It was reported in the media that certain Starbucks in New York City were covering up their AC outlets, so that customers would have to rely on their laptop batteries, rather than the company’s power supply.
This is obviously a direct and very reasonable response to those coffee shop customers using their laptops (and we have all seen them every week) who hog a table or chair for literally hours and hours. They plug their laptop in to the nearby power outlet and ‘camp’ for the day. This is just very poor coffee shop public etiquette and quite frankly very annoying and unreasonable to other patrons who want to ‘get online for a while’. If you need to be online all day for hours at a time, rent some space at a collaborative office space such as CoLoft in Santa Monica, California.
Good for Starbucks and any other coffee shops that use a solution like this. By simply covering their AC power outlets or limiting the availability to just 1 or 2, this automatically and effectively cuts down this practice.