I didn’t witness it, but back when my father was a restaurant manager he made some customers leave after they became verbally abusive toward the waitstaff and other customers.
If you want them to know why you are upset, you can tell them or write a letter of complaint. The OP says the kid was crying for about 10 minutes, should they pay for the service and / or food up until then? I just wondered if this happened in the first 10 minutes they were there or if they had eaten already. This was a restaurant that they regularly went to, so it must be good 90% of the time. I think they just got stuck with an obnoxious family by chance, it is hard for a manager to create a policy for a situation like that. How long can a kid cry before he kicks them out? One minute? 5?
I want a level of service when I eat out too, but this was not a matter purely under the restaurant’s control. If the kid cried for 10 minutes, was that everyone’s whole dinner ruined?
I agree that the parents were being rude and inconsiderate. When I take my child out somewhere and he starts being disruptive I take him outside or someplace where he won’t bother people and I hate it when other parents let their kids ruin it for everyone too. In this situation I wouldn’t stiff the restaurant because I think they were in a no-win situation here. If the manager asked the family to leave they would likely have raised a scene too.
He was right to tell the manager why he was leaving, but I still think he should have paid for what they ate and got out of there. Tell them you will never come back because they didn’t ask the family to leave if that is what you think they should have done.
Exactly.
A restaurant, especially a proper, non-fast-food, sit-down-with-a-waiter-and-everything restaurant, is selling an experience, one where you can avoid the hassling of cooking and dishwashing, and where you can eat and converse in a pleasant atmosphere. If you don’t get this from the restaurant, then it hasn’t provided the level of service required.
Now, if clothahump and his mum had enjoyed a nice quiet meal, and had only been subjected to the screams of the kid for the last few minutes, then i would agree that walking out on the bill would be wrong. But i got the impression that the disruptiuon came early enough and frequently enough to disrupt the whole occasion. And if that’s the case, then i fully support walking out on the bill.
If they ate the food they are legally obligated to pay, I would think.
I have, more than once. Hell, I booted the Governor’s son out of my store once.
See, but if there are customers creating a disturbance, then it’s part of the waitstaff/manager’s job to either get them to stop or get them out so as not to inconvenience the other 100 or so customers.
And the paying thing it would depend where in the meal I was when I felt compelled to leave. If I can stand the screaming throughout the meal and only leave just after dessert, then I should pay. If I order a drink or possibly even appetizers and can no longer hack the screaming, and complaints have resulted in no actual change in the situation for the better, then hell yes I’m leaving and no I will not be paying.
If the waitstaff/manager are failing to address serious customer complaints, they can hardly be surprised by customers leaving dissatisfied - and without paying for the lack-of-service that caused them to leave.
I just don’t get this. Why should a manager fear pissing off the loud, rude, disruptive group, but not fear pissing off a Doper and his mom? Talk about bad word-of-mouth! The LAST customer I would ever want to piss off would be a Doper…
Seriously, I don’t understand why the loud, rude, disruptive customers get the coddling and understanding. Why not the 94-year-old lady who frequents the place often, should be known by the manager if she likes it and goes there a lot? Aren’t we concerned about pissing off the wrong customers? I want to keep happy the customers who return… the repeat business. Or the customer who tip the best, whichever makes the business more money. 
In fact, upon preview, and to take this one step further, since the manager said something to the loud, rude, disruptive customers and they refused to change their behavior, even for a short period of time… I think good management would dictate that the manager should have offered to comp the meal in the first place, especially knowing that clothahump and his mom would be in there again. That she didn’t, and they felt compelled to leave without paying, strikes me as piss-poor customer service.
I have complained about the same thing in a grocery store, to get the same answer form a manager-type “it’s just a kid, what can we do?”
Now, here- I must define some terms. If we have a family place (which includes some restaurants and most grocery stores) then I 'd say that normal noise from the kids is accepatble- assuming the parents are doing what they can.
It’s that high pitched squealing which goes on and on- that is super annoying and not common. In this case, even in a family restaurant- you need to take your kid outside until he stops.
2 words: Duct Tape.
I think a big problem is that we live in a culture where nobody wants to be the ‘bad guy’ in a situation- i.e. a disruptive child might be bothersome, and a lot of people are really annoyed, but perhaps they don’t feel they should waste their breath on the issue; let some other shmuck stand up for everybody. The problem here is that nearly everyone in the room might be thinking this. Maybe they don’t like confrontation; maybe the parents look psycho and might throw down if anyone says anything disparaging about their kids. Maybe its an employee who fears for his/her job and standing up for themself is not worth getting fired. The point is, a lot of people are bothered, but few bothered enough to stand up and do something.
Personally I feel it is not enough for one brave soul (a Doper, in this case 
) to point something out. Obnoxious people get away with it because the people around them kind of tolerate it enough not to go out of their way to stop them. If everyone in the restaurant threatened to leave without paying, I’m sure the manager would have sided with the 90 other customers, and told the noisy family to piss off.
1 more word: straitjacket (for those kids whose parents see nothing wrong with letting Junior run around between tables forcing servers to do the cha-cha to avoid dropping trays of food into customers’ laps)
My parents are very fond of saying that they simply DIDN’T go to restaurants with me until I was about 4 or 5 years old, old enough to be polite and quiet. “Children should be seen and not heard” was a mantra in our house, and my younger brother and I knew the penalties for making a scene in public. It seems like parents just don’t know that mantra anymore, and they don’t care either.
Yesterday my girlfriend encountered what she thought was the best handling of a screaming child she had ever seen.
The kid was fine for a while, and then lets loose with a bloodcurdling wail for no reason. The mom quickly puts her hand in fron the kids mouth and moves it forward and back making and Indian wo-wo-wo noise. The kid was so surprised he stopped yelling, though they did make more wo-wo-wo noised together for a while.
Yeah, I can see what some of you are saying about it being the manager’s job to provide a level of service and atmosphere. Once the dad started yelling and swearing he should have put a stop to it, to me that would have been his chance to ask them to go. I can see why he was reluctant to confront them for having a crying baby though.
I have seen parties get asked to leave for being rowdy or aggressive before, but it was always for the behavior of an adult. I have never seen someone get asked to leave a restaurant for the sole reason of a crying child and it would take guts for a manager to do it, especially if it was a restaurant that wanted to attract families. Are we talking a 4 star dress-up occasion or an Olive Garden?
That worked exactly three times with my daughter before I got my hand bit.
Kids are a reality in life - and there IS a middle ground. Unless it was a very fancy restaurant, kids are to be expected (and even in a very fancy restaurant, kids are found on occation). However, the when “Angel” doesn’t live up to her name, she should be removed. To the lobby, to out of doors. A parent can try to calm the kid down at the table for a few minutes, before removing them.
However, even that isn’t ideal. Carrying a kicking screaming two year old through a restaurant is not a great situation (did it once - thank God for spaced out tables).
And I wouldn’t have paid my check either.
I’ll also say, although I don’t remember ever acting out like that in public (I was very shy when I was little), that doesn’t mean I didn’t. But my dad, who really isn’t all that great with kids (and I resent that he did this now) had what he thought was a brilliant solution to the walk-around-and-visit-other-diners phenomenon.
The second our food was placed before us, and probably before even one bite had been taken, dad would say, “Hurry up! We’re leavin’!”
This caused panic. We wanted to eat! We were hungry! Yet Dad was threatening to leave without letting us eat first. This caused us to STFU and eat our dinner with no whining, crying, or fussing in general. We didn’t have time to become PITAs, because we were too worried about being starved and abandoned.
It took my step-mother YEARS of indigestion before she figured out what he was up to.
But, if the OP’s account is to be believed, it wasn’t a crying baby, it was a screaming toddler, one that was screaming apparently just for the sake of it, with the parents making little or no effort to quiet the child.
While i might find crying babies a bit annoying, i think that most people realise that sometimes there’s very little even the best parent can do, short of taking the baby out of the restaurant altogether. But when parents just let their kids scream and holler for no reason, and without making any attempt to shut them up, then management should step in and have a word to them.
Bolding mine.
But it is exactly the behavior of the adult in not addressing the disruption of the chila that is being addressed. Parents are expected to control thier children.
Or he could just talk to the police and they could arrest the folks who didn’t pay their tab.
Right. Well, a year and a half is still pretty young, and it sounds like the parents were trying to get him to quiet down, just ineffectively. I agree that the parents were in the wrong. Totally. After a minute of crying they should have taken the child out. (of the restaurant, not ‘take him out.’ You know what I mean.) It’s a difficult spot for someone to have to confront a parent about how they are handling their own children. If I were him I would have used the dad’s response as my excuse to ask them to go, if he was yelling and swearing in the restaurant. Or he could have handled it better in the first place, maybe suggesting a seat or bench in the corner or outside where the child could calm down, etc. I don’t know exactly what the manager said to them so I can’t say.
I just feel for the waitress and the manager, who is going to have angry people no matter what. I’m sure he was hoping the family would leave soon or the child would settle down, in this case he waited too long and other people left without paying. Once again, if they are in a 4 star restaurant then the manager needed to take care of it sooner, but if in a family type place I can see why he didn’t want to throw them out. Gah, maybe I’m too sympathetic to people. I would just feel bad about stiffing the waitress too, it’s not her fault.
One of these days I am going to storm out of someplace in a huff without paying. A huff I tell you!