Coffee houses are pulling the plug on Wi-Fi service

San Francisco: Housed in an old San Francisco warehouse, Four Barrel Coffee — with its vintage record player, 53-year-old coffee roasting machine, tables hewn from recycled wood and wall of mounted boar heads — calls one of the world's most wired cities home.

But don't expect to get an internet connection there. Coffee connoisseurs hooked on this roaster's beans won't find a working signal — or even a power outlet. The uninitiated often try to plug into a fake one that owner Jeremy Tooker spray painted on the wall as a gag. "There are lots of marks on the drywall," Tooker said, laughing.

About 48 kilometres south in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley's technology industry, the Coupa Cafe offers some of the fastest internet service in town. But even this popular hangout for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists bans Wi-Fi on weekends to make room for customers sans laptops. "We had big parties or family groups who wanted to eat but had no room," said Jean Paul Coupal, who runs the cafe with his mother, Nancy. "They were getting upset about it. They felt the whole place was being taken over by techies."

Bottom line

Coffee shops were the retail pioneers of Wi-Fi, flipping the switch to lure customers. But now some owners are pulling the plug. They're finding that Wi-Fi freeloaders who camp out all day nursing a single cup of coffee are a drain on the bottom line.

Others want to preserve a friendly vibe and keep their establishments from turning into Matrix-like zombie shacks where people type and don't talk. That shift could gather steam now that free Wi-Fi is less of a perk after coffee giant Starbucks stopped charging for it last month.

"There is now a market niche for not having Wi-Fi," said Bryant Simon, a Temple University history professor and author of Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks. And not just for Luddites.

Mike Kuniavsky, who has spent his career dissecting people's relationship to digital technology, hangs out at Four Barrel Coffee precisely because he can disconnect from the internet and concentrate on his thoughts.

That's where he wrote his upcoming book on consumer electronics design: Smart Things. "No Wi-Fi is the reason I was able to write the book," Kuniavsky said.

Dan and Nathalie Drozdenko turned off the Wi-Fi at their Los Angeles cafe when it malfunctioned. The complaints poured in, but so did the compliments: Lots of customers appreciated a wireless cup of joe at the Downbeat Cafe, a popular lunch spot in Echo Park. "People come here because we don't offer it. They know they can get their work done and not get distracted," Dan Drozdenko said.

About-face

This is a 180-degree turn from the always-on culture of San Francisco, where the first Wi-Fi cafe went online in 2000.

That's when Cliff Skolnick, a networking engineer who became a champion of piping free Wi-Fi to the world, beamed a wireless connection to the coffee shop near his apartment. The owners of Martha & Bros. Coffee Co. never even knew, Skolnick said. Soon independent cafes began offering laptop-toting customers free access to the internet to poach customers from Starbucks. But many discovered that Wi-Fi could eat into their business.

Tooker of Four Barrel Coffee says he turned his cafe into a wireless-free zone to encourage his customers to interact with one another rather than their computer screens. On a busy weekday afternoon, his shop is packed with customers, only two of whom are gazing at laptops. His decision to ban Wi-Fi hasn't undercut business: Four Barrel goes through an average of 700 pounds of coffee each week.