It appears no one wants to sit at home and work in their pyjamas anymore — a boon for mental health, but a big problem for coffee shop owners.

Apparently it’s tough running a café when a great many customers treat it like their home office, when they park themselves and their various devices — laptop, tablet, phone, drone, etc. — at tables next to electrical outlets and sit typing away for hours, rarely purchasing more than a latte and a muffin. Or worse, when they can’t find a table next to an outlet so they run their myriad cables across the café floor in search of a free socket, setting booby traps of tangled cord that Indiana Jones himself could not evade.

This is the scene at thousands of coffee shops around the world where owners are failing to turn a profit because remote workers spend a lot of time in cafés, but not a lot of money. What’s a struggling owner to do then?

There’s a simple solution: ban the engine of the remote workforce. Ban the laptop.

It’s a policy hundreds of small businesses have begun to adopt in an attempt to reestablish healthy customer turnover and increase profits. A number of popular cafes in the U.K. banned laptops earlier this year. One of them, Brighton’s Dough Lover, pinned a poster to its door depicting a frowning, anthropomorphized computer alongside the caption “THIS IS A LAPTOP FREE ZONE.”

But other cafés have taken a less aggressive approach to the issue, banning personal computers only during busy periods, and informing customers of the change via friendly signs on tables. Here in Toronto, blogTO reported this month that Neo Coffee Bar, a café in the King St. E. neighbourhood, introduced laptop-free hours at its restaurant. “Weekends between 12 p.m.-4 p.m. are laptop free,” read the café’s table signs. “Join us in creating a community that encourages social interaction and making new friends.”

Indeed, if you read through the many media accounts of café owners trying to stay afloat in the remote work economy, it’s clear they’re not only distressed about laptop users lowering profits — they are saddened by how drastically laptops have changed café culture.

These owners appear not only to want to speed up customer turnover but to resurrect a long-forgotten idea of what they believe a coffee house ought to be: a space where strangers form intimate bonds and discuss the issues of the day. The only problem is that people never stopped doing these things. They just started doing them elsewhere. They started doing them online — on their laptops. And of course, on their phones.

“Creating a community that encourages social interaction and making new friends” is a lovely goal. Unfortunately for the likes of struggling coffee shop owners, it’s a goal already achieved by the internet itself, a space many find less daunting than a restaurant because eye contact is seldom involved, and if things get awkward or boring, you can simply log off. (Anonymity is a plus, too, in case you want to be the worst version of yourself.)

It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of remote workers are millennials and, what can I say, we have a sketchy history when it comes to paying for things. We rarely pay for news and we pirate entertainment in our sleep. It’s probably not a coincidence that some of us think it’s perfectly normal to sit in a café for seven hours without so much as buying a sandwich.

However, we can’t sit in the same place writing for seven hours if we can’t hear ourselves think. Cafés banning laptops would be wise to do as many painfully hip cafés in my west-end Toronto neighbourhood have done recently: create an ambience that is conducive to extremely short visits, and possibly a nervous breakdown.

These cafés appear to have quicker customer turnover and fewer squatters because they blast music better suited to an after-hours nightclub (think a steady beat with a few wild grunts thrown in) and, most importantly, they provide chairs and stools so hard and unforgiving you wonder if they were designed specifically to injure the people sitting in them.

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If customers are spending too much time at your café, it’s probably too comfortable. Go ahead, and ban laptops, sure. But while you’re at it, crank up the beats and throw away the cushions.

Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.