Starbucks has issued a countrywide crackdown in its Korean locations, demanding that customers stop turning its cafés into quasi-WeWork spaces, after a spate of incidents involving people bringing desktop PCs, printers, and even office partitions into its stores in the country.
Seeing people pecking at their laptop keyboard while they cradle a latte will be a common enough sight at your local Starbucks in the U.S. However, some South Korean folk have managed to outstretch the limits of the coffee chain’s hospitality. The Korea Herald reports that “every branch” of Starbucks in the nation has put up signs telling customers that bringing in their desktop PCs, printers, power strips, and even putting up office partitioning, is no longer permitted.
Local news reports suggest that the Starbucks customers with a penchant for bringing their home offices into the café are “a small but persistent group of clients.” The signs urge people to make room for their fellow coffee drinkers, and not to abandon their tech clutter at shared tables for long periods.
Are you a cagongjok?
Of course, there’s already a local word for these busy coffee shop table hogging folks. The Korea Herald says locals call them ‘cagongjok,’ which it explains is a portmanteau word blending the Korean words for ‘café’ and ‘study tribe.’
In our topmost picture, which the Korea Herald simply credits to social media (X), you can see that a particularly anti-social setup was spotted in a Starbucks in South Korea. We assume the image was originally shared for mirth-making and/or incredulous impact. Not only does this coffee shop visitor have a bulky-looking desktop setup (but where is the system unit?), but they have also constructed an isolating office pod to reduce distractions.
The source report suggests that other Starbucks cagongjoks have been spotted bringing printers, which are typically bulky, as well as power strips to feed their numerous electronics.
South Korea has enjoyed a “massive café boom” in recent years, according to Statistics Korea, which is quoted by the Herald. Latest figures show the number of coffee shops operating in the country have almost doubled, to 100,000, since 2015. It is pointed out that using cafés as study and workspaces has also grown quickly in popularity.
However, long-staying customers “can be costly for owners,” states the source. It cites an industry research institute that estimates a single coffee only covers 1 hour and 42 minutes of seat time before it becomes unprofitable.
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