Restaurant refuses to sing happy bday to 6 yr old

[guids]

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I had no idea that there was some hidden rule that you had to order X amount of drinks for the restaurant to sing Happy B-Day to you.

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I'm pretty sure you don't have to do this, unless the waiter is some angry douche or is having a slow night and is reliant on higher tabs at each table. I'd think most of the time their mind would be focused on getting the job done, not whether MicroBob is going to have another strawberry daquiri to pad his tip.

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ya, i have no idea what that poker analogy weiner is talking about. yes, it always helps if you are ordering rounds, and that waiters try to push wine, but no one actually thinks like that.

[roaaahhh]

it seems like the waiter was nice in this situation, but obviously the restaurant deemed them unworthy of special treatment, like i said if signal77 says, no we ordered a 100 dollar bottle of wine, or we ordered 12 cadillac margs id sympathize, but im guessing 3 diet cokes, some kids menu quesadillas and a whiny dad.

[MicroBob]

OR...he could just skip the wine if he wasn't in the wine-drinking mood and just offered to pay them $100 straight-up if they sang Happy BDay to the kid.

But since he was already told they would do it for free I don't know why he should do that.


What happens when I order a chicken-chimichanga and they bring out a beef-burrito instead?
I tell the waiter that this isn't what I ordered.
He says, "Ha! We don't even serve Chicken Chimi's anymore. I mean, we could have made one for you if you had bought a $100 bottle of wine. But since you just got a $1.50 diet-coke we decided to bring out this beef-burrito instead."

[Eurotrash]

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it seems like the waiter was nice in this situation, but obviously the restaurant deemed them unworthy of special treatment, like i said if signal77 says, no we ordered a 100 dollar bottle of wine, or we ordered 12 cadillac margs id sympathize, but im guessing 3 diet cokes, some kids menu quesadillas and a whiny dad.

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i agree wholeheartedly with you on this one.

like preflop confirm-with-hostess-about-birthday song was standard. but then mediocre flop and turn play sets them up for a tough decision on the river, despite being in position when the waiter's denial-of-singing is like the scariest card in the deck. plus he just lays the tab face-down (or "checks dark" as some like to call it) so of course then the only way to push the LAG manager off the policy she just made is to bet and 3-barrel. but then she goes Andy Kapp's Hot Fries and makes it four and you fold because it's her restaurant and she makes the rules.

wow, that had to be a good table.

[MicroBob]

I'm not sure if this is the best post in the whole thread or the worst.

[Hopey]

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I'm not sure if this is the best post in the whole thread or the worst.

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I vote 'best'. The posts it's making fun of are the worst.

[Signal777]

It seems that asking whether we ordered multiple drinks and if not then what happened was ok goes into the category of ridiculous replies to me. Can you imagine this scenario?

Dad - Can you sing happy bday?
Hostess - It depends.... how much alcohol will you be ordering?

Do you see the logic here? Either they do it or they don't.

[The Farside]

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If the hostess simply said "sorry, we can't do that" we would have piled back into the car, end of story.

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And here we have the crux of the problem, the reason for this whole stupid thread: the fact that there really are people out there that will decide whether to eat at a restaurant not because of their delicious tacos, or their awesome service, but whether or not they will sing happy [censored] birthday to their little brat kid. Ugh.

[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.

[Hopey]

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If the hostess simply said "sorry, we can't do that" we would have piled back into the car, end of story.

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And here we have the crux of the problem, the reason for this whole stupid thread: the fact that there really are people out there that will decide whether to eat at a restaurant not because of their delicious tacos, or their awesome service, but whether or not they will sing happy [censored] birthday to their little brat kid. Ugh.

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They weren't there for the service or the tacos, they were there because it was the kid's birthday. Do you not remember how important birthdays were to you when you were 6 years old?

But apparently you think the kid's a brat because his parents wanted to make sure that something their son had his heart set on happened on his birthday. Wow.

Oh, and "awesome service"???? WTF???? Did you not read the OP? The service is what got the restaurant in trouble in the first place!