[manpower]

I'll add some stuff from the industry point of view. I've read about half the thread.

Drinking a lot of alcohol makes you a significantly more profitable customer from the both the owner and server perspective, cheap mains and soda will absolutely get worse treatment than apps/mains/dessert/booze. Good waiting is totally about how you budget your time and you have to try and maximize your tips. Also, it's hard keeping a smile for 8 hours straight, so you can expect waitstaff to similarly budget their capacity to kiss butt.

In the same vein: Foreigners, families with kids, women, teenagers, and elderly couples are just a few examples of sub-optimal customers. Why? They tend towards higher maintenance / profit than say, a group of hard drinking lawyers. Kids especially are a real pain. They don't buy anything and constantly need attention, more soda, more ketchup, and extra this or that because they dropped it, etc. Foreigners obviously tip for [censored]. Old people - cheap. Teens - cheap. Women - bad tippers.

Re: the manager. Standard play on his part is to apologize and comp the dessert.

Re: the hostess. A lot of these girls are in the still in the high school/work 2 days a week crowd. That she didn't know the policy is standard. It's super hard from a management perspective to keep everyone up to date on policy when employees have A) a variable schedule B) no company email C) stay at the job for a month or two. Also, give her a break, she probably makes like $7 an hour.

Re: the waiter. Standard.

Re: The dad. The waitstaff would have considered him to be a whiny pain, by association the kid would be spoiled and the wife a [censored]. The waiter would describe all of this in profanity laced detail to his colleagues in the waitstation. Also, servers frequently curse their customers back there to compensate for all the fake niceness they have to project.

Also, guidsisright.