yeah, I totally did not get that.
My dad has his “Dad Look”. I would get scared whenever he used it. My father is six-three and when he gets his “look”, he is scary. I wasn’t afraid he was going to hurt me, but hell, when you’re a kid, that look can scare the shit out of you.
For gods’ sakes, sven, the kid threw himself into her booth, grabbed her with sticky hands AND spilled her coffee all over the place, screaming all the while that he was on fire. He was running around the place, making a complete nuisance of himself, and Mom and Dad were just sitting there ignoring him. Considering that he risked having hot coffee spilled on him or Lurker, I’d say he got off easy.
stegon66, I’ve worked customer service, but that doesn’t mean a person shouldn’t do his or her job. And in this case, his JOB was to take care of problems going on in the restaurant. In some cases, the manager IS a dick to customers, and shouldn’t be excused for it. And if a manager doesn’t have the balls to deal with THIS kind of situation, then fuck it.
If you’re putting up with customers who allow their kids to run around and pretty much maul other customers, and you’re not doing shit, then you’re a lousy manager, and quite frankly? You DESERVE to lose your job. I never allowed kids to act like that when I was working (I yelled at plenty of kids), and I don’t think I ever got in trouble.
(That kid was a lawsuit waiting to happen – if he had gotten hurt, can you imagine how Mommy and Daddy would have reacted? Ugh!)
See, you say that, but your comments, like the suggestion of asking the parents if they’d like some crayons for the kid, seem like they’d only work in an ideal world, where everyone has perfect integrity and where people always respond the way you want them to respond.
I am now going to start carrying candy in the same pocket I use for pet bribes. And for the same reason.
You are SO smart 
If either the parents or the manager had done their jobs then the OP would not have had to think on the spot with how to deal with this assault by a wild brat. I think it was hilarious! It’s about time the polite majority got the last word.
I don’t think it happens often at all. But if the manager can’t talk a patron into behaving in a manner that doesn’t disturb all the other patrons, what else does s/he have left in the way of options to deal with the situation?
What I hear you saying is that you’d let the one unruly patron or party ruin everyone else’s dining experience until they got tired and left on their own.
I’d be more sympathetic for your dilemma if you seemed like you gave a shit about how a party like the family in question was affecting everyone else’s dining experience.
You work retail, right? I’ve not seen many misbehaving kids in a retail environment (not that I do a lot of shopping.) First, they are not stuck in one place. Second, patrons they offend are not stuck either, like those in a middle of a meal are. If I can’t move for some reason, I’d just leave, with no problems. If there was a store that let kids go wild they might lose business, but I doubt the managers would see too many complaints.
i have had my crutches hooked out from under me, dumping me on the floor. I have had a kid RUN ahead of me and jump onto the power chair and ride off in it to joyride around the store. I have had kids run up and push me. All the times management did nothing about it, and the fucking parent/s did nothing about it.
Fuck brats.
Where the fuck do you do your shopping? I’m serious. It sounds like a zoo or something.
Well, I’d say ‘fuck the parents who let the brats get away with this shit’. It would never even occur to one of my kids to do something like that. You know why? They were raised better! This is not to say my kids have always been paragons of good behavior in public; for instance, mudgirl has a terrible habit of saying things that are. . .well, less than appropriate for a public setting, while we’re out eating lunch or something. But when she does that, I’ll quietly say to her “That’s not an appropriate topic for this time and place”, and she’ll say “Oh. Right. Sorry.” and change the subject!
Kids who are allowed to run wild when they’re very small quickly learn that running wild is an acceptable option. It is up to the parents to teach them differently (or to not let them learn to run wild in the first place!)
Do I like having my meal interrupted by having to take a kid somewhere else to calm them down/discipline them? I do not. Therefore, sometimes I get a baby sitter when I go out. Otherwise, keeping my kid under control is the price I pay for having the kid with me. Not rocket science!
ETA: @ lorene:
What, you think this behavior is uncommon? Or do you think aruvqan is lying? Or perhaps shops in terrible places? Does it really matter where she shops? I’m sure she could tell you stories of people parking in handicapped spaces she could have used who display no such placards/license plates and have no disability. Hell, I see it weekly.
I think we’ve already established that the world is brimming with morons who reproduce willy nilly. Just because you’ve never seen a child grind chicken into the floor with his bare feet doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened to me. Just because you’ve never seen a filthy little bastard grab another patron with their sticky little digits doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to the OP.
I’m a little tired of people calling into question the legitimacy of other well-established, rational posters’ comments.
Right? Maybe Columbus, OH is just some kind of idyllic paradise(), but I’m pretty sure that in any shopping establishment I’ve ever been to, if someone on crutches got knocked down by a rowdy kid, there would immediately be people swarming over to try to help out, reprimand the kid, etc. I have also personally seen, with my own eyes, a Target manager tell a kid to get off one of the little motorized cart things, and that kid wasn’t even driving it around; he was just sitting in the seat. So I have trouble imagining a store where kids are knocking over people on crutches and driving motorized carts around and shoving grownups with total impunity. It sounds like Lord of the Flies.
() These words have never before been uttered in any context at any time for any reason.
ETA in response to lindsaybluth: Yes, I do think this behavior is very uncommon, actually.
Thats the name of the new chain of “upscale” stores the Walmart Corp is planning.
I don’t think she’s lying. I never said she is lying. I do wonder where she is shopping that such feral beasts are the norm and not the exception. yes, it does matter where she shops, because it’s not anyplace I would ever want to be.
On preview—what Ms. Whatsit said. I don’t think these things never happen, but again, I don’t think they are more common than uncommon.
I also am curious about where this happens, and when. I don’t shop right after school gets out, and I don’t shop at WalMart. Where I do shop, like Target, I see plenty of kids but very few misbehaving ones. Hell, in Costco the kids are on average better behaved than the adults; at least they don’t leave their carts in the middle of the aisles. :mad:
You missed the editorial in last week’s Dispatch.
Now that I think about it more, I’ve never seen the behavior in more affluent suburbs, like where my parents are moving to. In the city at Target and other stores is where I’ve seen it.
Although the restaurant with bare feet/chicken ground into the floor was a well off suburb with an inexpensive menu.
Presumably aruqvan has listed behavior over many years. The issue is that any of the situations she listed is horrific. Once in a lifetime is an exception; once every few months is disgusting behavior that deserves comment.
I’ve seen people knocked over by kids on those wheelie-skate shoes. In fact, at one of the stores I shop at, they make announcements every so often (at least once, sometimes twice a grocery trip) about the shoe-skates being banned for safety.
My husband and I travel around North America by car and we stop at many different places, and one thing we’ve learned is that things are different in different places. We thought the kids in our local zoo were bad, then we went to a Chicago zoo - holy shit! Talk about feral children! We have a new appreciation for how well-behaved our local children are at the zoo now.