[WHY] One Americano, four hours: Inside Korea's 'cafe study tribe'

This article is by Seo Ji-eun and read by an artificial voice. A coffee shop, by most definitions, is a place where people talk. Not here. Climb one flight above the entrance of a Hollys Coffee branch near Cheonggyecheon stream in central Seoul on a weekday afternoon, and the air changes into an abrupt, studious silence. Downstairs, the palette is warm, the music is audible and customers are doing what customers traditionally do in cafes: gossiping over lattes. Up here, the walls are grey, the playlist has dropped to a murmur and nobody is talking to anybody. The only sounds are the erratic clatter of keyboards, the occasional drag of a chair and the soft snick of a bag zipper. Without quite deciding to, you find yourself walking on tiptoe. A sign on the stairwell, stamped with a small book icon, marks the floor as being for "working and studying." Meet the 'cagongjok' Korea has a word for these laptop-wielding patrons — cagongjok, a portmanteau of the Korean words for cafe, studying (gongbu) and tribe (jok). The term first appeared in print on April 21, 2015, in a piece about high school students cramming for exams near tutoring academies in western Seoul. Early coverage treated it as a curiosity. Within a year, it became a complaint. The numbers tell part of the story. 'The noise actually helps' Seo Jae-won, a university student in Seoul, describes coffee shops as a choice to find an environment where it is easier to focus. "At home, it is too easy to slack off or end up doing other things," Seo said. "The school library is too quiet, which feels suffocating. A cafe offers the right amount of ambient noise with fewer personal distractions." Korea's hyper-dense urban housing — where young adults routinely live in apartments, shared dorms or remain with their parents well into their twenties — has created a chronic deficit of private space. Psychologists note that such a preference is grounded in behavioral science, particularly the social facilitation theory." "The presence of other people itself has an effect of improving individual performance," said Kwak Geum-joo, an emeritus professor of psychology at Seoul National University. "Because other people are around, you can't just slack off due to their gaze. Seeing others work hard gets you pumped up as well." A little background noise, she adds, can sharpen focus, with the brain working harder to filter it out. The focus has a ceiling, however, on tasks that require highly precise or high-level concentration. When deadlines approach or tasks become too complex, the noise ceases to be a catalyst and becomes a barrier, according to Kwak. For Seo, the cost of a drink is a "space utilization fee." "Three hours feels like the line," he said. "If I'm going to study longer, I order another drink or add a dessert." The macroeconomics of that courtesy, however, are brutal for the people paying the commercial leases. The Korea Food Industry Research Institute calculated that for an eight-table cafe selling a 4,100-won ($2.7) Americano to break even, a customer must vacate their seat within one hour and 42 minutes. Recalculated against today's soaring labor costs and inflation, that window has shrunk to roughly one hour and 31 minutes. Seo's self-imposed three-hour limit already blows past that time frame by double. Some cafe owners shared stories online of customers arriving with dual external monitors and multiport power strips. In one case that circulated widely enough to become something of an urban legend, a customer plugged an electric scooter into a wall outlet. "Next it'll be electric cars," the owner wrote. Lee Si-won, who works at a cafe in Incheon, estimates that 70 to 80 percent of her daily customers arrive with something to study or work on. "Groups stay under an hour, but the cagongjok stay for two to three hours minimum," Lee said. "Most order a single 4,700-won Americano and stay for hours." To disrupt the studious atmosphere, she once swapped their usual low-f...