Barnes and Noble are now offering free WiFi: smart move. Last time I tried to get online at a Starbucks in a B&N - just to send someone an email noting that I was nestled so snugly in the twin bosoms of franchised culture it would take motor oil and a shoehorn to get me out - I couldn't connect. AT&T customers only. You could buy a Starbucks card, but I didn't want to buy a Starbucks card, possibly because it would come with points and rewards and email alerts and a million other lifestyle enhancements.

I'm trying to remember where I was: it was either Fargo, Phoenix, or the Mall of America. . . okay, it was the B&N with the Starbucks on the right side, not the back. So that's the Mall. It surely wasn't the one at Galleria, because the Charbux is downstairs. Anyway. Now that B&N has Wifi, you'll be able to sit in the coffee shop and sop up wifi while laughing derisively at the Starbucks policy. Hah! Take that, you people who are charging for a service!

Has wifi become an obligation for companies? It's getting there. If I have a choice between two coffee shops, and one offers WiFi while the other offers, oh, someone standing in the corner making modem noises, it's the former every time. Good for us, but we're at the point now where we DEMAND it, and get peevish if a place that serves coffee also does not allow a magical invisible connection to the world-wide cybernetic hive. It's a long way from the old diners, where the idea of an ethereal medium capable of plucking thoughts out of the air and distributing them to patrons would have seemed like Buck Rogers.

If you put it like that, I mean. Call it radio, and it would make sense.

The saddest part of the news: there's one local store on the B&N metro-area page that doesn't have wifi, and it's the Southdale B. Dalton's. The reasons are obvious: it's a B. Dalton's. B&N bought the chain, years ago, and hasn't exactly done a lot with the brand. No Starbucks, for one thing. No comfy chairs, no fireplace, no sit-and-relax mood. If you want wifi, you have to walk down the hall and pick up the signal from the Apple store - which resides in the space occupied by a big B. Dalton's when it was the nation's hottest bookseller.

Everything changes. Even B&N is not immortal. Which reminds me: don't sit in B&N and use their wifi to order books from Amazon. It's just mean.