Back in the day, the United States was booming with small business owners operating out of a home office when starting out.  The concept, although not completely dead, is slowly morphing to the cafe and restaurant world.  Many business owners are now meeting in places that have free wifi and fancy coffee as they market their products and services, hire employees and network.

We’ll never see a complete end to the home office but this expansion into the cafe world has taken hold and is even lauded and applauded by the fact food chains.  McDonalds offers free internet in over 11,000 of their restaurants and the Chick-fil-A cahin is also offering free internet. Those well know fast food restaurants are seeing the trend and want to capture the internet savvy clientele that is now permeating the highways and byways of America.

McDonald’s move is particularly interesting because they had charged a 2.95 fee to use their internet service which was powered by the AT&T network and gave up a source of revenue to attract those customers.  I would be hard pressed to believe they made that move without some intense and serious market research.

You can’t walk in to a Panera Bread restaurant without seeing a bevy of people sitting and working on their laptops, interviewing prospective employees, selling an insurance program using the internet access to get the latest rates or just tapping away on their keyboard writing for their latest project. The ability to be able to just plop down almost anywhere and access the internet plays right into the fact that we are a mobile society dependent on the world wide web.

One man I know makes over 10,000 monthly without an office, home or otherwise, just accessing the free internet portals offered by the various restaurants with his internet marketing business.  Spending about 5 dollars a day on fuel and another 5 on coffee or drinks, he hits no less than 5 restaurants daily cruising around in a Mercedes SUV while dressing casually.

So, next time you see a guy wearing shorts and a golf cap, tapping away on a Toshiba laptop sitting at your local eatery, realize he isn’t some local bum but a businessman working in his office.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 12:20 pm and is filed under General Business, US Business News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.