Thank you, Disneymommie!!
I just want to make a couple other comments. The restaurant where I work is a very old-fashioned family type restaurant, nothing up-scale, not a chain, etc. It's a 2-room restaurant that seats about 100 people, and has an old-fashioned counter/bar with swivel seats. It's in a very small town (population about 300!) but people drive for miles and miles to eat there. People who live in Lansing, our state capitol, will drive the 40 miles up just to eat there. Our menu stays the same, always. You know what you're going to get, it's very, very consistent (rare turnover of cooks and waitresses) and very well-run. People love the place.
The carpet in the lobby needs replacing, the bathrooms could use up-dating (they are not even handicapped accessible), etc. but it's clean and the food is wonderful, all home-made, from scratch.
We are extremely busy on weekends, and most of the rest of the week is quite respectable (except for this month, s-l-o-w). We do close at 4:00 on Sunday (open at 7:00 a.m.) and 90% of our customers know this. The owner knows we usually sit down at 3:00 to eat and she's fine with that. We all (owner and her husband, and the three waitresses) sit down together usually on Friday and Saturday nights, but sometimes not until after closing but still have people in the restaurant so we are always hopping up and down to take care of them.
We had cleared all of the tables BEFORE we sat down this past Sunday at 3:00. But while we were in the process of getting our food three other tables left. Rather than let our food get cold to clear them (taking care of our customers is another thing, we are more than happy to keep hopping up and down to do drink refills, remove dirty plates, get dessert, etc.) we always wait until we're finished. It takes us about 10-15 minutes to eat, so it's not THAT LONG of a break, really, and like I said we're up and down every couple of minutes checking on customers but we don't feel it's necessary (and our boss feels the same way, or she wouldn't allow us to do it) to leave our food to get cold to clear a couple of tables (plates are cleared steadily as the customers eat, but the glasses, coffee cups, napkins, silverware, butter wrappers, etc. are still on the table) while we eat, since there are many, many CLEAN tables for customers to choose. 99% of our customers will not sit at a dirty table, and it just annoyed me that these people chose a dirty table and refused to move when I asked them. And no, they didn't want to sit there because of the "view", there was no window for them to see out of, and we don't have booths, they are ALL tables.
Like someone else said, the employees run the restaurant, not the customers. Most restaurants have a hostess who seats people and they do not get a choice in which table to sit at, especially if a whole section is "closed" for one reason or another. (I have worked the breakfast shift, and usually "close" the second section until the second waitress comes in so I don't have to keep an eye on both rooms and I've had people ask to sit in the other room and I just tell them "sorry, it's closed.")
We had the "please seat yourself" sign out, since our hostess had left, but had I known these people would be a pain in the *** I would have seated them myself so they wouldn't have sat at the dirty table.
But like I said, I enjoy my job MOST of the time, and we have many wonderful "repeater" customers that I love waiting on, but there is the occasional customer that I don't particularly enjoy.
Oh, yes, they did leave a tip. I was surprised!!
I mean, I wasn't rude to them. I smiled, refilled their water glasses, took away dirty plates, asked if they wanted dessert, etc. I just "took my time" getting to them after they refused to move.
