Does the local knock shop count?
We like breakfast out on the weekends and there are few choices in our mostly-rural area. So when we show up at Bob Evans for the gazillionth time, it’s nice that the server brings our Diet Cokes right out. That’s as far as it goes, tho, since we don’t have a usual meal.
What I really like is being known by our auto mechanics. I never feel like they’re trying to sell us a bill of goods - if they recommend something be done to one of our vehicles, I trust them. They won major points when I brought in our old van and said “Tell me what it needs” and the answer was pretty much “Oil change and new wiper blades.” I have to beg them to change the turn-signal fluid…
I don’t like very much attention focused on myself and I also don’t like feeling like I should do or eat something. I wouldn’t mind a “hello” but anything more personal would irritate me. I like to just shop or eat and be left alone.
I would rather have them ask if I wanted my usual food or drink item before they prepared it for me.
I agree, but that’s what they do–if I even have a regular. Both going to the same place regularly and always getting the same food would suck.
Mostly they just know that we usually get the salad bar at Western Sizzlin, want ranch dressing, and that all but me want the same drink every time. Oh, and that I want everything cooked medium well, my dad and sister medium, and my mom “not burnt but no pink,” which should be well-done, but you’d be surprised.
Tangential question: if the cute girl at the Dunkin’ Donuts near my mom’s house remembers my coffee preference after lapses of a couple months at a time, and struggles to remember the rest of a typical order for me, and apologizes for not remembering it all perfectly, and gets a little flushed… should I do something about that?
I go, every few weeks, with one of my coworkers to a local restaurant and we have the greatest meal on earth - a steaming bowl of Beef Rendang and a pot of coconut rice. When we arrive, no matter how many people are waiting, we are shown to a table for two, given a jug of iced water and not asked to order, although one of the wait staff asks us regularly if we would like to try the Curry Chicken for a change.
Not only do we love it we are corrupting others.
A few weeks ago a group of 11 of us went there and ordered 5 bowls of Rendang, 5 pots of coconut rice and one Laksa.
Of course I like it. It makes it into a personal, often friendly interaction rather than a cold impersonal exchange of money for goods.
I guess I wouldn’t like it if I changed my meals around regularly and the staff prepared a meal for me as I queued, leaving me no choice about what to have, but if I change my meals regularly then how would they even know what to prepare? That’s hardly likely to happen, is it?
And if I nearly always eat/drink the same thing but want something different for a change, it’s easy enough to call out that I’m not having the usual today, if I thought they might be pre-empting my order
Yes, I like it. I was out of NYC for two months over the summer and when I came back to start teaching in the fall I was feeling lonely, having just been vacationing with my parents and my brother’s family. I had yet to meet my students or reconnect with coworkers. I was back in the impersonal city, another face in an uncaring crowd… (Waah, waah, poor me…) and I stopped in at the Dunkin Donuts a couple blocks from school.
“Welcome back. Medium coffee, milk, no sugar?”
After not seeing me for two months! Suddenly I felt like I was back home.
These Dunkin Donut ladies do ask me every day, rather than assume my order, and I do vary the foodstuff I get. But it’s really nice when there’s a line, and people ahead of me are ordering a thousand donuts, and my cup appears on the counter, and I just put down my money, take the cup, and go.
This is another big advantage of being a regular – if I don’t have enough money, they’ll let me slide until next time. They also hold things I may have forgotten (credit cards, umbrellas, etc.) until I come back in.
I normally love it. The only time I didn’t was at this one restaurant where the waitress there thought she had some sort of claim over me. So what would happen is, I would go there, her section would be full and they would try to make me wait. Then I would have to verbally tell them “No, just sit me down where ever.”
Don’t get me wrong. She was a nice girl. It’s just that my purpose for going to that restaurant is to eat; not chat with the waitstaff.
I go to the same branch of Subway pretty much every Saturday for lunch, there’s a lady who works in there that knows I drink tea. If she sees me come in, she catches my eye and asks if I want a cup of tea and then she’ll set one brewing so that when I’ve ordered my food and it’s been assembled, my tea’s ready at the same time.
Other than that, I rarely go anywhere often enough to be a ‘regular’. However, I tend to catch the same train in the morning on my way to work where the first class carriage has only a small number of regular staff - most of them know exactly what I drink and how I like it, more often than not they’ll see me get on the train and bring me a drink almost immediately. I kind of like that bit!
I can only guess at what this means in Australese…I’m assuming it’s something that’s illegal (in most of the U.S.) 
The girls at the donut shop a few blocks from my house know how I take my coffee, which is good because I take it black with sugar, and if I get someone new, and I say black, they don’t bring a spoon to stir it with, and if I say anything else, they bring me about a dozen of those little creamers.
I could imagine that a regular customer would be unhappy at the corner store if he was greeted by a loud “A carton of Pall Malls and a bottle of Wild Turkey, just like yesterday?”
The only store where I’m a regular in the sense that they know what I buy (even sometimes when I don’t know) is the local pet store. It has gotten to the point where sometimes they’ll remind me that I’m almost out of food when I didn’t go there for food. They’re always right and always prevent a dog food emergency.
There have been a couple instances where I walk through the door and immediately forget why I went there. Knowing what our dogs eat and play with and how often we need to replace things, the owner or her employees are able to figure out what I went in there for after my brain shuts off. The slightly distressing part is that they can all tell just by the look on my face whether or not I remember why I’m there.
Actually, when I worked at a convenience store, most of the smokers got really pissed off if I didn’t automatically pull a pack or two of their favorite cancer sticks from the overhead rack when they came to my register. The drinkers usually drank wine or beer, and that was self serve except for the high end stuff. I had a couple of customers who would wander in after a hard day’s work, look blankly around, and I’d say “Toilet paper, six pack, I got your cigs, and you probably need dinner, too, the tuna salad is nice today.” I always wondered how they got home without someone driving them.
I’m a regular here, so no, it doesn’t bother me.
I thought that only happened on Clerks
“Pack of Cigarettes.”
Nothing, NOTHING is allowed to come between a smoker and his/her favorite brand of cigs. Smokers will usually cut back on almost anything else before they start going to a lower priced/generic brand, or cutting back on how much they smoke. And they’ll spend those silver dimes and quarters and half dollars that they were hoarding at face value.
I love it. My corner store already has my pack of smokes ready when i walk. And my local comic shop always has my stack ready and waiting
I suspect everybody saying “yes, I love it!” are the ones keeping this guy in business.
I’m with the OP. For me, I don’t like the implied familiarity. And since dislike of shallow familiarity is widely interpreted as me being a jerk, I face just a bit of pressure as I either have to play along with a similarly cophrophagic visage or know people think I’m an antisocial cad for just wanting my coffee and not caring who gives it to me.
I didn’t vote, because I like it in some industries and not in others. For example, I hate being a regular at the local restaurants and chains here. The wait staff will be rude to you and favor new customers over you and still expect a tip (I usually give a large tip). I always don’t like being a regular at restaurants or beauty places (nail/hair places), because they always try to make try a new item. Or they’ll bother me into getting something different than what I want because they “know me so well” (Yes they told me that!). I’ve been talked into trying too many food/styles I ended up hating because I felt too bad to say no or say what I really wanted.
On the other hand, I like when I go to a store for goods and I’m a regular. Like say the grocery store and the clerks will tell me “That yogurt you eat is sale this week”. Or if I’m in a book store I frequent, and someone shows me the new additions.