Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible

"... it's nice to continue working..." yes, this is also the problem with so many cafes. People go there to get some work done but also to interact. To strike up conversations about work or life with people outside your usual bubble. If you didn't want to be around other people you could stay in the office or at home. But in recent years everyone wears headphones and has so many devices that walking into a cafe at lunchtime is like going into a call center. What's the point? I've worked on laptops in cafes since the early 90s when I was usually the only one with a computer. But I learned the civility that if you're going to work in a public space, part of the reason you're doing that is to take time away from your work to interact with other people, including the service staff. Usually I would never go work "out" until all the job reqs for the day were done and I was comfortable being interrupted. To go into a public space and tune everything out and demand that it function like your private office is a bizarre antisocial feature of a generation that has spent too much time on social media and doesn't know how to act or respond in real life. Walking into those places now just makes me sad.

From my view... there are cafes for working and cafes for socializing, and to me they have different vibes and regulars. Or perhaps I'm fortunate enough to live in a city where there's such a distinction, I'm not really sure.

For example, there used to be a cafe around here with a designated 'no laptops, no work' area and some board games (R.I.P. Longfellow's). There's a local chain that doesn't even provide WiFi. Contrast that to the hyper-sterile Blue Bottle Coffee less than a mile away -- I actually do like their coffee, but I don't go there to socialize. It's a space optimized to cycle people in-and-out ASAP.

Pre-COVID I actually ran a small mailing list for people to hang out at rotating local cafes, so I get what you mean to some extent. Even then, you're probably right that doesn't seem as dire to me because I grew up post-2000.

I'm old enough to remember when the 'no laptops' signs sprouted and then quickly were overwhelmed or went out of business. I didn't take it personally - by that point I understood that my gf and I making graphics and websites while talking to the regulars wasn't the problem. Most of what I'm referencing is in South America, Thailand, Vietnam, France, Czechia and Spain. Generally liquor licenses are permissive and they're family owned, so, a lot of places serve coffee during the day and transition to bars and nightclubs at night. There is a general flow to your day where as evening approaches, you switch from corfee to alcohol and people you know come and populate your table, sometimes they work and if they're coders you talk shop about databases or something, then it gets too loud so you go out with whoever came by and get dinner. And if the server is finished you invite them too. This is what I considered a civilized form of working in a cafe with a computer on your table. And even at that,any times my gf thought it might be rude so we'd put it away and play chess or read.

I think if people had an awareness of their surroundings in these spaces, the spaces wouldn't have turned into sterilized off-campus work sites. But that may be asking too much from people who've never experienced it. I think this is what some of the 90s/00s startups were trying to replicate with their play rooms, but that's a far cry from sitting with a local dev and a taxi driver and a drunk musician spitting out ideas To me that's what the cafe is for.

(edit) I don't mean this to come off as the rant of an old gen X-er... it sounds to me like you had a real appreciation for the counterculture of ideas that could bubble up from having some limits and creativity in those spaces. You woulda loved the 90s. But maybe if enough people get sick of Blue Bottle Coffee and Starbucks, we can claw some humanity back. As it is, the less work-centric and more friends-and-family-centric parts if the world mostly reject the cafe as workplace model. They didn't used to find it so rude but they do now. I hope we have a backlash in the States if only because people really need that space to be verbal, interacting humans with each other. Especially on a lunch break.

I live in France and I've never heard of something like that. There's usually a strict distinction between bars and cafés, with cafés being where people take a coffee or an orange juice during the day with friends, and bars where people drink beer during the night with friends, and sometimes meet other people.

The conversion from cafe in the day to bar/club at night is more common in Spain and Argentina, but there are places around in France. I lived in a couple villages in Auvergne near Clermont-Ferrand and also in Avignon. The places that are cafes in the day will convert at night in these smaller towns. The whole square in Avignon is cafes in day and bars at night. (In Paris or Marseille I didn't really see this - but it's prevalent in Madrid and Buenos Aires).

> In Paris or Marseille I didn't really see this

That's probably this then, I've lived in Lyon all my life.

I wish I had spent more time in Lyon. The countryside around there probably seems boring to you, since you grew up in the city. But coming from America, it's obvious that the smallest village in France is light-years more advanced, more educated, clever and civilized than the country I grew up in. It has its problems of course, but it's paradise compared to most other places I've been.

Funny, slightly dark story about Avignon. I became friendly with a guy there who was a good musician but turned out to be a bit of a...right wing type. National Front. There was a cafe on the square that was a gay club at night, and my girlfriend and I used to have coffee there in the day. One day this guy walked by and said "don't you know what this bar is where you're sitting?" I said, "come on, chill out, sit down." He took some convincing. So finally he sat down and I said, "I know you like Le Pen. How do you feel about sitting in front of a gay bar with an Filipina/Mexican and Jew/Argentine? Are you angry we're in your country?" He said, "as long as you're here because you're interested in France, I'm okay." Later, walking through town, he saw a kid urinating on the front step of an apartment. He shouted at the kid and the kid pulled a knife out. This guy tackled him. Still later we took a bus to the station through the banlieu and saw the desolation - she said, "what have they done to their country?"

Eh. I shouldn't tell these stories on HN. I guess it taught me that life is complicated and to bring it full circle to the cafe question, your view of the world is very relative to where you grew up, in what time period, and what you expect people to behave like.

On the contrary, the countryside has a lot of appeal to me. For a few years we lived in a rather isolated house in Dardilly and I have fond memories of them. Not really the same experience as the countryside but I'm really glad I spent some of my youth here and not directly in the city.

Thank you for sharing that story, it's thanks to people like you that bring some new perspective I started to love my country for what it is.