Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
Welcome to the internet age, La Colombe. After more than two decades of being staunchly anti-wifi, the local coffee shop chain is finally getting connected to the grid. La Colombe started quietly rolling out wifi at its Philadelphia-area locations in early September, said Semira Sarancic, La Colombe’s head of cafe operations. Wifi is already up and running at the Fishtown flagship cafe, as well as outposts on Independence Mall, in Dilworth Plaza, and Bryn Mawr. Internet will be coming to La Colombe’s original location at 130 S. 19th St. in Rittenhouse Square by the end of 2025. All in all, roughly 75% of the chain’s 29 locations across New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., California, and Texas will have wifi at long last. Only grab-and-go style stores will remain off the grid, Sarancic said, due to their limited seating and smaller square footage. “There’s no reason for us not to add it,” Sarancic told the Inquirer. That wasn’t always the prevailing attitude. Co-founders Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti started La Colombe in 1994 with a single Rittenhouse Square coffee shop, its name a reference to a picturesque cafe in Iberti’s hometown of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Over time, the company blossomed into a national coffee chain that pioneered the frothy draft latte, sold on tap and in cans at most major supermarkets. Chobani purchased La Colombe for $900 million in 2023, and has since infused the coffee chain with millions of dollars to professionalize operations and supersize the lattes. La Colombe’s vaguely-industrial brick-and-mortars were branded as “third spaces,” or places between home and work where you are meant to talk to people, read a book, or do pretty much anything other than park at a table with a laptop to answer emails or take meetings. “We created our cafes with the intention of providing an environment that enables individuals to either purposefully or accidentally interact with other human beings ... ” reads a 2022 entry from La Colombe’s FAQ. “For this reason, many of our cafes do not offer WiFi.” The company policy has been a perpetual pain point for some customers who bring their laptops anyway and are forced to connect a hotspot or sip their beverage while focusing on more low-tech work. Sarancic joined La Colombe in August after more than 25 years of working in coffee shop operations for Starbucks and Foxtrot Café and Market, the Chicago-based boutique coffee shop and grocer that closed abruptly in 2024 after promising a rapid expansion. Sarancic said her first order of business was adding wifi to the stores after a close friend begged her to. Already the change has paid dividends: Sarancic has received positive feedback from baristas who no longer have to awkwardly explain to customers the wifi situation. And since she spends most of her time visiting stores, Sarancic is able to do her job a bit more easily, too. “It’s truly a reflection of how our customers live now. They come to our cafes not just for the delicious coffee and food, but to work, and then to maybe relax and recharge,” Sarancic said. La Colombe is getting online as the coffee industry faces upheaval, with tariffs on coffee producers driving up the cost of beans as consumers cut back on spending. In September, La Colombe competitor Starbucks went through another round of layoffs as it closed hundreds of U.S. locations — including six in Philly — to stave off more profit losses. The closures came as Starbucks is rebranding to feel less like a behemoth and more like a local coffee shop, bringing back ceramic mugs and free refills while ending its open-door policy. The chain is also rolling out a new store design with more seating. Serancic has her own wish list for improvements to La Colombe locations (like more space between entrances and registers to stop bottlenecking), but she is unconcerned about her former employer taking La Colombe’s third place leftovers. “I spent 20 years with [Starbucks] and I truly believed they were number one provider of that third place experience. Now everything had changed,” Sarancic said. “I truly believe that La Colombe is so special and unique because no matter what’s happening outside the world, we never change who we are.” Save for finally turning the wifi on, of course.
