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

Published: 23 May. 2026, 07:00

SEO JI-EUN
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Patrons work on their laptops and study at a coffee franchise in Jongno District, central Seoul, on May 19. Cafe layouts are increasingly being engineered with individual lamps and partitioned booths to accommodate solo laptop workers. [SEO JI-EUN]

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 customer focuses on his laptop inside an individual study capsule at a franchise cafe in Jongno District, central Seoul, on May 19. [SEO JI-EUN]

Nearly every seat faces outward — toward the glass, toward the wall, away from the person beside you. Each has its own power outlet.

A sign on the stairwell, stamped with a small book icon, marks the floor as being for "working and studying."

A directory board inside a Hollys Coffee branch along the Cheonggyecheon stream in central Seoul designates the fourth floor as "H-Works," codifying the space reserved exclusively for working and studying. [SEO JI-EUN]

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.

Between 2010 and 2015, registered coffee shops in Korea nearly doubled from 30,000 to almost 60,000, according to Statistics Korea. More cafes meant more flat surfaces, more Wi-Fi and more outlets.

'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.”

[GETTY IMAGES]

One Americano, no rent

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-fi jazz playlist for upbeat pop music.

“With so many cheap coffee shop options out there, we realized that if we lose the cagongjok, we won’t have much demand left,” Lee said. “So we quietly acquiesce.”

Sometimes the laptop tribe has begun pushing out traditional, talking customers.

A cagongjok once demanded she turn off the background music so he could take a video conference call. She declined. Another time, when a table of middle-aged women grew a little loud, a male cagongjok shouted across the room — startling the entire cafe. The women left almost immediately.

“A cafe is a public space where people are allowed to talk," Lee said. "When people ignore that, they cross the line [into becoming the kind of entitled, problematic customers.]”

A customer sets up an external desktop monitor and a multi-port power strip in a Starbucks branch in this undated photo uploaded onto an online community [SCREEN CAPTURE]

The legal mirage of eviction

Cafe owners who have looked into their options have found them largely symbolic.

A rumor persists on Korean portal sites that a 2009 Supreme Court ruling allows owners to prosecute long-staying customers for business obstruction.

Legal experts confirm that quietly occupying a seat — however long — does not meet the statutory threshold, which requires fabrication, deception or the use of physical force. Sitting with a laptop does not qualify.

Notices taped to a cafe wall warn customers that laptops and tablets are not permitted [SEO JI-EUN]

What owners can do is post rules in advance. Clear signage establishing a time limit or minimum spend creates an enforceable contract; a customer who refuses to leave after being asked can, in theory, face a trespass charge.

Flagrant energy theft — running high-draw devices for hours — could theoretically constitute larceny.

Though few owners pursue either route.

"Taking criminal action against a customer drains time, money and mental energy," noted one legal commentary on the issue. "The most pragmatic solution is prevention: post time limits clearly, or physically restrict access to outlets."

If you can't beat them, upsell them

Having realized that the cagongjok cannot be evicted, Korea's coffee industry has pivoted to a more reliable strategy — monetizing them.

Single-person divider booths stand ready inside a Starbucks branch near Hanyang University's Erica Campus in Ansan, Gyeonggi. Major chains are increasingly introducing library-style infrastructure to institutionalize long-staying customers. [STARBUCKS KOREA]

Starbucks Korea, long the de facto headquarters of cagongjok, introduced guidelines last August banning desktop computers, printers and multiport power strips.

At the same time, it began rolling out “Focus Zones” near university campuses — single-person booths and partitioned window-facing counters, physically separated from the main floor, designed specifically for the solo patron who came to work.

A Twosome Place, a major domestic coffee chain, went a step further by expanding its tab.

The chain's "All-Day Twosome Set" — an Americano bundled with sandwiches, bagels or salads at a 2,000-won discount — is aimed squarely at the remote worker who plans to sit through lunch. The set drove sales up more than 25 percent on year in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, Twosome's panini lineup surged roughly 43 percent compared to the same period last year.

"Sales of deli items tend to be higher in commercial and office districts than in residential neighborhoods," a company spokesperson said.
The industry spent a decade debating whether the cagongjok were patrons or squatters. Now it is trying to figure out what else they can get them to buy.

BY SEO JI-EUN [[email protected]]