The restaurant is faced with the natural desire to increase turnover and therefore business. Doing this is common practice, and although many of us stop frequenting places where we’re subtly and not so subtly hustled through a timetable dictated meal, it seems that there are still plenty of patrons who accept the practice.

The missing component is this. The restaurant wishes to increase sales by increasing the number of patrons served. They can’t increase their space, but is there some particular reason they can’t offer their product via take out? One would hope that their popularity is at least partly based on their primary product. If the product were available regardless of the availability of the comfy seating, the customers might very well additionally develop their own processes for getting the comfy seat inside.

Oh, and (btw) why can’t the airport flight monitors be accessed by any traveller on a PDA anyway? Is this just a convenience/business idea no one’s thought of?

Vera

Given that price adjustment is unlikely to be a solution, given ebb and flow of demand, and that making coffee suddenly more expensive still doesn’t persuade people who’ve already bought it cheaper to vacate, I have another solution: a secondary market.

The coffee shop sells coffee and provides seating, but it also provides a facility for people to buy/sell their seats. And only those who’ve purchased a coffee can participate.

Enabling customers to freely trade the seating may at first glance appear to be completely impractical, but with enough thought I reckon it could be done.

It would only really kick in when there were no free tables. So, usually, seating works as normal – informally. However, when things get busy customers could start seeing signs on their table saying “Surrendering your seat is now valued at $1. Your table at $10.”

2: Security/pharma marketing is not quite the same. An external threat exists and they either inform people about it, or perhaps overhype it a little (and downplay side effects, e.g. liver damage from various medications or crashes and slowdowns from installing anything by Symantec). These companies are also marketing a defense against the threat they are hyping. This cafe, on the other hand, is creating the threat of missing a flight intentionally, and the coffee they sell and seating they provide is not a defense against that threat. Rather different kettles of fish, these two cases are.

3: It’s occurred to me that some of the anti-sit devices (although clearly not uncomfortable chairs/anti-homeless benches or any indoor ones) might actually be targeted not at humans but at pigeons — particularly the fairly-dense-spikes-and-sh*t-on-a-ledge-or-standpipe type, and particularly in London and New York where they’re especially well documented and the accumulation of pigeon poop is a major public-works headache…the effects on human would-be sitters may just be collateral damage in a war with flying vermin.