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You go to a coffee shop, you order a coffee, open your laptop and start working. After you're done with your coffee the waiter comes and asks you whether you would like to pay. You say no and continue working. One hour later they ask you again whether you would like to pay. You say no and continue working. Two hours later the waiter insists you either pay and leave, or pay for two coffees, and they bring you another one, then you can stay and work. You call the police because you're being harassed, and post on lemmy about predatory coffee shop practices trying to upsell you a second coffee. The police arrests the waiter and you get 9000 upvotes on lemmy.
Running a video-on-demand platform is very, very expensive. Just an FYI.
Why did the coffee shop have a "Free coffee and unlimited sitting time" sign in front of it?
No it didn't. It said "entry for free, coffee either for money or with ads".
So then there are some ads playing in the background and I put on my headphones so that I can ignore them.
Sure, but it's a private coffee shop, and they can just simply not let you in without paying or in headphones. They need to make money.
So, at first your clever trick works. But once everyone is doing it, their advertisers stop paying them, so now someone's gotta pay for the coffee somehow.
In the comments to your coffee shop story someone points out that coffee shops deserve to be paid for the coffee and the working space you occupy. The comment gets heavily downvoted with other commenters providing great counter-arguments, like "the coffee is ridiculously overpriced, like a 100% margin, it's an evil for-profit business and we shouldn't pay those" and "they just had a coffee, it costs them almost nothing, the rest of the time they werr just working, which didn't incur any costs on the coffee shop. The coffee shop are assholes, if they let the OP work till the evening, they would've paid for their coffee". Someone even suggested a new commercial model for the coffee shop: everyone makes their own coffee, it's free, and so is seating, funding is donation-based. They have certainly seen such a place before, although, they themselves would never be up for running one cuz they have a day job to pay the bills.
Then you are walking along the street when the city folds in on itself. You realize Leonardo Dicaprio is there. This is a dream? As if from afar, you hear a faint voice crying, "Murph! Don't let me leave, Murph!"