In the past it was pretty normal for many of us to go to the office to work and once there we stayed there for a set amount of hours before coming home again and we did this day in and day out.
We may of course have ventured to a café to have a break during our lunch hour or to meet friends for a social chat after work. Nowadays though, more and more of us are actually going to the café to work.
Take Panera Bread for example. It is a chain of café restaurants right across the United States and Canada and most of these cafés offer free Wi-Fi access to their customers, something that I’m sure you’d agree is very convenient.
Ok so we have a laptop, we have free Wi-Fi and we can enjoy a coffee or whatever else takes our fancy whilst we work. Welcome to working in the 21st century where the café workforce is on the rise.
An article in the St Petersburg Times reported that at the Panera Bread café in new Tampa, the number of people “working” there has risen by over 20 percent in the last year alone according to Melanie Cunningham the general manager.
Once, when the place was busy says the story, she decided to shut down the Wi-Fi during lunchtime in order to free up some seats, which turned out to be not such a good idea as 75 per cent of her customers had laptops with them.
“I got way too many bad e-mails,” Cunningham said. “In the long run, the people actually sitting here and doing business were eating breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
Apparently it’s just the same at the other side of Tampa Bay in St Petersburg Feather Sound area; that particular café even has a meeting room and around 70 percent of customers are there with their laptops says Manager Elaine Hushek.
In fact it’s a new way of working that is going on right across the UK, parts of Europe and the US and Canada.
Gartner Dataquest, a global IT research company says that the number of workers who “telecommute” is likely to rise to around 27.5 percent this year. That’s a lot of folk away from the corporate workspace.
Working at the café sounds like a great idea to me! You get free Wi-Fi connection, the motivation of a busy atmosphere and coffee on tap. That sure beats working in some drab office or home alone!
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