A Restaurant Is Not A Coffee House
Coffee houses are great and can be a lot of fun. It’s relaxing to linger over a favorite cup of coffee and converse with friends. You can spend hours there and order nothing but coffee.
The problem is, restaurants are not the same as coffee houses. Most expect or hope you will order food. No one is saying that you are not welcome to come into a restaurant and just order a cup or two of coffee and stay for an hour or so. However I can tell you as a retired server at a famous restaurant chain, that people who come in, meet with friends, and only order coffee and stay for six to ten hours, are more than just rude.
In the first place, a server is only assigned a certain number of specific tables for the shift. So by sitting at a table for six hours let’s say, you are the equivalent of taking a table away from the server and a percentage of their income for that shift.
To make it worse, you are only being charged for one cup of coffee, the refills are free. So two people who only order coffee and stay for the entire shift, at 15% for a tip can leave less than a 50 cent tip. For that 8 cents an hour, the server is expected to constantly be watching and refilling those coffee cups as soon as they are empty.
You may ask,” that is their job isn’t it?, and you would be right, but as a former server I can say I would rather just give you a dollar to leave and go somewhere else then serve you at that pay scale for that shift.