In February of this year, I walked into a café in Pangrati that I have been visiting, off and on, since 2017. It is a good café. The coffee is good. The tables are wooden and large enough. The wifi has, for the entire time I have known the place, been faster than what you would have a right to expect from a café charging two euros and ten cents for a single espresso. I sat down, took out my laptop, and was approached, within ninety seconds, by the owner — a man named Spyros whom I had known by name for at least four years.
Spyros, with great apology, asked me to put the laptop away. He had nothing against me, personally, he said. But starting last November the rules of the café had changed. Laptops were now permitted only between six and ten in the morning, and again between three and five in the afternoon. Phone calls were not permitted at all. Power sockets had been taped over. The wifi password, he was no longer giving out, except by request, and never for more than two hours.
I asked what had happened. He gestured, vaguely, at the windows. The neighborhood had been, in his words, "transformed." The café had, until around 2022, served mostly retirees and the writers from a literary foundation up the street. Now it served, predominantly, what Spyros called — with the gentle precision a Greek of a certain age can apply to a foreign class — "digital nomads." They came in at ten. They left at six. They bought one coffee per three hours. They sat at the four-tops by themselves. They held video calls at the bar. They did not, in Spyros's experience, ever become regulars.
"I am a café," Spyros said, as if testing the word. "I am not an office."
A specific kind of war
Spyros's café is one of approximately fourteen million cafés around the world that have, in the last three years, been quietly waging war against the remote worker. Some have done it openly, with signs: NO LAPTOPS, or LAPTOPS ONLY BEFORE ELEVEN, or LAPTOPS DURING WEEKDAYS BUT NEVER ON SUNDAY. Most have done it covertly — by removing power sockets, lowering wifi speeds, raising prices, restructuring seating so that single-occupant work-stations become physically impossible. The most elegant solution we encountered, in a café in central Lisbon, was the deliberate installation of bench seating: no laptop, the owner explained patiently, can be comfortably opened in a bench- and-table arrangement designed for four. We tested this. He was right.
The numbers above are a small sample. There is no comprehensive global census of where, exactly, the world's third places have been pushing remote workers out from, but the pattern is consistent enough across our reporting — across Lisbon, Athens, Mexico City, Glasgow and Lagos — that we can describe it confidently. The third place, as Ray Oldenburg defined it in 1989 — the space that is neither home nor work, where strangers gather, hang out, build a casual common life — is, for the remote-working class, closing.
Three things are happening at once. The first is volume: there are simply too many of us. Remote work, as a global percentage of professional employment, grew from roughly 6% in 2019 to 31% in 2025. The third places that historically absorbed casual workers — cafés, public libraries, hotel lobbies, hotel bars, the upper floors of bookstores — were not built to accommodate a fifth of the working population for a six-hour shift. They have, predictably, broken under the load.
The second is economics. A laptop worker, by every measure that café owners track, is a worse customer than any other category of customer. The average laptop customer in our survey occupied a table for 2.4 hours, against the café-wide average of 38 minutes, while spending — when corrected for time — 19% less. They were, in other words, taking three times the seating to generate four-fifths of the revenue. The math is brutal, and it has not escaped anyone in the industry.
The third is harder to name and, in some ways, the most interesting. It is that the laptop worker, sitting at the four-top alone, broadcasts a signal — the visible signal of being-at-work — that other customers do not enjoy. Cafés that, in 2018, were full of conversation are, in 2026, full of a kind of focused silence broken occasionally by Zoom calls. The atmosphere has shifted. The retirees we used to find in Spyros's café have, slowly, stopped coming. The literary foundation has, slowly, moved its discussions elsewhere. The neighborhood loses, in this transaction, a small but meaningful piece of its sociability, and the café — which used to host that sociability — becomes, instead, the architecturally-confused intermediary between an office and a home.
The third place did not die. It was worked to death.
Where the rest of us went
Push enough people out of the third place, and they will, predictably, find a fourth. The fourth place, as it has developed since 2022, is mostly private. It is a corner of someone's apartment. It is a friend's spare bedroom. It is — when you can afford it — a coworking membership, which is not, technically, a third place at all, but a paid version of the second. It is, increasingly, FlexSlice and our peers: the room-by-the-hour economy, which has roughly quintupled in size since 2022, and now turns over an estimated $2.4 billion in annual bookings worldwide.
We would like to claim this is a good outcome, and partly it is. The room-by- the-hour economy lets hosts earn a useful income from underused space, and gives workers a quieter, more reliable place to work than a café was ever designed to be. The Mariana Sás of the world — to use one of our own hosts as an example — keep their rent paid, their studios in use, their bills manageable. The Spyros of the world get their cafés back. Both gains are real.
But we should be careful about overstating it. A café is, among other things, public infrastructure for casual encounter. A rented room is not. You cannot stumble into a rented room and run into your neighbor. You cannot, in a rented room, hear a conversation between strangers and join it. The transition we are describing — from third place to fourth — solves a problem of capacity at the cost of a problem of serendipity. The neighborhood gets its cafés back; the worker gets a quieter desk. The rest of us lose something more difficult to measure.
What it costs to lose a café
A few months after I last spoke to Spyros, I went back to the café in Pangrati. The laptop ban had, in his words, "worked." Revenue was up 14%. The retirees had begun, tentatively, to return. A book club, organized by the wife of a regular, had started meeting Wednesdays at 11. The café felt, Spyros said, like a café again. He poured me a coffee. He sat down across from me. He asked, with genuine curiosity, what I was working on. I told him I was writing about cafés. He laughed, in the brief generous way Greeks laugh at foreigners who have noticed something obvious five years late.
"It is not that we don't want you here," he said. "It is that we want you here as a person. Not as a worker. Bring me your book, and we will read together. Bring me your laptop, and we will fight."
He poured another coffee. We sat, for a while, in the new silence. The compromise he had reached was a small, decent one. The café was again a café. But I left, that afternoon, with a sharper sense than I had arrived with that something was being lost — not in his café, which was fine, but in the larger pattern of which his café was a small part. The third places of our cities are not infinite. They were, until recently, taken for granted. They have, in the last five years, become, very quietly, scarce.
What we do about it — whether the fourth place, in its various rented forms, can ever do what the third place did — is the open question of the next decade. We do not, at FlexSlice, claim to have a complete answer. We are part of the problem and, we hope, part of the solution. But we are also, quietly, customers of Spyros's café. And we will, when in Athens, continue to be — between six and ten in the morning, and again between three and five in the afternoon, with the laptop, always, in the bag.