Langester

Sitting in a Second Cup coffee shop reading emails and doing some light writing it struck me, I don’t really like their coffee! I much prefer StarBucks, and thinking about it, the location that I frequent often is either too cold or too hot, has terrible music which is too loud and there are lots of high school kids regardless of the time of day. But the cookies and varies treats are great.

So why do I continue to frequent Second Cup if the coffee isn’t to my taste, after all its a coffee shop…. its because of the free wireless connection they offer! Sure there’s a password but I don’t actually have to pay anything! In fact as far as I know there is only one other such place, everywhere else flashes the “HotSpot” symbol which is code for paying a lot of a short period of time. Also most of those hotspot services are browser based authentication which means I can’t use my SMTP or FTP clients a lot of the time.

10+ years after the internet come to the masses and at least 3 years of wireless explosion do I still have to pay for access when I’m at a coffee shop spending $4 on a latte and another $2 on a cookie… and if I’m there for longer I’ll have at least another $4 latte. By my calculation that’s $10 for about 45 minutes to an hours of my time. Which if I had a book, magazine or friend I would spend that amount of time there easily.

If they’re worried about kids bringing the laptops and surfing for hours and not spending anything… that’s what the Public library is for and its 6 doors down. They also have computers so you don’t have to lug yours around. Also a 16 year old is probably not going to have a laptop. That leaves a certain segment of the population of a certain age, which probably has better things to do with their time.