Wifi saga aftermath
A couple of newspaper articles and an appearance by David on NPR’s All Things Considered and the whole overblown story seems to have run its course.
The New York Times piece, by the original wifi-backlash-as-global-news instigator Glenn Fleishman (who is a really nice guy) focused primarily on the “business” angle of this story. The caption under the large photo of owners Jen and Chris reads that “profit rose after they stopped free wireless Internet service on weekends”. While it looks like we’ve sold a handful more drinks on the couple of wifi-free weekends we’ve had so far, I’m not sure this has caused our “profits” to rise in any meaningful, measurable fashion. The dubious business angle of this story seems far less interesting to me than the cultural angle, which while no doubt of considerable interest to Glenn, was of little interest to the Times business editors. The fact that giant public companies like T-Mobile or Starbucks bet some part of their farms on the deployment of these technologies makes the tale newsworthy, but I’m not sure I buy into the intended extrapolations.
Seeing my name in the New York Times was sort of nifty and weird (I should have told them my last name was spelled “G O A T S E”), but I’m more satisfied by my mention in an actual article about coffee in the upcoming issue of the typically underwhelming trade publication Fresh Cup (click on the “Robusta Rehab” article on the left side).
Also, why does the New York Times always capitalize the word “Internet”? Is it treated as the proper name of a place? Did I miss a William Safire piece on this?
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June 15th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
Regarding why the NY Times capitalizes “Internet”: It’s the AP Style. I’m sure they have their own take on the style guide, but the Holy Bible of journalism says “Internet” needs caps. Also, “In later references, “the Net” is acceptable.” The same goes for “the Web.” I dunno. Maybe they just think it’s that important. And with that I step off my gramatical high horse.
June 16th, 2005 at 6:56 am
Your long nightmare of misattention is over! And thanks for being the subject (victim)? It’s always interesting when you step into the Zeitgeist, and quite hard to scrape it off. Remember warchalking?
The NY Times has its own style guide, and Internet is a proper name because it’s always been defined that way. (It did stand for “inter networks” at one point. And it’s one of many internets, apparently, according to a world leader.)
At one point, email was spelled E-mail in the NY Times.
The business angle was emphasized in the caption, but I think you may be underrating that part of things. The weekends are clearly busier based on your all descriptions, and I’d be curious if receipts don’t reflect that more. The other cafes I spoke to were primarily interested in the culture issue, but finances always ran beneath it: it was hard to have the culture of REGULARS kept happy with too many laptop users during key social times.
But we’ll see. In a few months, if receipts are up 1 percent or down 1 percent on weekends compared to similar weekends with Wi-Fi, then it’s all about culture, innit?
June 17th, 2005 at 12:02 am
So… like. Tony. When are you gonna get back to talking about coffee ;)
A fan of the coffee talk ;)