photos for Instagram, then leaving without touching them.

Two cafes. Two policies. The same underlying problem: cafe culture has a freelancer problem. And it is not just Vietnam.

Someone Brought a Printer to Starbucks

If sleeping on the furniture seems extreme, consider what happened in South Korea in August 2025.

Photos circulating that month showed something that made the Ho Chi Minh City incident look restrained: printers, partitions, and full cubicle-style workstations set up inside Starbucks branches. Customers had been constructing personal offices, complete with desktop monitors and multioutlet power strips, nursing a single Americano while the printer hummed.

Starbucks Korea responded by posting signs in every branch banning desktop computers, printers, power strips, and “large partitions.” Laptops remain permitted. The company said the goal was ensuring “a pleasant and accessible store experience” for all customers. Translated: stop building cubicles.

South Korea has a word for these people: cagongjok. It combines the Korean words for cafe, study, and tribe. The term is not affectionate. Small cafe owners call them “electricity thieves.” One operator told Korea Pro that students occupy seats for six to seven hours on a single order. “In a small cafe like ours where seating is limited, cagongjok are a financial strain.”

The problem spans continents. Across the United States, coffee shops are banning laptops, removing wifi, and taping over power outlets. The pushback has been building for years. But the sleeping photos in Vietnam and the printer incident in Korea clarified something cafe owners have known for a while: the social contract is broken. By hour five on a single latte, the coffee shop stopped being a business and became a free office where rent is one flat white.

Why Does Japan’s Cafe Culture Work Differently?

In Japanese kissaten, nobody brings a printer. Nobody brings a laptop either. These traditional coffee houses operate on a set of unspoken rules so deeply understood that writing them down would be mildly embarrassing.

The Tokyo Kissaten Research Institute describes kissaten as spaces that embody the owners’ very lives. Visitors are expected to respect the unspoken rules of each establishment. One rule above all: order at least one item per person. Another, less spoken: do not overstay. The brewing itself takes three to four minutes via cloth filter or siphon. The unspoken rule of kissaten, according to one guide, is that companionship, not caffeine, is the priority.

Osaka’s cafe culture makes this even more explicit. A guide to the city’s morning kissaten notes that the morning set is offered at a low profit margin, with the expectation that customers will eat, drink their coffee, and move on within a reasonable time. Usually under an hour. Occupying a table for an extended period is considered selfish and disrespectful to the master and to other guests who may be waiting.

No signs needed. No printer bans. Everyone just knows.

A $5 Customer Sitting in a $50 Seat

Coffee shops operate on thin margins. The average US coffee shop makes about 15% profit after all expenses. A sit-in cafe generates roughly $300 to $800 in revenue per square foot per year. The industry uses a metric called RevPASH, revenue per available seat hour, to measure how efficiently each table earns its keep.

A 40-seat coffee shop open 12 hours generates 480 seat hours daily. If that shop makes $5,600 per day, its RevPASH is $11.67. Every hour a seat sits occupied by a single oat latte, that number drops.

Now consider the cagongjok. Six hours on one coffee. That seat generated maybe $5 across half a working day. The customer beside them, the one who ordered, drank, and left in 40 minutes, generated the same revenue in a fraction of the time. One seat is earning its keep. The other is overhead with headphones.

Bedford Hill Coffee Bar in Brooklyn has operated with single-use wifi codes for years. Owner Allison Stuart told Brokelyn she operates on an unspoken “one coffee, one hour” etiquette. “We only have 12 tables and it’s important to have the tables turn over,” she said. “I’m happy to provide internet, but realistically the business can’t afford to have a customer sitting all day on one cup of coffee.”

Timed Wifi, Taped Outlets, and Weekend Bans

New York’s Devocion chain limits wifi to two-hour windows on weekdays and eliminates it entirely on weekends. Detroit’s Alba coffee shop has operated without wifi since opening in 2023. DC-based cafe Elle launched without wifi, reversed course after receiving negative Google reviews, then settled on a compromise: access restricted to Monday through Thursday, 8am to 3pm, with a 90-minute usage cap.

Some venues have resorted to physically taping over electrical outlets. Others play loud, upbeat music. One chicken tender restaurant near a commenter on Hacker News “practically blasts their music,” driving off everyone who is not Gen Z. The music is the message: this is not a place to linger.

The timed wifi code is the most elegant solution. A cafe profiled in The Manual gives customers a slip with a unique code granting access for two or three hours depending on order size. Craig Anderson of Appliance Analysts described the system as one he supports as a freelancer. “It keeps us honest and removes the worry over whether I’m overstaying my welcome. The café is always buzzing with a mixture of laptop users and people chatting over coffee.”

One Ohio cafe went further. It built a separate room for office workers, rented by the hour with credits for buying drinks. The main cafe played loud, energetic music. The office room stayed quiet. The wifi timer kicked people off via DHCP lease. Two businesses in one building, each serving its audience.

Weekend laptop bans are increasingly common. The logic is simple: weekdays belong to freelancers filling otherwise empty seats; weekends belong to couples and friends who came for conversation. The hard part is enforcement. As one barista noted, these rules force employees into awkward confrontations with customers who do not want to leave.

How Did Korea’s Cafe Culture Get So Extreme?

South Korea has over 100,000 coffee shops. That is double the number of convenience stores in the country. Starbucks Korea alone operates 2,050 locations, more than Japan despite having less than half the population.

Office vacancy rates in Seoul hover around 2.6%. Rent is climbing. Companies that discovered during the pandemic that they did not need office space have not rushed to lease new floors. Some let employees work from coworking spaces or remotely. Many of those employees ended up at Starbucks.

A professor of Korean culture at Curtin University told Fortune that the phenomenon predates the pandemic but accelerated after 2020. “It’s quite a cheap way to work really,” Jo Elfving-Hwang said. “You can just go and have a cup of coffee, work there. But people are taking it a little bit to the extreme nowadays.”

The printer was the extreme.

Starbucks Korea’s policy now explicitly bans desktop computers, printers, power strips, and large partitions. Laptops remain permitted. The company said the goal was ensuring “a pleasant and accessible store experience” for all customers. Translated: stop building cubicles.

The Cafe Is Not Your Office

The kissaten model works because expectations are baked in. The slow pour. The quiet. The assumption that this is a pause in your day, not a replacement for your office. You are buying time, not just coffee, but the time has limits everyone understands.

Western cafe culture promised a third place. Neither home nor office, somewhere in between. Starbucks built a global brand on the concept. But a third place still has to function as a business. When the third place becomes a free office with espresso, it stops working for everyone else.

Cafe owners now face a choice. Absorb the cost and hope social norms shift. They can cut wifi and accept the one-star reviews. They can implement timed codes and minimum spend rules. Or they can do what one Santa Cruz manager admitted: accept the laptop crowd during slow hours, but push for periodic purchases and reasonable visit lengths.

Japan’s kissaten never advertised themselves as coworking spaces with better aesthetics. They advertised themselves as coffee houses. The difference is not just branding. It is an entire social contract, understood without being enforced.

South Korea had to put up signs. America had to pull the plug. Japan just poured the coffee and assumed you would know when to leave.

If you run a cafe, you probably cannot rely on that assumption anymore.

MÊ bistro & cafe is still open and still serving customers at 386/71E Lê Văn Sỹ, Nhiêu Lộc ward, District 3, Ho Chi Minh City. They make good coffee. Just maybe don’t don’t take a nap on the furniture….