Simply Suggest Another Restaurant

Dear Miss Manners: What is a tactful way to deal with customers when you no longer want or need their business because of the numerous problems they cause?

We own a small but upscale lunch restaurant that caters primarily to business people. While most of our customers are fine, a few of our regular ones are confused, demanding and neurotic types - who simply go through life being a burden on those who have to deal with them. These include:

Self-important types who demand to use our business telephone at any time simply because they were paged. (They have even come behind the counter and helped themselves to the phone without asking permission, and tied up the line during busy periods.)

Women who bring in unruly children much too young for a restaurant such as ours. These children disturb our other customers with their screaming, scratch and damage our table-tops with metal toys, and completely trash the area with food and spilled drinks. And their mothers never offer a word of apology or make any effort to control them.

The list goes on. There was a time when I thought we had to tolerate anything because “the customer is always right.” Having seen what some customers are capable of, I no longer feel this way.

Is there any polite way of saying, in effect: “We really don’t want you as a customer any more. We’re patient, but you have crossed the line and used up your welcome here. Please go somewhere else.”

Gentle Reader: Must we part with that dictum that the customer is always right? Miss Manners is not so naive as to believe it is the guiding principle of modern commerce, but she would like to keep alive the idea that it is a good thing not to let outrageous customers push trained service people into retaliatory rudeness.

This doesn’t mean you, she hastens to add. You have a reasonable position and want to exercise tact. So perhaps we could agree that some of your customers might be - shall we say “more right”? - elsewhere.

The technique you need is known in private schools (where the intention is to avoid hurting a child who will never be able to keep up with the academic standards of the school) as “counseling them out.” The approach is: We have your best interests at heart and believe you would be happier elsewhere.

In this case, you say, in reference to the telephone service or protection of a child on the loose, “I’m afraid we really don’t have the facilities here to take care of your needs. We will be sorry to lose your business, but we understand that other restaurants would be more suitable for you.”

Dear Miss Manners: My wife and I are invited to be the host and hostess at a wedding. We are close friends of the bride’s parents and know the groom’s family and a few of their friends, but not the other family members on either side. What are our duties as host and hostess? Nothing has been explained to us.

Gentle Reader: The hosts are the people who put on the entire wedding - planning it, paying for it, and seeing that it goes well. Perhaps your friends know what they are doing in not having explained this to you before you accepted.

But quick, before you pass out, Miss Manners has to tell you that she doesn’t really believe that that is what they intend. She just wants to make the point that they are using terms loosely, and making up positions that don’t exist.

Probably, all they want you to do is keep an eye out in case guests are stranded or some arrangement needs to be fixed while they are busy with other guests. Or perhaps they want you to preside at a table during the wedding breakfast or dinner, introducing people and seeing that they are well taken care of.

But then, why didn’t they just say so?