What One Drink an Hour Actually Buys
· 1 min read
The unwritten rent on a cafe table is real, calculable, and much lower than most people fear — until the room fills up.
A cafe pays rent per square metre and recovers it from the seats in that space. Divide a month's rent by the number of tables and the number of hours the place is open and you get the cost of holding a table for an hour, which in most cities is startlingly small — often less than the margin on a single coffee.
That is why nobody minds a laptop in a half-empty room at ten on a Tuesday. The seat is not scarce, and one drink covers it comfortably. The arithmetic only turns hostile when demand exceeds seats, at which point the cost of your table is not the rent, it is the revenue from the person standing in the doorway who left.
A practical rule
Buy something at least every ninety minutes while the room has free tables, and something more substantial if you stay through a meal service. When people are standing, leave or accept that you are now costing the business money and behave accordingly — one seat, not two, and bags off the chair.
The other half of this is choosing the right room in the first place. Rooms designed for working — the ones with big tables, plenty of sockets and a counter rather than table service — have priced this in and want you there. On this site those are the listings under Study and Workspace, plus anywhere listing both Wi-Fi and power outlets, which is the closest thing to a machine-readable version of please stay.
