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Free Wi-Fi: Good For Coffee, Bad For Books
Unemployed intellectuals now have even more reason to spend their days lounging at Barnes & Noble; free wireless Internet connection.

by Kasey Wehrum | 04.22.2004 ReadMe | Print it.

Furthering my belief that all Barnes & Noble bookstores are simply money-laundering fronts for Mafia businesses, the bookselling giant has announced that it will begin offering free in-store wireless Internet service for its patrons. Apparently
letting every quasi-intellectual slacker use its stores as their personal living room wasn't enough, Barnes & Noble will now have their already overcrowded aisles flooded with down-on-their-luck Web geeks and bloggers. Do they honestly believe that a guy who won't pay the $30 bucks monthly for his own Internet hook-up will fork over $24.99 for a flimsy paperback? They are more likely to use the free Wi-Fi to log on to Amazon.com and buy a used copy for $4.50. Free wireless connection worked wonders for Starbucks, but that business model doesn't translate universally. Even McDonald's is trying to lure customers in with the free connection, as if spending any more time than necessary in that dirty ashtray of a restaurant was an appealing proposition. What Barnes & Noble doesn't realize is that if you keep people in a coffee shop, they will eventually buy more coffee. But if you keep people in a bookstore, they will just read your magazines and copy recipes out of your cookbooks then leave without spending a red cent.
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