Coffee Knowledge: Why Long-Staying Student Guests Test Cafe Seating

Cafe owners say students increasingly treat shops as study rooms, ordering one drink and staying seven or eight hours, which cuts table turnover while rent and raw material costs rise. Owners are asking online how to guide long-staying customers out politely, and suggestions include posting time limits, requiring refills, adjusting the environment, or copying Hong Kong's two-hour seating cap.

The complaints sit alongside sympathy: many owners say they studied in cafes themselves. Younger students often buy caffeinated drinks from convenience stores, while high school and university students tend to visit a cafe daily, and social platforms now carry recommendation lists filtering shops suited to long study sessions. That makes street coffee seating policy a practical question of consumer rights and shop survival.

In recent years, more and more students treat cafés as study rooms, ordering a single drink and staying for seven or eight hours at a time, which gives many café owners a headache. Facing the dual pressure of declining table turnover and rising operating costs, owners must both protect their reputation and find effective management methods. On social platforms, discussions about how to politely guide long-staying customers to leave are heating up. Some suggest posting time-limit notices, some choose to adjust the environment or require refills, and some shops borrow from Hong Kong's experience by enforcing a two-hour seating limit. This struggle over café space usage and consumer rights reflects the real dilemmas of today's food and beverage business.

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account: cafe_style)

For more specialty coffee beans, please add the personal WeChat of Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee), WeChat ID: qjcoffeex

No matter what stage of education they are at, young people are quite dependent on caffeine. Younger students often buy caffeinated drinks from convenience stores, while after entering high school or university, they are more inclined to visit a café every day for a drink.

- Screenshot of a line from the TV drama "Strange Lawyer Woo Young-woo"

For senior students who need to study with high concentration, cafés are almost the ideal place. Compared with libraries or home, coffee shops have a relaxed yet relatively quiet atmosphere, so a large number of "study-friendly café" recommendation topics have emerged on social platforms, specifically filtering shops suitable for students who sit for long hours to study.

However, this phenomenon distresses many café operators. Recently, many owners have posted on forums asking for help, inquiring whether there is a way to get students who buy only one coffee but stay for seven or eight hours to leave without hurting anyone's feelings.

At first only a few people asked, but unexpectedly it quickly resonated with and sparked discussion among a large number of café owners with similar experiences. While complaining, many also expressed understanding of students' difficulties, because they themselves had gone through the same thing back then.

But in recent years, utility and raw material costs have continued to rise, making café operations increasingly difficult. These students often buy only the cheapest iced Americano, or even just a glass of water, then pull out laptops and other equipment and sit for seven or eight hours. And it is not an isolated phenomenon; they appear in groups every day.

Café business is already hard to run these days, and many shops are small with limited seating. Once these students arrive, they take up more than half the seats, resulting in extremely low table turnover. At the same time, some customers who genuinely want coffee see that there are few empty seats and give up the idea of coming in to spend money, which is truly heartbreaking.

But after all, these students have made a purchase. Even if it is just a glass of water, the shop cannot directly drive them out, otherwise it will affect the store's reputation. Therefore, everyone hopes to find a feasible way to limit how long they stay.

Besides students, some private tutors are even more troublesome. One person orders an iced Americano, brings four students, and can teach in the store all day, both occupying tables and disturbing other customers.

In response to this situation, many cafés that have successfully reduced student seat occupation have shared their own approaches. The most common method is to post clear notices explaining that seating is limited and customers who need to study must pay by time in designated areas.

Some shops directly put notices on tables: "If you use the seat for more than a few hours, you must order another drink or meal." Some owners, when too many students are occupying seats, choose to turn off the air conditioning or heating, or play upbeat music.

Although students occupying seats does indeed affect table turnover, some café owners admit that business is hard these days and their presence adds some foot traffic to the store. But if they stay more than six hours after buying only one drink, and large numbers of such students come every day, it is hard for the shop to sustain itself, since it would even lose money on utilities.

Seeing this topic, the author recalled a Hong Kong customer received yesterday. At that time, there were not many seats in the store and many customers, so he asked whether the shop had a time limit. At first I did not quite understand, since customers have the right to use the space once they have made a purchase, so why limit the time?

Later he explained that in cafés in Hong Kong, many office workers bring their laptops and sit for a whole day, but during lunch or afternoon tea hours, the store is often packed. Because it is occupied by office workers for long periods, many customers who want to rest cannot find seats, so many shops require customers to leave within two hours, and if they want to stay longer they must make another purchase.

Such rules actually also reflect the difficulties of operators. Just as many cafés previously came up with all kinds of tricks to control influencer check-ins and photos and avoid affecting other customers' experience. Some require buying a ticket to enter and take photos, some set a minimum spending amount before photos are allowed...

There are also some shops that, in order to stop people who buy one coffee and then occupy the space for hours taking photos, explicitly require a venue fee and limit the usage time, so that no one can use the space indefinitely and affect other customers on the strength of one coffee.

Business is hard to run, and the owner is not running a charity. It is too difficult, truly too difficult.

Image source: Internet

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.