Your e-books are not welcome in my establishment

Oh come on, there's got to be a better way to get coffee-shop parkers to move along than tell them they can't use their Kindles and iPads. Your friendly neighborhood table hog comes in a lot of forms, and speaking as someone who has taken up valuable espresso real estate without the help of a computer or even a book, I don't see that this will do anything but annoy the few. (Disclaimer, as a Kindle owner I am clearly biased, but to be fair this has never happened to me.)

One potential solution, if there aren't enough tables to go around, is put in a communal table where loners can all sit together and do whatever it is they have come to the coffee shop to do. It will likely self-select to people who don't mind sharing, and one disruptive person will fall under the influence of everyone else.

By the way, the original author of the Times post on this phenomenon, Nick Bilton, doesn't name the shops that chased him out, but the Brooklyn sandwich shop he mentions is 'Snice in Park Slope. (I'm positive; I was in there a few days ago and remember the signs. I mean, I like Georgia font too, but really.)