How would you feel about no Wi-Fi at your fave cafe?

The moment Liz Ostrick looked up from her gleaming La Marzocco coffee machine to see five heads bent over five laptops at five different tables was the moment the café owner’s perception of free Wi-Fi shifted.

The technology once classified by Ostrick as a necessary convenience when she first opened her Margaret River café, Brew Shack, now more closely resembled a medium of needless interference.

“It got to the point where in the afternoon we’d have every table with one person at a laptop with headphones in not talking to each other,” recounts Liz in a break between customers on this quiet, Margaret River morning. “It’s a pretty strange vibe to walk in to.”

Indeed, by the time I’d discovered enough about the Brew Shack to make myself a semi-regular the writing was quite literally on the wall:

Important announcement, it read, we no longer have WiFi. Pretend it’s the 90s & TALK to each other.

From Margaret River to Manhattan, a small group of curiously minded café owners are flying in the face of both convention and consumer expectation by cutting the cord on technology in order to increase social engagement.

While economy forms part of the equation, the larger impetus owes to a desire within the no Wi-Fi set to take the modern coffee house back to its conversational roots.

“Phones and laptops create a separate personal space,” says Sydney’s Eric Harrison, owner of Redfern café, Chapter Five Espresso. “Turning off the Wi-Fi wasn’t about economics at all, for us, it’s just that having customers with headphones plugged in to laptops is not the type of atmosphere I want.”

Without Wi-Fi, Harrison says his 18-square-metre, 10-seat espresso bar and café had become a technology free haven; a place where baristas know the order of every regular despite its busy railway station location: “We’ve started on our regulars’ coffees before they’ve even got past the front door; they don’t have to say anything and they know that.”

It is a closeness bred by the day-in, day-out witty exchanges and personal conversations that happen so easily within coffee’s unifying circle.

It's an intimacy being embraced around the globe:

Of course what’s interesting about the wi-Fi free café is that, according to those that run them, most customers feel relieved that another has made the decision to unhook us from technology’s grip.

Those customers that do leave, according to Ostrick, are all travellers requiring Wi-Fi to confirm, make or change travel bookings. And Harrison’s uni student regulars find solace in a space that demands complete connection to the present and the immediate space.

“It’s a refuge, if you like,” Harrison smiles.

And not just for the customers.

Studies have long shown social connection breeds everything from increased chance of longevity to a stronger immune system. According to Ostrick and Harrison, cultivating a close community outside the context of devices supports staff as much as providing a more social environment for those they serve.

“We have a really tight team because my staff feel part of something,” Harrison reflects. Not just there to do the coffee and the food, they become central to the social network. They become human.

And when we see each other as human in all roles and in all environments, all kinds of wonderful connections are just waiting to be made.

“I’ve been invited to a 40^th birthday, to a wedding anniversary dinner; I’ve had surfboards shaped for me,” says Ostrick, recalling the multitude of important people in her life who began as regular customers to her café. “My boyfriend was one of my customers.”

Anything’s possible in a café without Wi-Fi. A healthier life with more social connection? I’ll drink to that.

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