My intention was to ask an analytical question. There is no doubt in my mind that it is rude to be served or waited upon after closing hours…nonetheless, if a Dr’s office is open from 9 to 12 and 2 to 5, it means just that…that a pt can come in during office hours (if advanced appointments are not required) and expect to be seen.
Otherwise, why not say full service until 4PM…any guests or customers arriving after that time until 5 pm closing will be expected to conduct business quickly.
Wouldn’t that be a better way of alerting even the most inconsiderate or rude individuals?..
Say a restaurant closes at 10PM, what is the latest a party can go to that restaurant in the eyes of the server, or bartender whereby the party is NOT considered rude? in your opinion of course.
You probably didn’t ever work for OfficeMax then. At least in the store I worked in, it was against policy to make announcements to inform shoppers that the store was closing. We couldn’t even dim half the lights or shut the music off to clue people in that we’ll be closing soon. The reason: “We mustn’t make our customers feel rushed and thus, unwelcome in our store. Our customers deserve to have a pleasant shopping experience…” Yeah, whatever. Even worse was that if any customers were in the store at closing time, we were not to close the doors, which meant other customers could come in, even after we were supposedly closed. Lastly, we were to wait a full five minutes until the last customer leaves before shutting the doors. Needless to say, none of the managers ever did this. As soon as the last customer was out the door, the doors were locked.
The corporate-level morons who make up such insanely asinine policies probably never worked in any of the stores. If they did, they’d want to get the hell out of there and get home after closing as soon as possible just like the rest of us human beings. The most we could do was very strongly hint to the customers that we were closing. We did this by asking them if they needed us to help them find anything (mainly to hurry them up). Never were we to tell a customer that we would be closing soon, but often times we did. What the corporate bigwigs don’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
I have certainly seen restaurants here with signs that say “Open 12:00 - 22:00 / Kitchen closes 21:00”, meaning no additional food will be served after that hour though you won’t be rushed out. Or perhaps, if it’s as much a night spot or bar as a restaurant, “Open 14:00 - 01:00 / Dinner served 14:00 - 20:00”, meaning after that you can only order drinks and maybe a limited selection of appetizer-type foods, which allows them to shut down at least part of the kitchen. Whether this works against the truly clueless or the very rude, I do not know. Unfortunately working in retail has convinced me that some people just don’t want to be supplied with a clue and don’t care if they are perceived as rude or if they are inconveniencing people.
I worked at a grocery store during high school and summers during college, and one of our customers was called The Midnight Shopper behind her back. She would come in five to ten minutes before closing to do a week’s shopping. TMS was immune to both subtle hints, like turning out most of the lights, and blatant ones, like telling her to her face, “Ma’am, we closed ten minutes ago, would you please finish your shopping and proceed to the check-out?” One memorable year she did this on Christmas Eve, of all days. (I remember it well because I had to get home, eat, shower, dress, and get to one final brass choir rehearsal before midnight Mass. Tight enough schedule without losing half and hour waiting for her.) At the deli counter she would ask for a “taste” of this and a “taste” of that, and either only order one thing or decide nothing was really what she was in the mood for. The closers had already begun wrapping the meats and cleaning down the slicers, and would open up again and then have to re-wrap and re-clean. At the check-out she had elaborate instructions for bagging her groceries, and if they weren’t done quite right, she’d unpack the errors and demand they be repacked - but she’d never help out. I do believe she enjoyed being a… okay, this isn’t the Pit, so you’ll have to fill in the blank here.
I don’t believe signs are any protection against people like that.
The only protection from them is a strong manager. One that will walk up to her and say “Ma’am, our registers are closing down in 2 minutes, if you want your groceries to leave the store, you will have to go there now.” or “Get out and don’t come back.” and mean it.
Retail, when closing time comes, the store is CLOSED. I’ll be nice enough to let you finish your transaction and get out.
Restaurants are a bit trickier, since each transaction takes a long time. You can set closing time a half hour earlier than you want to close, and let people linger a bit over coffee and dessert. That doesn’t help much if you let someone in for a full meal. If you close earlier than that, you’ll wind up rushing your later diners. Again a good manager will see that it is 30min to closing and won’t let new customers in, while letting the existing customers not feel rushed.
Think about a bar, anyone here think it’s just ducky to hang out after closing time chit-chatting over a nursed beer? They don’t just have Last Call, they have Last Call followed up by Get Out.
What many restaurants here do is simply have a “last order” time, usually 30-45 minutes before the posted closing time. And they stick with it. I’ve been turned away on occasion when going out for a late-night snack because they’ve stopped taking orders. More frequently, though, I encounter it when I’m already eating and they send someone around to each table to ask if there’s anything more anyone wants to order before the kitchen closes. Some restaurants (particularly in places where people are out and about late at night) post the last order time outside along with the closing time.
I worked at a restaurant/bar once where the bartender was always threatening (low tones, to the barbacks) to take “The Persuader” (a king-sized bottle of Galliano) to the jerks who were sitting around twenty-after-close and yapping about their business deal or how much their wives hassle them for getting home late and drunk. :rolleyes: He never did it, but it make for a good image.
Most bars expect a little extra after-hours time (hence, they’ll serve up to last call, or five minutes before) but customers who linger half an hour after close are just a big pain in the ass, 'specially since the bar staff usually likes to spend a few minutes winding down and schmoozing with management after the doors are locked. At least with a bar, you can begin closedown and cleanup while still serving customers, but jeez, at 02:30 your customers should be staggering home, not nursing their tall Tanqueray and tonics.
I used to work at a Subway which, for many reasons, was the job from hell. One of the reasons was the following: closing.
It wasn’t a freestanding place - we were located in the foodcourt of a mall. We were at the very end of the food court, next to the indoor skate park. The park closed at 9, and everything else closed at 9:30. So, at about nine, nine-fifteen, we’d suddenly get this stream of hungry, thirsty skaters who wanted a snack. We had fifteen minutes 'til closing, and there is a lot you need to break down, put away, wash, etc. It’s physically impossible to do that while serving customers. Since working the first night I closed, I have refused to go into any non-24-hour resteraunt an hour before they close.
The most fun was the night over winter break when my manager, god knows why, decided to have me close alone. I finally got out of there an hour and a half late…but no, I’m not bitter…
Nope…at least not the Applebee’s down the road from my house. They are open until 2AM but the kitchen closes at 1:30 AM.
I work in a different industry - hydraulic seals - but I still get jerk customers like this sometimes. Someone will bring in seals for 3 or 4 cylinders to match up (this would generally consist of 20-30 greasy parts that need to be measured, written up, pulled, and invoiced) at 4:55 PM when we are struggling to get the last of the UPS Red orders called in at 4:45PM and hoping to leave sometime before 5:30 (we close at 5). Since we are salaried, it doesn’t matter what time we leave, our pay rate is the same. If I’m in a good mood I might match them up, but my boss allows us to tell the customer that they can leave the seals with us so that we can match them up the following business day.
For bars, it’s kind of nice to be in Washington, where the law requires that all alcoholic drinks be pulled by 2:00 AM. So the bartenders have the force of law behind them when they pick up people’s half-finished drinks and say “get out”.
We restaurant and retail people are not so lucky. Back when I worked retail, we had a woman come walking into the store 5 minutes after we were closed. We had left the door open because there were still a few people to check out. As this woman walked in, a cashier told her, “Ma’am, we’re closed.” This woman had the audacity to say, “It’s okay, you’ll get overtime!” Then she proceeded to the back of the store and returned with a tube of Chap-Stik. Holy fucking shit, woman - have you never heard of 7-11?
One restaurant I cooked in used to close at 8:00 PM. Because of a number of regular customers who consistently showed up 5-10 minutes before we closed, the boss decided to start staying open until 9:00 instead. These same customers promptly started showing up at 5-10 minutes before 9:00. Dumbshits. When the boss learned of this, he (admirably) went back to closing at 8:00 and we employees all got to have a good laugh over the next few days at these customers pulling into the parking lot just as we were leaving.
We had customers do this ALL the time when I worked the drive thru at Wendy’s. We’d close at 11, and some jerk would drive up at 10:58 and order about 5 extra value meals.
Then some other jerk would see Jerk #1 ordering and go “ooh, they’re not closed” and get in line to place an order. One time we were still taking orders 45 minutes after close because of our jerk managers.
That’s how it was in every restaurant I ever worked in. If closing was taking too long, we’d have to clock out because somehow it was our fault that it was taking so long. The McDonald’s I worked at as a teenager wasn’t real big on breaks, either, or child labor laws. Once my mother dragged me out of there (the night before a big inspection) at about 1am on a school night. “But she’s not finished,” my managers said. “Yes she is,” Mom replied, and out the door we went.
Where I work, there’s minimal closing-down to do, and we’re paid until leaving time. It takes maybe five minutes to do the cash-out and get out the door- and by ten to closing, we’ll have turned off some of the lights and the music, and be standing menacingly by the door with our keys at two minutes to close. We have the company owner’s full permission to verbally shove people out, too.
At my last job we had a lot more closing-down to do, combined with that stupid let’s-make-our-customers-feel-welcome crap. So if someone barged in at five minutes to close, and spent an hour browsing, we had to delay the hour and a half closing procedures until s/he left.
If I’m not being paid past a certain time, I’m not going to hang around while you browse. Sorry.
I worked at Pizza Hut a few years ago, and had one group of people that made it worth our while to stay open late. It was a football team and their coach, they had just won a game and came it about 20 minutes before we closed and wanted to sit down and have their meal in the restaurant. It was me, the dishwasher, one waitress, one cook, and the manager. The football team stayed in there eating for about 45 minutes after closing time, and they knew we were all going to be late getting home, so they pooled together some money and gave every employee that was there that night at least 20 dollars. They were very nice, and very clean, they even helped wipe their own table and gather up their dishes. The coach came back and slipped me an extra five bucks because I had to wash all the dishes they had used. So I didn’t mind staying past closing time.
Just my story…not saying it applies to everyone.
Personally, I try to get my business with a place done at least an hour before they close, because I’ve experienced the bad side of this too. I worked at Burger King before I worked at P.H., and people would come in after all the machines were being broke down and cleaned and order shit like 20 cheeseburgers…oh that made me so mad. Usually I was the one that had to make them all.
So…it can be good, it can be bad. Common sense would say that most of the time, it’s not a good idea, and it’s likely to piss a few people off if you show up somewhere 30 seconds before they lock the door.
Some people won’t even leave the store when a tornado may be coming. True story, on June 8, 1974, I was working in a big store and the sirens went off. We broadcast a warning in the store that people must leave and take shelter somewhere(we had none.) We clerks were hurrying out the door to the restaurant across the street, which had a basement. The manager stayed behind to shoo out all the dumb ass customers who wanted to be checked out first, and on a last run through of the store found a customer wandering the aisles, who asked him “Where’s the strawberry jam?”
I should have mentioned, the reason I remember the date so precisely is that it was exactly eight years to the day after a huge tornado DID plow right through the middle of our city, doing horrendous amounts of damage. You’d have thought that the pea-brained idiots who wanted to be check out would have been a little more “tornado conscious”, but noooo.
I have been for dim sum here in Sydney, and although I don’t think we got there too close to the end of the session (maybe 45mins), we were seated, and then found that the carts simply weren’t coming around. We ended up having two or three dishes and then kicked out still hungry (but of course having to pay - I should have made a scene and refuse, on reflection). Very rude of the restaurant. They should have just not let us in. We had a third of a meal.
Most banks in the US close at 6pm…I have raced to the bank many times to make it in before closing. Then I expect to conduct any bank business if I get in before 6PM. Don"t you?
As I mentioned before, if a Drs. office is open until 6PM and you are given an appt. for 5:45PM, don’t you expect full service from the Dr. even though you waited in he waiting room past 6PM?
MadSam, it seems from the tone of your posts that you are seeking to justify poor time planning. Rushing to the bank before closing, and expecting to get full service. Arriving very late at a store or restaurant, and expecting to be able to get a full meal/service, with no consideration for those who must wait on you.
Tell us, what kind of jobs have you held? Have you held any jobs? Were you peachy-keen happy to stay late to serve the public? Let us know, and then we may know better where you are coming from.
When a library is ready to close, it means it. Most of these are public institutions and the employees aren’t paid after closing time. People in civil service (and most walks of life) have a distinct aversion to working without being paid.
Most public libraries I’ve worked at will let you check out books right up until closing time. Usually the services that shut down early are things like retrieving periodicals, photocopiers, and public internet terminals.
Keep in mind also that libraries get a few people who will just stay there all day and all night because they don’t have a home.
Baker, I’m not trying to justify going to do any thing just before closing time…My questions are based on examining what does open mean in various situations?
You ask if I was happy staying late to serve the public…I’m a retired obgyn who was up all hours of the day and nite for over 40 years…Many of the hours I spent taking care of individuals was gratis. I’ve had thousands of calls at all hours of the nite some important…most not emergent or urgent.
I do not argue with you or anyone that a restaurant server, salesman or what have you should have to work overtime…My contention is that a store or restaurant should say open until whatever time they are prepared to provide full service even though it may be an hour earlier than time for employees to go home.