M. Rohrs’ House of Fine Teas & Cof­fees has a com­plete and utter con­tempt of their pay­ing cus­tomers, and has lost my busi­ness, for­ever. Yes­ter­day after­noon, they kicked out myself and every other sin­gle cus­tomer, cit­ing a new pol­icy that accused us all of “loi­ter­ing.” I am not mak­ing this up.

M. Rohrs is one of the last remain­ing cof­fee houses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As oth­ers have noted on Yelp, they rou­tinely invent new poli­cies, such as chang­ing the terms of cus­tomer loy­alty cards (in fact, I think they sim­ply rescinded them alto­gether at one point). Until the very recent past, any cus­tomers that wished to sit down after 7PM must have ordered at least $10 from the menu. That pol­icy was not entirely unrea­son­able, but it was unfea­si­ble. M. Rohrs is not a restau­rant, and it is actu­ally dif­fi­cult to spend more than $10 at a cof­fee house. But as of yes­ter­day at least, that require­ment has now expanded to all hours, every day. It’s also worth not­ing that the new pol­icy did not seem to spec­ify a dol­lar amount, so I sup­pose they can arbi­trar­ily eject any­body they deem to have spent too little.

Here’s what hap­pened yes­ter­day after­noon at about 4-5PM: I bought a cof­fee and muf­fin, tipped, and sat down. About 10 min­utes later, the vol­ume of the music sud­denly got VERY LOUD (painfully, dis­tract­ingly so) for no appar­ent rea­son. Then one of their employ­ees vis­ited every cus­tomer in turn and pre­sented us with a long-worded sign explain­ing their new seat­ing pol­icy, which used the word “loi­ter” sev­eral times. I don’t think this employee speaks Eng­lish as a first lan­guage, so there was no oppor­tu­nity to dis­cuss it with him, even if the music had not been deaf­en­ing. He was not apolo­getic. Every sin­gle cus­tomer in the store at that time had only pur­chased cof­fee and pas­tries, so we all had to leave. There were only about a half-dozen cus­tomers at the time, so the man­age­ment can’t claim that we were hog­ging seats from hypo­thet­i­cal meal-eating cus­tomers (of which there were none). If the new pol­icy had been posted up front when I placed my order, I did not see it.

I used to like to go to M. Rohrs occa­sion­ally, some­times for a sand­wich or some­times just cof­fee. I would usu­ally sit and work or just read for about an hour or two, which I don’t think is unrea­son­able at any cof­fee shop, Star­bucks not excluded. All the other neg­a­tive com­ments on Yelp are true; the ser­vice is often rude and neglect­ful (I once had them com­pletely for­get to make my sand­wich — but at least they apol­o­gized), and they charge for wire­less access and for elec­tric­ity. Worse is their atti­tude; it would be one thing to sim­ply charge peo­ple to plug in their lap­tops, but the signs plas­tered about the place couch it in terms of “theft of util­i­ties,” essen­tially accus­ing cus­tomers of crim­i­nal behav­ior. After the clos­ing of the vastly supe­rior cof­fee shop DTUT a few years ago, M. Rohrs is pretty much the only place of its type in the neigh­bor­hood, so I used to patron­ize it any­way. No more.

The word “loi­ter­ing,” as any lit­er­ate per­son should know, has crim­i­nal con­no­ta­tions, and I sus­pect the man­age­ment of M. Rohrs knows this. I deeply, deeply resent being called a “loi­terer” despite hav­ing paid (and tipped!) for cof­fee and a pas­try. Upon leav­ing for the last time, I only regret­ted not demand­ing my tip back.

Per­haps they intend to tran­si­tion away from being a cof­fee house into a restau­rant with a take-out cof­fee bar. If so, they will have to hire more staff, improve the speed and accu­racy of their ser­vice, toss out the couches, and stop accus­ing their pay­ing cus­tomers of crim­i­nal behav­ior. Good luck with that. If any­one asso­ci­ated with the estab­lish­ment hap­pens to read this, I invite you to please com­ment below. I would love to hear your jus­ti­fi­ca­tions. I signed up for Yelp for the sole pur­pose of post­ing a copy of this review, and I sin­cerely hope lots of poten­tial cus­tomers read it.

So that you know where not to go get your cof­fee, M. Rohrs’ House of Fine Teas & Cof­fees is located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at 310 East 86^th Street, between 1^st and 2^nd Avenues.