easyInternetCafé

» see easyinternetcafe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

internet cafes were the way most people in turkey first got online between '02 and '05. the local model was small. ten or fifteen pcs on a back-room mezzanine, an owner who knew which kids were on counter-strike at any given hour, a per-hour rate of about two lira. easyinternetcafe was a different idea entirely. it was the same orange branding as easyjet, the same dynamic pricing, the same megastore footprint stelios was building across every easy-prefixed business he had at the time.

the first easyeverything opened on tottenham court road in london on june 21 '99 with 400 terminals in one room. you walked up to a kiosk at the door, fed it a pound, got a slip with a username and password, sat down at any free pc. when the room got crowded, the price went up. when it emptied out, the price dropped. it was airline yield management ported onto the internet cafe.

i never used one in person, by then. but stelios kept rolling them out. paris, amsterdam, frankfurt, edinburgh, new york. the times square site opened in november '00 with 800 terminals and earned a guinness world record for the largest internet cafe on earth. the brand rebranded to easyinternetcafe in '01 when the company realized people did not know what an easyeverything was. for whatever reason the simpler name did not help.

i was watching from a distance, mostly. the cafes were busiest at night and on weekends. tourists used them to check email, locals used them when their dial-up at home was being slow. revenue per terminal was real but the floor space was eye-watering. central london rents on 400-pc rooms killed the margins faster than the pricing engine could refill them. by '02 stelios was already shrinking outlets. by '03 the company lost a copyright suit brought by the bpi over its onsite cd-burning kiosks, which had been letting customers rip mp3 collections from cafe pcs to blanks at the counter. the legal cost compounded with the rent problem.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pricing engine ~

the dynamic pricing was the part that everyone wrote about. on a quiet morning the rate could be 80p an hour. on a saturday night at the times square store the rate could hit $6. the kiosks displayed the current rate on a small lcd next to the slot. people gamed it. tourists in london figured out that the post-pub crowd inflated rates after 11pm, came in at 3am instead. the engine itself was simple. ten percent of the floor empty was one rate band, fifty percent empty was a different rate band, the next band kicked in at seventy.

~ the cd-burner suit ~

the cd-burning kiosks were the second thing the company became known for. each terminal had a cd burner. for an extra fee you could rip an audio cd to mp3 or burn an mp3 collection back out to a blank. the bpi argued in court that easyinternetcafe was operating an unlicensed copy service. the high court agreed in january '03 and awarded damages. stelios pulled the burners that week, the case made it harder to convince city investors that the chain was a tech-platform rather than a high-street risk machine.

~ what really happened ~

the retreat happened in two waves. the directly-operated megastores in central london and new york shut between '03 and '05, with the times square location selling its terminals at clearance and reopening as a smaller franchise on a different block. the second wave was the smartphone. by '07 the customer who used to walk into an internet cafe in covent garden was checking gmail on a blackberry at the coffee shop next door instead. the franchise model held on for another two years in smaller european cities, then by the end of '09 the last directly-managed sites were gone and the brand had become a licensing arrangement on a handful of independently-run shops.

the original tottenham court road site got knocked down for a clothing chain. the times square room became a clothing store too. stelios kept the easygroup brand running on dozens of other ventures from easyhotel to easycar, but the cafe chain itself never got reopened. by '15 the term "internet cafe" had a small museum quality to it everywhere except a few cities in southeast asia and turkey, where some of those back-room mezzanines on residential streets are still running in '26.

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