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Food

This Cafe Charges Customers Who Plug in Their Laptops

These cafe owners are scheming the system.

You might be crawling towards payday on a diet of plain pasta, but that doesn't mean you can't scrape together enough coin for coffee. Four quid matcha latte from the nice cafe with all the succulents? A basic necessity. The Chemex-brewed black filter you grabbed on your way to work? A vital morning pick-me-up. And that pricey flat white from the hot Australian barista this morning was totally worth sacrificing your retirement fund for.

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As if overpriced coffee weren't enough of a drain to your bank balance, a cafe in Vienna has found another way to charge caffeine-addled customers.

Galina Pokorny, manager of the cafe at the city's famous Hundertwasserhaus apartment house, has started charging customers who plug in their phone, camera, or laptop chargers while enjoying a coffee. If you spend more than two hours with a device plugged in, a 1 Euro fee will be added to your bill.

READ MORE: You Pay for Time, Not Coffee, at This 'Anti-Cafe'

Speaking to Austrian newspaper, Kurier, Pokorny explained that her cafe was popular with visitors to Vienna, and that the number of people using plug sockets for a long period of time was getting out of hand. She said: "If a guest uses our energy supply for longer than two hours, then I add a Euro to their bill. Every day I get a crowd of tourists who are charging their phones, cameras, and tablets. I tell customers this is my rule."

The Viennese cafe owner isn't the first to resort to unusual measures to stop people from using her premises as a charging station. "Anti-cafes," establishments that bill customers for the time spent there rather than the amount of coffee they drink, are becoming popular in New York.

Let's hope your phone battery lasts longer than that cappuccino you necked this morning.