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.