I was in the Barnes and Noble in downtown Naperville, IL over the weekend. I brought my laptop with me to get some work done in the café.

It sucked. Here's why:

• Free wifi is a de facto requirement of cafés in the United States these days. Despite the larger Barnes and Noble, Inc. having announced free wifi at stores nationwide nearly a year ago, and the main Barnes and Noble web site advertising free wifi right on the front page as I write this, the B&N in downtown Naperville offers only for-pay wifi.
• At least a few power outlets for laptop users is a close second to free wifi on the modern café requirements list. For the past several years, any rational business person planning a new café has included power outlets next to just about every table. The entire café in the Barnes and Noble in downtown Naperville has exactly one two-socket outlet. If that was where they left it, it would be at worst a mildly inconvenient poor design choice. But the café management decided that mere inconvenience wasn't quite offensive enough for the atmosphere they were going for – so they added a special sloppily-labeled message to their customers:
  

  Downtown Naperville Barnes & Noble to customers: "F*#@ you."

  My MacBook Pro uses an average of about 22 watts while I'm using it at full screen brightness, on wifi, and playing music, with peaks of up to 30 watts when the hard drive's writing, as measured with a Kill-A-Watt. Let's overestimate and call it 30 watts, continuous.

  The downtown Naperville Barnes & Noble is open for a total of 84 hours per week, or, let's say, about 360 hours per month. Residential electricity rates in the area, from ComEd, are currently 13.72¢ per kilowatt hour tout compris. I don't know what rate Barnes and Noble gets, but if anything, it's probably a little less.  If both power outlets at the Barnes and Noble were in use continually by laptop users thrashing their hard drives every single minute the store was open, it would cost Barnes and Noble about $2.96 per month.

  Is a savings of, at the absolute maximum, $2.96 a month really worth giving the metaphorical finger to all your customers? Apparently the genius who runs the café at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Naperville thinks so.

• To top it all off (though I'll admit this last offense is against good taste more than against good business) the café management decided to play the entirety of this insipid pile of auditory vomit. If you're about my age (late 20s), imagine the memories of the songs you grew up with butchered, ripped open and defecated on, and then vampirically drained of all feeling or art, and you'll have an idea of the torture the downtown Naperville Barnes and Noble café inflicted on my pitiable psyche.