Buy Or Don’t Buy

I don’t know about you people, but I drink coffee. And sometimes it comes from coffeeshops. Yes, crazy, right? Well, not really.

Let me paint a picture. You go into one of these little cute cafe to get yourself a midafternoon snack, or a morning cup of coffee, or just to read a book  while looking through their big glass windows.

You enter, you stand in line, you order and pick up your treat of choice and move to get cream, sugar, napkins etc. But when you locate the “extras” sidebar, and its near tables which you would have to weave through to get there. You decide to scratch that and find yourself a chair. But that task is more difficult than it seems. Why? Why are there so many tables? Why doesn’t it seem like there are enough chairs? Who are these people? You look, you recognize one glasses-adorned man who has been in the same spot since you passed this cafe over an hour ago. And look, there is another one who’s been there even longer. But why?

Has this happened to you? Have you been left wondering what are these people doing here for so long? Well, you missed the sign on the front door, probably written on cardboard, saying that this cafe has Free Wi-Fi.

These people buy one cup of coffee, and sit there for hours and hours soaking up this cafe’s electricity, tables and air. As a consumer, there is nothing you can do except never come back. If you are one of the wi-fi leaches, you can get up and buy more coffee, cookie or whatever, but why would you? You could lose your seat, or someone might share the full table you are hogging. It’s too risky.

But what can Little Joe’s cafe do? Nothing. Now, Little Joe can’t going to make their connection splotchy, then he would lose the wi-fi users who buy stuff.

Enter the wireless personified.

One little cafe in Holand got the idea to guilt their wireless customers into buying more coffee. By a simple wireless name change, you can send a message to those users who are trying to get your wireless. Now I don’t know much about wireless, but I’m sure you can set it up to alert users anytime the network name is changed. So every half hour, change it to “OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready” to “If.you.dont.buy.more-we.wont.be.able.to.afford.wireless.anymore”. “To.thank.you.the.rest.of.the.day.is.on.us”.

Way to go Holand’s little cafe!

Story and image source: Adrants and Egansnow’s Flickr