Meet Me at the Coffee Shop/We Can Dance Like Iggy Pop

Every once in awhile, SFist likes to get out of our pajamas and take the SFist show on the road. So we pick up our trusty laptop and head on out to go work at a coffee shop. There's one we especially like to go to-- it's small, extremely cute and cozy, and has plenty of outlets for everyone to plug in. There's only one problem, though, and that even at like two in the afternoon, they're usually too full for us to get a table. And so we go to another place only to discover that they too are completely full.

It's two in the afternoon, doesn't anybody have jobs?

And it's the worst kind of coffee shop denizens too, the kind who have their laptop on and are pretty much camped out there for hours. Damnit, how are we supposed to camp out there for hours with our laptop if everyone else is doing it?

So sometimes we give up and head back home, where it's never crowded and there's plenty of electrical outlets. And sometimes we wander around like Israelites in the desert, searching for the coffee shop promised land (we're pretty sure it's Ritual Roasters).

But shouldn't there be a better way of doing this? Having to wander around aimlessly looking for a coffee shop is not how we want to spend our afternoons, after all. And besides, how coffee shops actually make money if people spend hours on their laptop to only buy a cup of coffee and the occasional scone is one of life's great mysteries.

So we have ideas. Like couldn't coffee shops set up some sort of web cam to their web sites so you can see in advance if there's tables available before heading over? Or how about they set up some sort of reservation system. You know, so we could reserve the table in the backroom at Muddy Waters between 3-4. Or, maybe somebody should just set up a web site that monitors such things, like a Google Map of coffee shops so we can see that there's only a couch available at this place but a whole table available at this place and that place two blocks away has nobody there.

Or is it just us?

Image of Muddy Waters from the free radical