There’s getting cozy at a Starbucks to sip a latte and catch up on emails, and then there’s lugging your printer and desktop to the coffee chain to clock into work.
Starbucks South Korea is experiencing this exact phenomenon and is now barring patrons from bringing in large pieces of work equipment, treating the cafés like their own amenity-stuffed office space.
“Starbucks Korea has updated its policy so all customers can have a pleasant and accessible store experience. While laptops and smaller personal devices are welcome, customers are asked to refrain from bringing desktop computers, printers, or other bulky items that may limit seating and impact the shared space,” a Starbucks spokesperson told Fortune in a statement.
The company said it will continue to be a “welcoming third space.” The store policy change was first reported by the Korea Herald.
Starbucks has been a fixture in Korea since opening its first store there, in the Edae neighborhood of Seoul, in 1999. South Korea has surpassed Japan in the number of Starbucks stores, boasting 2,050 to Japan’s 2,040 locations, despite having less than half its population.
But the coffee chain’s crackdown on cagongjok, a term referring to individuals spending prolonged periods of time working at cafés, may indicate a changing attitude toward customers who may be loyal but taking Starbucks’ burgeoning efforts to become a cozy third space for granted. Starbucks South Korea is majority owned by retail giant E-Mart Inc. as of 2021. Starbucks continues to oversee its licensed business.
For years, there have been pockets of cagongjok as a result of the COVID-induced remote-work boom, as well as the rise of temporary-contract jobs following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, according to Jo Elfving-Hwang, an associate professor of Korean society and culture at Curtin University in Australia.
“It’s quite a cheap way to work really,” Elfving-Hwang told Fortune. “You can just go and have a cup of coffee, work there—but people are taking it a little bit to the extreme nowadays.”
Rising visibility of cagongjok
Korea has a strong tearoom culture, Young-Key Kim-Renaud, professor emeritus of Korean language and culture and international affairs at George Washington University, told Fortune.
“Even when they were dirt-poor, people gathered in the tearooms to discuss things [like] literature, art, politics, or whatever, and felt that they were civilized,” she said.
But cagongjok—a portmanteau of the Korean words for café, study, and a word for a tribe that has taken on a pejorative meaning—has gained public awareness as a result of South Korea’s labor market and remote-work shift. The pandemic caused an influx of employees needing to work remotely, but as many Koreans returned to the office, government redevelopment restrictions limited how much space was available for businesses to set up their employees in office spaces—especially in South Korea’s capital of Seoul, where rent prices are skyrocketing as businesses fight over office spaces. Office vacancies in Seoul remained low last quarter at around 2.6%, according to April data from commercial real estate service CBRE, while rent for the offices increased on average 1.5% from the quarter before.
Korean companies failing to find or afford office spaces has led some to let employees work in third-party co-working spaces or remotely, Elfving-Hwang said, leaving many to flock to cafés.
“People just started working from home more, and [businesses] discovered that they didn’t necessarily need a space in the same way,” she said. “Part of the reason is that it’s become more of a practice that just a lot of companies discovered that they didn’t necessarily need an office of their own.”
However, not all café owners are so sympathetic to changing labor culture, calling cagongjok “electricity thieves” and claiming patrons stay working at their businesses for hours while nursing just a single cup of coffee in that time.
While the rise of remote workers in cafés marks the shift of coffee shops from a place of leisure to a place of work, Elfving-Hwang said, she said she believed it was only a matter of time before coffee shops itched to shift the balance back toward reputations of relaxation.
“I was surprised it took so long,” she said.
