Starbucks South Korea is experiencing this exact phenomenon and is now banning patrons from bringing in large pieces of work equipment, treating the cafes like their own amenity-stuffed office space.

“While laptops and smaller personal devices are welcome, customers are asked to refrain from bringing desktop computers, printers, or other bulky items that may limit seating and impact the shared space,” a Starbucks spokesperson told Fortune in a statement.

The company said it will continue to be a “welcoming third space.” The store policy change was first reported by The Korea Herald.

Starbucks has been a fixture in Korea since opening its first store there, in the Edae neighborhood of Seoul, in 1999. South Korea has surpassed Japan in the number of Starbucks stores, boasting 2,050 to Japan’s 2040 locations, despite having less than half its population size.

But the coffee chain’s crackdown on “cagongjok,” a term referring to individuals spending prolonged periods of time working at cafes, may indicate a changing attitude toward customers who may be loyal but taking Starbucks’ burgeoning efforts to become a cozy third space for granted. Starbucks South Korea is majority owned by retail giant E-Mart Inc. as of 2021. Starbucks continues to oversee its licensed business.

For years, there have been pockets of cagongjok as a result of the COVID-induced remote-work boom, as well as the rise of temporary-contract jobs following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, according to Jo Elfving-Hwang, an associate professor of Korean society and culture at Curtin University in Australia.

“It’s quite a cheap way to work really,” Elfving-Hwang told Fortune. “You can just go and have a cup of coffee, work there—but people are taking it a little bit to the extreme nowadays.”

Rising visibility of cagongjok

Korea has a strong tea-room culture, Young-Key Kim-Renaud, professor emeritus of Korean language and culture and international affairs at the George Washington University, told Fortune.

“Even when they were dirt poor, people gathered in the tea rooms to discuss things [like] literature, art, politics, or whatever, and felt that they were civilized,” she said.

But cagongjok—a portmanteau of the Korean words for cafe, study, and a word for a tribe that has taken on a pejorative meaning—has gained public awareness as a result of South Korea’s labor market and remote-work shift. The pandemic caused an influx of employees needing to work remotely, but as many Koreans returned to office, government redevelopment restrictions limited how much space was available for businesses to set up their employees in office spaces—especially in South Korea’s capital of Seoul, where rent prices are rocketing as businesses fight over office spaces. Office vacancies in Seoul remained low last quarter at around 2.6%, according to April data from commercial real-estate service CBRE, while rent for the offices increased on average 1.5% from the quarter before. 

Korean companies failing to find or afford office spaces has led some to let employees work in third-party co-working spaces or remotely, Elfving-Hwang said, leaving many to flock to cafes.

“People just started working from home more, and [businesses] discovered that they didn’t necessarily need a space in the same way,” she said. “Part of the reason is that it’s become more of a practice that just a lot of companies discovered that they didn’t necessarily need an office of their own.”

However, not all cafe owners are so sympathetic to changing labor culture, calling cagongjok “electricity thieves” and claiming patrons stay working at their businesses for hours while nursing just a single cup of coffee in that time.

While the rise of remote workers in cafes marks the shift of coffee shops from a place of leisure to a place of work, Elfving-Hwang said, she said she believed it was only a matter of time before coffee shops itched to shift the balance back toward reputations of relaxation.

“I was surprised it took so long,” she said.