Your Cell Phone is Waiting at a Philly Coffee Shop

marioanima /Stock Photos

Is your cell phone missing? It might be waiting for you at a coffee shop in Philadelphia. Lookout, a mobile phone security company that ofers a "find my phone" app, has compiled statistics on more than 15 million lost phones and come up with a list of the most common places to lose your phone and the cities where phones get lost most often.

The results? More phones are lost in coffee shops than any other venue, and people in Philadelphia are more likely to have their cell phones go missing than people in any other city. What else did they learn? Well, among other things, they learned that people in big cities lose their phones more often, and that taxicabs are not in the list of the top ten places where cell phones are lost. Of course, that may be because few taxicabs are registered as locations on foursquare, which is how Lookout determined locations.

Ten cities where you're most likely to lose your cell phone: 

1. Philadelphia
2. Seattle
3. Oakland
4. Long Beach
5. Newark
6. Detroit
7. Cleveland
8. Baltimore
9. New York
10. Boston

And the ten most common venues:

1. Coffee Shop
2. Bar
3. Office
4. Restaurant
5. Apartment & Condo
6. Grocery Store
7. Gas Station
8. Residential
9. Pharmacy or Drug Store
10. Park

So if you can't find your phone under the seat of your car, check the last coffee shop you visited. Or grab a Philly phone book and start calling coffee shops. Who knows? Maybe you'll find the socks that get lost in your dryer, too.

Of course, there's a darker statistic behind that one. Lookout doesn't distinguish between misplaced cell phones and stolen cell phones, but it's a pretty good guess that a lot of those coffee shop cell phones didn't just grow legs and walk away. People tend to feel comfortable and at home in their favorite coffee shops. How many times have you seen someone just get up and walk away from their table, leaving laptop, cell phone, tablet and other belongings sitting there unattended. It only takes a few seconds for someone to walk by and pocket the phone. We don't like to think of our coffee shops that way -- but the Lookout study suggests that it happens a whole lot more often than we like to believe.

So I'm wondering -- how safe do you feel in your favorite coffee shop? Do you leave your equipment sitting at your table  when you go order another coffee or make use of the facilities or do you pack it up and take it with you? And...what's the chance that your cell phone is watiing for you at a Philly coffee shop?