Background:
If you go into a coffeeshop in a major city, there is a good chance that you will find it entirely colonized by patrons with laptops who use the shop as a “home office.”
Even if you wait for half an hour, you might never get a table. Woe!
Previously, this issue could be mitigated by either:
- Not providing WiFi, which is now obsolete due to phone tethering and/or built-in cell radios in laptops.
or
- Restricting access to wall outlets (which worked very well in the era of 3-hour laptop batteries). But improved battery technology has rendered this approach ineffective as well.
Fig 1: This laptop has unavoidably occupied an entire coffeeshop table.
Proposal:
It is difficult to politely kick out a customer.
So we turn to a technical solution to discourage long-term laptop use: harsh overhead lighting.
Specifically, we propose strategically arranged spotlights (Fig. 2) that will be generally acceptable but will cause unbearable screen glare when reflecting off a laptop screen.
Fig 2: The array of ceiling lights (blue) is calculated to cause maximum laptop glare at all screen angles.
Fig 3: At left, we can see the reflecting lights in the (turned off) laptop screen. At right, note how the glare makes the computer unusable (compare to the laptop screen in Fig. 1).
Conclusion:
If you own a coffeeshop and hate your customers, you should give this plan a shot!
PROS: Increases patron turnover and discourages long-term occupancy of tables.
CONS: It is possible that the substantial fraction of a coffeeshop’s patrons only go there to use their laptops, so cutting off this revenue may deal a fatal blow to the shop’s profitability.
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 
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