it is if you want the place to be financially viable.

The common non-tourist behaviour in a café in Vienna is to sit there talking for hours, buying a few cups of coffee total. It has been like that since before laptops were a thing. Yet the cafés remain viable.

Same here in Greece.

I’m going to build a cafe inside a faraday cage someday.

Just to see what happens.

Maybe I’ll not serve alcohol and call it Zero Bars.

Better yet, serve alcohol and call it Bar/No Bars.

For the case of

> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out

Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the human perspective.

I think it's pretty common today though. There are a number of cafes with a lot of seating where I see a whole lot of tables with someone seated working on their laptop.

Cafés as a place to be for cheap where the weather can't reach you while you read the newspaper you can't afford or a book or plan a revolution is quite old. Like centuries old, perhaps millenia if you count gossip and include inns.

I suspect the economics have changed in a lot of cities though.