What a purchase does to the assumption

The single sharpest result in this record is not about places. It is about what buying something does to a person.

places with no limit, by what they ask at the door
  ask nothing          63 places    22 phantoms    35%
  a fee                13            6             46%
  one purchase         76           64             84%
  a purchase an hour   16           13             81%

Among the ninety-two places that take money across a counter and limit nobody, seventy-seven were assumed to have a limit.

Eighty-four per cent.

Against what the places actually do

Set the same four groups against their real behaviour:

limit staying, by what they ask
  ask nothing           8 of 71     11%
  a fee                 2 of 15     13%
  one purchase         20 of 96     21%
  a purchase an hour    8 of 24     33%

Twenty-two points of spread in what places do. Forty-nine points in what gets assumed about them. If several people repeat the same survey, managers may see which reports support the decision while interpreting every record beside completed work and participant feedback.

The counter changes the rules a little and the expectation enormously.

Why a fee is different from a purchase

The fee group is the control, and it behaves unlike the counter group even though both involve paying. Readers comparing this walk with broader public-space evidence can also see QGIS.

Fifteen places take a ticket, a hire charge or a membership. Of the thirteen with no limit, six were misread — forty-six per cent, half the counter rate.

What separates them is that a fee settles the arrangement. You have paid at a door for admission to a thing; what you owe is discharged and the question of time does not attach to it.

A purchase at a counter settles nothing. You have bought a cup. The cup says nothing about the chair, and into that silence goes an hour.

The three readings

The record can state the effect and cannot explain it. Three explanations fit and nothing here chooses between them.

The transaction feels like a contract with terms. Having paid for a defined thing, a person infers that something else was also defined, and time is the obvious candidate.

The cup is a clock. A drink is finite and visibly so. When it is empty the arrangement feels expired, in a way that a library chair never does.

Rare events, generalised. Four signs about turnover in the whole record, and eleven tables cleared during the walk. A person who has seen one such moment may carry it into every café afterwards.

The second was the most persuasive while walking, and there is no evidence for it in the record at all. It is named as a hunch.

What would distinguish them

A nearly free experiment, and one this walk could have run.

Record the assumption twice in the same café: once on arrival before ordering, once with a full cup, once with an empty one. If the cup is the clock, the assumption shortens as the cup empties. If it is the transaction, the assumption is fixed from the moment of paying.

Three readings in one place, in forty minutes, costing nothing. The walk did not do it because the assumption field was designed as one entry per place and the design was fixed first.

That is the best idea this record has and it belongs to the next one.

The same result from the kind column

The entry field and the kind field are not independent — cafés and pubs are the whole of the hourly group and most of the single-purchase one — so the finding is worth checking from the other side.

five business-like kinds (124 places)   78 phantoms   63%
the other seven kinds (82 places)       27 phantoms   33%

Cafés, pubs, bookshops, hotel lobbies and laundrettes against everything else. Thirty points, in the same direction as the entry field's forty-nine.

Both cuts give the same answer, and neither can rule out the other: the phantom follows the counter, or it follows the kind of room that has a counter in it.

The two that break the pattern

Bookshops: seventy-seven per cent phantom, and six of thirteen are free at the door. A bookshop with no counter to buy from still produces the assumption.

Shopping centres: thirty-eight per cent phantom, and all sixteen are free. But six of them really do limit staying, which is the highest rate in the record, so the assumption there is less wrong than anywhere.

The bookshop is the better test, and it points away from the transaction: six free bookshops, no limits, and the limit assumed anyway in most of them.

What a bookshop and a café share is that a person sitting in one is ambiguously a customer. That may be the real variable, and this record cannot separate it from the purchase.

What the figures cannot carry

One observer. All hundred and twenty-eight assumptions are one person's, and the whole of this page is about that person's responses to a counter. Whether anybody else responds the same way is exactly the thing that is not established.

No prices. A cheap cup and an expensive one are the same entry. If the size of the transaction matters — and it might be the whole mechanism — this record cannot see it.

Confounded kinds. The counter group is sixty-eight cafés and pubs; the free group is shopping centres, worship, libraries and benches. The two groups differ in every way at once, and the entry condition is only one of them.

That last one is serious enough to state as a rival explanation: it may be that cafés produce phantom limits because they are cafés, and the purchase is incidental. The record cannot separate the two, and the page on what it refuses puts this reading alongside the other.