NATION Trend: Businesses use coffee shops as offices

The independent work style and comfortable, social work routines blend nicely.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Like millions of working people, David Smith heads off to work each day, grabs a cup of coffee, socializes briefly, then gets down to business.
However, Smith's workplace isn't actually an office -- it's Legal Grounds, a Dallas coffee shop where the free-lance graphic artist has been working on his computer and meeting with clients for the last four years.
He's one of a growing number of people who -- thanks to laptops, cell phones and wireless Internet -- don't need to be tethered to a traditional office to do a day's work and prefer to be out among people instead of alone in a home office.
National coffeehouse giant Starbucks has embraced the trend and about a year ago decided to try providing wireless Internet access for customers who were working out of the cafes. Dallas was a test market for Starbucks' wireless Internet service.
"This is one of the areas where we really sensed a trend where our guests were using Starbucks as a place away from the office," said Starbucks Regional Vice President Tim Casey. "The pilot was very successful, and it's being rolled out."
'Social cohesion'
While telecommuting has been touted as the high-tech future of work life, people such as Smith have found that the solitude of the home office isn't ideal -- and that the coffee shop blends the independent work style and comfortable, social work routines nicely.
"People are social animals," said John Slocum, who holds the O. Paul Corley Professorship of Management at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "They need social interaction, whether they get it from work or Starbucks, it doesn't matter."
Slocum said the coffeehouse provides office-like connections but with the added benefit of no office politics.
"You're working, they're working -- there's social cohesion," he said.
Pros and cons
Smith, 50, who hasn't worked in a traditional office setting since the 1980s, when he was a photographer for North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), said there are many parallels between working out of Legal Grounds and working in an office.
"There are people I look forward to seeing, just like in an office and people that you dread to see as well," he said. "Before you can work, you definitely need to do some socializing. I'm just a regular coffee-shop customer for the first half-hour."
But after the morning rush slows, he opens his PowerBook and begins working on Web site design and other projects, including his avocation of composing techno music.
He said there are advantages to working out of a coffee shop rather than an office, such as having no time clock and -- he said with a laugh -- way better coffee. But there are also downsides.
"You get all the colds ... you have to be able to work through loud noise, you have to be able to focus and tune out even more so than in an office," he said. "Babies are one of the biggest hazards. The screaming child at the table next to you ... you don't get that at work."
As a person who spends hours each day at a coffeehouse, Smith is always mindful of the fact that he is in someone else's place of business. He doesn't go behind the counter to help himself to a refill, even though he knows where everything is as well as any employee, and he always dresses nicely as if he were going into the office -- albeit a casual one.
Legal Grounds owner Leslie Murphy, who has several regular customers who work out of her shop, said consideration is the key to making the relationship work.
"They're really respectful of what's going on here," she said. "They're here so much, they help me carry stuff in from the car. They're part of the day-to-day operation, part of the establishment."
Away from the office
At Starbucks, Casey said, it's not just freelancers and other self-employed people working out of the coffeehouse. Some are office workers wanting to get away for a casual meeting, a job interview or some quiet work time. Casey said he enjoys getting out of the office and away from the phone to sit at Starbucks while checking and answering e-mails, and he's far from alone.
"We're seeing more and more laptops open up in Starbucks," he said. "I was in our store at Cole and Lemmon and we walked in about 9 in the morning and probably seven or eight laptops were open that time of day."
Smith said he goes to Starbucks or Borders Books cafes occasionally when he needs to go online (though he and other Legal Grounds regulars have been after Murphy to install the service), when he needs to be nearer to a client or when he needs a change of scenery.
"The coffee shop is a modern institution that accommodates mobility," Smith said. "It's a little more of what the future has in store."