A More Reasoned Coffee Shop WiFi approach

With the coffee shops came free WiFi and the hoards of laptop toting folks followed. With the current downturn in the economy, the laptop folks are not leaving nor are they buying enough to support them being there. Some shops in NYC are taking to banning laptops during the busiest parts of the day. Other shops are rethinking their laptop policies. Most of the new policies are either draconian bans, dropping WiFi, or manually enforced.

I would suggest them taking a lesson from the hotel industry. In some hotels whether you have to pay for Internet access or not they make you sign up for it once a day. Until you do you are routed to an internal self-promotional web page. I would suggest that the same approach should be a boon to the coffee shops offering free WiFi.

Once each hour user’s WiFi would be redirected to a self-promotional web page that reminds WiFi users that the Internet connection is for paying customers and have they purchased anything lately. Then giving them the ability to sign back in. Of course the timeout could be adjusted long during low traffic periods or shorter when seats are at a premium. For institutions where simple reminders are ineffective, they could choose to enforce the policy by linking the registers to the monitor and make the WiFi user enter their receipt number to continue using the Internet.

I would think that these approaches would be less alienating to the shop’s clientele. These techniques would be much better than dropping WiFi service or having face to face confrontations of employees and laptop users who have overstayed their welcome.