Common sense is uncommon in real life

A chef and owner of a restaurant in France has changed the rules of his establishment. Fed up of customers not honouring their bookings, the chef’s new rule is that every party booking a table must pay a fine per person not showing up. Now a lot of people might argue that the restaurant owner is being unreasonable. But his rationale is that this is a business. For example, when customers make a booking for a party of six people the chef purchases ingredients and then proceeds to make dishes based on those numbers. Then when someone doesn’t turn up, those dishes and the money spent buying the ingredients are wasted.

It is a business after all. It would not only be courteous but helpful to the restaurant if the customer called in advance to cancel a booking or to inform the restaurant that the numbers had changed. But, more often than not, patrons turn up one number short.

Some customers might argue that sometimes, it’s not possible to tell the restaurant in advance that a person wasn’t turning up. It could be a last minute emergency such as if one of the diners happen to be a doctor. Or what if someone was taken seriously ill or even passed away. Would the owner feel comfortable about charging a fine? Again, his argument would be that it is a business. Think of it this way. If someone passed away at a hospital after a lengthy illness, you’d still have to pay the hospital bill.

It seems to me that there are far too many people out there who do not have any courtesy or consideration for the establishment they frequent or for other customers around them. Yesterday I saw a couple in a food court changing their baby’s nappy at a table right beside other diners. The other diners were so busy with their affairs and eating that they didn’t notice and neither did security. Or maybe they didn’t think there was anything wrong with what they were doing.

But to me it was a health hazard; a child’s nappy was being changed in a place where food is being served! Another time I saw a girl perhaps in her mid to late 20s throw up under her table in a food court. Even after throwing up she didn’t move and continued to sit there with her body liquids near her feet. It didn’t seem to bother her that she’d done something so horrendous because she continued to sip from her cup and watch something on her phone! I was horrified and informed security that there was a health hazard in play right now and pointed them towards the offending table.

Even after security went over to her to tell her they needed to clean the table and floor she refused to move. Hazard notices were going up around her but they didn’t have any effect on her. No other customers noticed her throw up but, lucky me, I happen to catch the event as I walked past her.

And this lack of consideration also goes for people manning food stations. I once saw a man behind the counters of an outlet in a food court spend at least 15 to 20 minutes on his phone, probably watching Instagram. The issue was not with him being on his phone, since there were no customers, but with what he kept intermittently doing while he was on his phone. He must have touched his nostrils around 10 times.

Then a little girl sidled up to the counter to pick up a sample of food and he gave it to her with the same hand that had touched his nose. He didn’t even bother to put on gloves. He didn’t seem to have any concerns about hygiene. His co-worker was the same. She kept touching her nose with her wrists and then began prepping food. She too didn’t bother putting on gloves or washing her hands. There’s only so much that people can be trained to do. A lot of it depends on the common sense of the individual. That is why the restaurant owner instituted the rule about fines. Perhaps money does talk.