Name: Phone bans.<\/p>\n
Age: Their provenance is considerable; their time is now.<\/p>\n
Appearance: Groups of people eating together, talking together and laughing together, while also twitching slightly from withdrawal.<\/p>\n
So this is specifically to do with banning phones in restaurants? Restaurants and bars, yes.<\/p>\n
Hardly a new thing, is it? No. Ironically, a decade ago many fine dining establishments were <\/a>unbanning<\/a> mobiles<\/a>, surrendering to the idea that people couldn\u2019t be stopped from posting photographs of their food.<\/p>\n I suppose it was considered good for business. Not any more \u2013 at the Spy Bar in London, they put a sticker over your phone\u2019s camera lens at the door.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the point? People can just peel the sticker off. It\u2019s supposed to work on a psychological level \u2013 to preserve privacy and allow people to enjoy themselves without distraction.<\/p>\n Shouldn\u2019t a ban be more, erm, enforceable? They certainly can be. At Antagonist, a bar in Charlotte, North Carolina, customers are required to put their phones in a locked pouch of the type used to enforce phone bans in schools. At the Trophy Room in Phoenix, Arizona, guests\u2019 phones are stored in a vintage filing cabinet during their visit.<\/p>\n Sounds like prison. At the Clink restaurant in London they lock all phones in an outside cabin, but that\u2019s because the restaurant is actually inside HMP Brixton, where possession of a mobile phone is prohibited.<\/p>\n OK, maybe a phone ban should be less enforceable than that. Some places use a carrot instead of a stick. At Al Condominio in Verona, Italy, customers are offered a free bottle of wine<\/a> if they surrender their phones before the meal.<\/p>\n Does that work? Apparently 90% of customers accept the challenge.<\/p>\n As would I for free wine. Other restaurants simply have a no phones policy, in a bid to encourage conversation and to re-establish focus on the food and the experience.<\/p>\n And the clientele are in favour? For the most part. \u201cI strongly encourage people to give it a chance, and sometimes they don\u2019t and they go somewhere else,\u201d Antagonist\u2019s general manager told the Wall Street Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, it sounds as if it\u2019s becoming more widespread. Big chains are now beginning to crack down. Pizza Express initiated phone-free afternoons<\/a> last summer, and even Wetherspoons has drawn a line<\/a>.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no way I would go into a Wetherspoons without my phone. No worries \u2013 they just want you to keep it on silent.<\/p>\n Do say: \u201cTake my phone, please. Anything that encourages human connection is worth sacrificing a few hours of doomscrolling for.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t say: \u201cI can still do my podcast from here though, right?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Name: Phone bans. Age: Their provenance is considerable; their time is now. Appearance: Groups of people eating together,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-770594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}