Coffee Shops = New Age Homeless Shelters

Full capacity. Really.

Last night, I went to Coffee Bean And Tea Leaf in Robinson's Place with my girlfriend for a short chat. Looking from the outside, we found vacant seats inside the shop so we entered the place. When we got to the tables though, we were surprised to see that three tables covering about a third of the shop was empty, but filled with open books, bags and various beverages at various states of consumption.

My mind basically went:

1. Either I'm in the movie The Langoliers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langoliers
2. A radiation scare had forced people to evacuate the premises while leaving behind their stuff.
3. Mugs and books have finally gained enough sentience, dexterity, and cash to purchase and consume coffee.
3. Some people thought it was a fucking wise move to leave their things to reserve the seats so they can conveniently go somewhere else in the mall to have cheap dinner and then go back to their seats and resume studying wihtout having to order food again, and actually look like regular customers, all the while disregarding petty things like etiquette and human decency.

Seeing that the rest of the shop was filled with normal people that didn't look like they were dying of rad poisoning, I figured it must be the third option. So we sat outside and waited to see if people would indeed return to their seats.

TWenty minutes later they did, carrying around takeout food from McDonalds and Joe Pepperoni. The people resumed studying, surfing the internet (for free) and just lounging around. Nobody ordered anything afterwards, despite the fact that some of the cups of coffee have been empty since the Cory Administration.

As a demonstration of how amazingly crass things got, one of the finer (read: hambeast) ladies found an unoccupied leather seat across the shop, dragged it to her place and used the seat, while keeping her existing seat for her bag. (apparently bags can drink now too)

Call me conservative, but I thought it was simply ridiculous. Coffeeshops are for good for reading books, but they're for reading books AND drinking coffee. Buying one coffee or having a friend who bought coffee three hours ago does not constitute you as an eternal customer, and even an overpriced badly tasting joe can only go so far.

During the time the bags were left unattended, I was thinking of the many ways to force management to get the unattended items thrown out.

- Make angry faces at management for allowing second-class books to occupy chairs while you're left to stand. Bring up the topic of book-human discrimination.
- Leave a large card note saying "Free stuff"
- Stash drugs in the bag pockets and call in the K9 units
- Tell management the people who stayed in the empty tables asked you to tell management that they wont be returning because one of their friends had a heart attack
- Call security and tell them one of the bags is filled with explosives. Use a deep, persuasive voice with accompanying maniacal laughter.

I would've, but my gf is a frequent visitor and I wouldn't want her in trouble, so I just put my ideas here instead of in practice, where they belong.

On hindsight, we should stop calling the place CBTL and call it CBTG: Coffee Bean and Taong Grasa