When Jo Schneider and Willow Bentley started Bentley’s House of Coffee & Tea, they hoped people would come to their place and linger with friends. “I really wanted to build community,” Schneider said.

In fact, you could say that building community was the big idea behind the 25 years of success at Bentley’s, 1730 E. Speedway.

Some of the founding values were creating an atmosphere where singles could come in with friends or by themselves and share a table with others if they were alone and wanted company. 

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“We wanted to create community, a meeting place where a woman alone would feel really comfortable coming in,” said Schneider. “Where anybody could be comfortable and talk and eat and enjoy community.”

A lot has changed since Bentley’s first opened its doors. The namesake of the business, Willow Bentley, still works there at times, although she has moved on to other interests. Schneider acquired Bentley’s share and became the sole owner 10 years ago.

The biggest change and challenge comes along with the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Bentley’s, like most other establishments around the country has seen its business slow.

The slowdown coincides with — or at least brings to the forefront — a major sociological pattern evident to all serious or even casual observers of social change.

Where people used to come in, socialize, eat, drink and commune, now they often come in alone and commune with only their laptop and a cup of a beverage. And they do it for hours.

Assume a cup of coffee is about $1.75 with maybe a 50-cent charge for a refill. Then assume the average java drinker sits with his or her laptop for a good solid three hours. Oh, and assume that laptop user sits alone at a table with a backpack or purse in one extra chair and a laptop case in another chair. That translates to the average coffee establishment making 75 cents per hour per customer or 18 cents per hour per chair used. That’s not the kind of money that will pay the Internet bill.

In the meantime, when lunch rolls around customers can’t find a place to eat. The tables with four chairs around them are taken by a solitary person, a laptop and various needed equipment. 

Coffee establishments all over Tucson are facing this situation but when asked, Schnieder prefaced by saying, “I love my customers but it can be an issue.”

My guess is that Schnieder is too polite and loyal to her customer base to say what is obvious. When the economy is so bad, we need the tables for paying customers, folks.   

I lived in Manhattan and fought other lunch time warriors for a table every workday. I can’t imagine a proprietor letting people surf the Web taking up good revenue-inducing tables while paying customers go somewhere else because they can’t get in.

I know, I know, Tucson is not Manhattan. We all came here to get away from such rudeness!  Well, maybe.  But, if you are like me, you are tired of watching your favorite places close in this horrendous economy. 

It doesn’t help that the coffee house tradition is to sit and talk for hours. Yes, but that tradition is built on a group of people, eating, drinking and connecting with one another. Is the age of the community coffeehouse going the way of the typewriter?

More people these days are isolating themselves and relating to their gadgets and computers more than they are to other people. Combine that with the recession and it’s a miracle if small establishments filled with solitary laptop aficionados can survive.

Bentley’s House of Coffee & Tea is a well-operated, long-term, solid business and will survive the current downturn but for those less fortunate here are a few tips to consider:

1. Limit laptop squatters during prime revenue-producing hours.

2. Stop providing Internet service in your establishment - let someone else lose money.

3. Arrange “computer usage” areas and make the tables small with cubbies for accoutrements.

4. Send wait people out to ask for another order or to collect the bill.

5. Don’t be ashamed to make a living and teach thoughtless people you are not a library with coffee.

Contact Sharon Youngblood at say@youngbloodconsulting.com or (520) 795-7498. Youngblood is a certified management consultant, corporate coach and speaker who works with leaders to improve performance and profitability of firms. Her website is at www.youngbloodconsulting.com. Best Practices appears the first Monday of each month in Inside Tucson Business.