Originally published at: 'Epidemic of entitlement': Too many rude customers cause restaurant to shut hours early | Boing Boing
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Grand Rapids is largest RED city in Michigan. Massively Republican and MAGA. This may not explain the unacceptable behavior but it is a Mexican restaurant with probably Hispanic staff. May this serve as a wake up call.
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Dining out is essentially dead, to me that is. Friggen humans…
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…but then again. it might
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Actually… maybe that’s the problem for this restaurant owner… that many reasonable people who understand that the rest of the world doesn’t exist to serve them still aren’t going out, leaving much of his customer base as entitled anti-masker types who can’t be bothered to treat others with basic respect?
I guess @BillB hinted at that.
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Good man!
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So many questions…
Did the staff get paid when you were closed?
Are they $2 an hour tip workers?
From the video, it looks likej you should have had a crew come in and clean the place up.
I did 3 years working in a 24 hour diner, the only good thing about working overnight was no kids. But the asshole factor was through the roof. I can’t imagine its gotten any better.
My thanks to everyone who works these jobs, I wish other people had a bit more empathy. And keep your rugrats on a leash!
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That would never happen at my favorite place…
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Having spent a couple decades bouncing in and out of the restaurant business. Unreasonable people who think the world exists to serve them, and who can’t treat others with basic respect. Is kinda the normal baseline for restaurant customers.
Over the pandemic people have generally been kinder. If only because the situation made labor concerns in the industry abundantly clear to everyone.
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At the beginning of the pandemic I observed that a lot of the customers at the store I was working at were either a) unable to get a credit card, b) too stupid to figure out online shopping, or c) both. The pleasant, reasonable customers were staying home.
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I honestly don’t know why people behave like assholes to the staff who are serving them in shops, pubs, restaurants, etc.
Maybe it’s the way I was brought up, in a working class family without much money, but it was made clear, albeit in subtle ways, that I should always be polite, say please and thank you, hold doors open for people, and not just women, and when walking along a street with a person of the opposite gender, to always walk on the outside.
I’m now 68, and all those things are pretty much ’baked in’, I just doesn’t occur to me to behave in any other way!
I have had the occasional glare from a woman when I’ve held a door open, and I’ve had doors shut in my face by women walking in front of me, which has gotten a loud ‘thank you’ from me. With no obvious response. Unsurprisingly.
It costs nothing to be polite and to be nice to people, the little cafe/restaurant I regularly use in town, if the staff see me putting my bag down by one of the outside tables, will start making my regular mocha before I’ve even got inside, for which they always get a big thank you. I consider them to be friends, and treat them as such, and in return, they treat me well.
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I think it can partially be attributed to most service industry types bending over backwards to appease their customers, following the mantra that ‘the customer is always right’. You get a few decades of business operating under that assumption and it trains customers to be entitled about their interactions with staff.
The other part of the puzzle in my mind comes down to plain old classism. Some customers just outright believe that a person is working in the service industry is just fundamentally a lesser person than themselves and thus undeserving of courtesy or kindness.
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I’m surprised to hear people have been kinder since the pandemic began. I know there was a surge of support early on but then the cranky types took over, at least from my point of view.
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Wish my bosses had been more like this guy. Instead, one of mine let me get written up b/c I politely told an angrily insistent customer an author had published two books, not three, and showed her on the computer.
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How dare he shut down before closing time!
Read the many, many stories on https://notalwaysright.com/ to find out that the customer is not always right, and in many cases, is a complete arsehole
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Thanks for that link. Only read the first story so far, bookmarked for future cheering-up doses.
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I used to eat out a lot. I’d only cook at home maybe 3 days a week. The pandemic changed that, out of necessity. So spending a year and a half cooking at home almost every meal, with the occasional take out or delivery, (a) made me a better cook, (b) made me a more efficient cook, and, thus, (c) got me to realize that I could eat in almost as easily, and certainly more cheaply and healthily, at home. Now, even though I could go back to eating out all the time, I haven’t. When I do, I’m always nice to my server, even if they aren’t nice to me (which is super rare), and I always tip well (even though I hate the tip based economy). So yeah, I could definitely see that if my situation isn’t unusual, the average dine in customer today may be very different than they were 3 years ago. I think the other thing that has changed has been what the staff is willing to put up with. We’ve seen a change in all workplaces that employees are much less tolerant of shitty jobs than they were pre-pandemic. And restaurant owners know this, too. They know now that if they don’t have their employees backs, their employees may just up and quit mid-shift (as they should). I’m hopeful that, in the long run, all of this will end up being a positive thing for workers.
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It was the after-church crowd and their disgusting wingnut larvae, all jumped up on the DeVos-approved prosperity gospel shit. I have never seen a more pompous, entitled horde of christofascist bootlicks than the Christian Reformed Church stormtroopers which infest Grand Rapids every Sunday between the end of Morning Church and the beginning of Evening Church.
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They also are fond of putting fake money tracts under a plate so it looks like they have left a tip.
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