It’s not a matter of different rules for different people. It’s a matter of the sign has to have some number on it, but the restaurants are going to be flexible about it depending on the situation, not the people. They’re not going to kick anyone out who takes 30 minutes to finish a meal that was bought at McDonald’s even if they’re entitled assholes, they generally won’t kick anyone out if they sit for an hour or two during a slow period as long as they have bought something, but they generally will kick out anyone who decides that buying a coke at 6 am means they can camp out in the dining room until midnight and they will kick out people who have bought nothing.
You don’t really want them to apply the rule regardless of the situation- because that would mean McDonalds couldn’t allow the seniors to sit around between 8am and 10 am unless they also allowed people to sit around between noon and 3pm. Which they are not going to do. I absolutely agree that if they are going to allow this group of seniors to sit around between opening and 10 am after buying a single cup of coffee, then they must allow me and my 23 closest friend to do the same. Wonder what the seniors will say if we monopolize the seating first?
I think they need to clarify themselves more. They can’t on the one hand offer free refills (plural) to customers who buy 1 drink but also at the same time say that customers need to leave within 20 minutes. The 2 sets of rules aren’t compatible and they should discard one or the other. At least then ppl would know where they stand when they enter the restaurant.
What would give you the impression that I am a “supporter”? I’ve said repeatedly that it’s pretty clear they have no right to be there. But I don’t think it’s practical or productive for the restaurant, from a purely utilitarian perspective, to keep the tactics they were trying because it was likely to dig the seniors in further and alienate the community.
I don’t see how this is overly generous. The McDonald’s owner got exactly what he wanted: the seniors will leave during the busy hours of 11am to 3pm. In exchange, he has agreed to allow them to stay longer than 20 minutes during the non-peak hours, which everyone here has said was almost certainly the unwritten policy before this conflict began, and to post the new rules in Chinese and Korean.
As an added bonus for both sides, one of the many Korean senior community centers has agreed to come pick up the seniors at McDonald’s at 11 and bring them back to the McDonald’s after the rush is over at 3. Since there was no indication that transportation was an issue before, this probably won’t matter, but it gives the seniors a sense of having won something, since at least someone (not McDonald’s however) is giving them something new. And the center gets positive press and can show their donors that they are offering additional services, plus they might actually get the seniors to spend time at their center.
Except that it seems they aren’t all doing so and it seems like the restaurant owner is afraid of having the security guard remove them althought he doesn’t fear removing the loitering Hispanics. Didn’t someone say something earlier about different rules for different people? Here it is- the Koreans are permitted to loiter when others aren’t.
So the seniors aren’t all abiding by the agreement. That’s disappointing and somewhat predictable, but it doesn’t mean the agreement itself was bad. The owner is scared to roust them presumably because of the threat of boycott, not because of the agreement. And now he has Assemblyman Kim who can come and put pressure on the seniors from within their culture to abide by their agreement. And if one or two truly recalcitrant seniors eventually do have to get arrested or committed, Kim can assure the rest of the community that it was a few bad apples that caused the problem, not something that requires a boycott. And he will, because otherwise he looks bad for failing to resolve the situation.
But that article said that the managers weren’t aware of the new policy and the signs in English, Mandarin and Korean weren’t yet posted, so it sounds like no one is aware of the new policy. And perhaps they need a Korean speaking security guard or restaurant employee to explain the new agreement to the loiterers.
It says McDonald’s is supposed to “collaborate with local senior centres to provide transportation.” That sounds to me like McDonald’s will be collecting people from the senior centres; if it were just the centres driving their members to McDonald’s there’d be nothing to collaborate about.
And the very next sentence says that one particular center, the Korean Community Services Senior Center, will be providing transportation. Presumably the agreement was for the center to liaise with McDonald’s rather than the seniors themselves, for obvious reasons.
ETA: It’s also possible that McDonald’s is subsidizing the cost of the transportation. The point is that it was McDonald’s responsibility to ensure that transportation was made available through one of the centers, not the seniors’. That’s to everyone’s advantage.
Well you can’t issue a summons to ensure that every senior who comes to the McDonald’s shows up for the negotiation. Until the signs get printed, it’s too early to call this a failure.