What happens with a party of 4 males or 4 females (or a 3/1 split)? 
Honestly this is the weirdest policy I’ve read about in the thread.
I know, I know, I know, it’s all perfectly reasonable. I still want it back, and blame it’s absence for why the nation is not what it once was!
I’ve never been to the restaurant with a party composed like that. Next time I’m there, I’ll look and see if there’s a party that’s less than 5, but has more than 2 males, and report back what the solution was if there is. I’d ask, but I’m not sure how the staff will react to a customer questioning the old man in public. He has a reputation for running the place with an iron fist.
ETA: I agree it’s one of the stranger ones, and it was one that I didn’t notice at first. I went to the place for more than a year before I tried to sit in the wrong seat.
Okay…I know the thread’s been inactive for a couple of days, but just to chime in on the women’s hat thing…just heard this on the How To Do Everything podcast:
The reason women don’t have to remove their hats, at least in church and during the national anthem, goes back quite a ways. The rule was put into effect because if a woman took her hat off, it would cause her hair to drop down, and it was believed it’d be a distraction to the men.
The point is the restaurant I worked at, not only would you not get served if you didn’t take off your trucker hat. You would be asked to leave. What would you do then ? Go to the Human Rights Commission and file a complaint or head down the street to the diner and keep your hat on.
You said it’s none of their damn business. It’s 100% their private business and they can serve who they want. I didn’t like asking people to remove their hats when I worked at this restaurant but it was their policy and I did it. Most people had no problem with removing their hats. It was an upscale’ish restaurant.
Bwuh? I don’t know about other places, but I’ve always understood the church thing was based on something the apostle Paul wrote that said men should keep their heads uncovered (which is also related, apparently, to why some priestly/monastic orders shave the tops of their heads) and that women should keep their heads covered, and it just sort of carried over into other situations due to widespread Christian cultural influence.
Same here. I’ve never seen “coke” used generically, and I’ve live my whole life (to date) in GA. Maybe I just missed it. 
I once went to an Indian restaurant. I had just planned to order an appetizer, because lots of time there’s just too much food on the entrees.
They told me they didn’t serve JUST appetizers, that I HAD to order an entree. If that’s their policy, no problem. I walked out and found somewhere else to eat that DIDN’T have that policy.
FWIW, I do tip really well when I just order appetizers. Because the waiter shouldn’t get stiffed just because I don’t eat a lot at one sitting.
I hadn’t heard that before so had to look it up. So this is what he says:
I feel like if someone came here and made this argument, people would be demanding he explain exactly what he’s talking about because it makes absolutely no sense. “Because of the angels” what? If this is indeed why men aren’t supposed to wear hats in restaurants, the world for me today is a funnier place than it was yesterday.
Hmm. I grew up in southwestern Virginia. In a town with a college. Would you mind telling me the town and the year? Thanks!
Well, I’ve also heard that this scripture is another case of the writer speaking metaphorically and later readers taking it literally. Even so, there are a lot of “common practices” in Western culture that have their roots in Christianity, but have become so ingrained over the course of 2000 years that we no longer think of them as “Christian”. They’re now just “etiquette”.
You are confusing one “they” with another “they.” It is the restaurant owner’s business to set policies in his or her own establishment. Of course, the owner of your particular restaurant might just be a different species of asshole, but it has nothing to do with what I said.
I worked at a burger joint in Disneyland and there was one rule that bugged me and that management never sufficiently explained. When guests walk up to the counter and request a cup of water, or ice water, we’d always give them a cup and direct them to the water fountains a few steps away
Sometimes, guests would want water right from the tap, and we’d have to tell them no, its a health hazard. I think that explanation is a true worry, even though I think its pointless
However, in our soda dispenser, the nozzle which dispenses Iced Tea had a separate lever for water. When guests asked for that specifically, we were told to tell them no, because “the water tastes funny since it comes out of the same nozzle”. Even for guests who insisted they didn’t mind, we had to make up some excuse about management not wanting to do it.
My theory for this weird policy was:[ul]
[li] Management really is that anal (possible, since this was Disney)[/li]
[li] They don’t want any complaints later on[/li]
[li] They don’t want the line slowed down by people asking for free water (probably this one)[/li]
[/ul]
Maybe given the amount of business we were doing, #3 makes sense, but its always been weird to me. Sometimes if the guest insisted, I’d just reach over and pour them some water. Nobody ever got in trouble for it, and all of the employees get water from that nozzle so its not like we cared it sometimes tasted a bit like Iced Tea
I’ll pick #3 as well. If you’re filling up a cup with water, you’re not filling up a cup with a paid drink. While this might be tolerable when it’s slow, it’s going to be a PITA when you’re slammed, and management wants the drones to get into the habit of directing the customers to the fountains.
Or possibly Disney charged the shop for water from the soda fountain or tap, but Disney paid for the water from the water fountains.
Don’t most municipalities require that eating establishments offer free tap water? Maybe since Disney controls its own municipal-like entity, it doesn’t require that of itself.
Even if a municipality (or county or state) did require it, why wouldn’t the water fountain suffice?
Perhaps this is what you come to expect with an organization that now charges $87.00 a head for admission. (I am soured on Disney anyway; I have a nephew who worked for them for many years, and quit when they wanted him to be a hatchet man and fire people on someone else’s behalf.) :mad:
Wow! The bizarrest part of that is when I ask a similar place at Disney World (other coast), I get a cup filled with ice and tap water.
(It’s a WDW policy that ice water is provided free of charge at all eateries. Better to miss out on a few people buying bottled water than some suffering from heat stroke, I guess.)
He was being asked to fire people that another person managed?
How old are you? The only people I’ve heard muttering about hats in restaurants are seniors.
I’m in that demographic, too, but I just made a decision that It Honestly Doesn’t Matter. After years of seeing my mom’s dinners “Ruined! Ruined I tell you!” because one person thirty feet away was wearing a hat. When we ask her why, she looks at us like we’re crazy, and says “Well, it just ISN’T DONE!”
(This is the same woman who wouldn’t let me wear comfortable shoes to school, because anything more casual than wingtips would be “disrespecting the teacher”, so take her with a grain of salt…)
Seriously, was there a rule made back in the 40’s that eating with a hat on was evil? Why?
Heh. My mother’s reason for dressing me up in uncomfortable, “nice” clothes that I hated was worse, if maybe more honest: “I don’t want people thinking I’m a bad mother!”
While I’m sure the hat thing goes back much further than than the '40s, when it comes to “that” generation I think the obsessive attitudes about it are rooted firmly in The Great Depression. Being seen removing your hat emphasized the fact that you owned a hat. This would be closely related to the “No son of mine is going to go around looking like he can’t afford to shave!” thing. Not “don’t want to shave”, it’s “can’t afford to shave”. Being able to pay for a shave (or to buy a razor) was a sign that, no matter how poor you might be, you still had some dignity. And these are both closely related to pale-skinned European aristocracy (who could afford to stay indoors not getting a tan like the common rabble), or certain cultures where obesity was/is seen as a good thing because it indicates you can afford to eat your fill instead of just scraping by.
Pride and Vanity.
He was being asked to do the dirty work–do the actual firing for executives who were too lily-livered to face the people they were cutting loose. My nephew refused to do something so underhanded.