WSJ
I did say that I wouldn’t swear to the timeline, but I am sure that their party was there when I left. And I’m sure that I didn’t leave until after 11:00, probably closer to 11:30. That would means, if they were seated around 9:20(according to faithful1), then they were there for at least an hour and a half, probably close to two hours.
And though faithful thought the length of their stay was irrelevant, I disagree. If they were able to turn our table over in just over 30 minutes, they should have been to turn their tables over three or four times in the time they were there.
The point of my post was to show that there was most-likely an inconvenience that resulted in a loss of revenue to the cafe due to the size of the party and the length of their stay. I wouldn’t be surprised if some customers went somewhere else when told of the wait time for a table. That would be business that is lost.
All that being said, however, I still think the owner acted inappropriately. Yelling at the customer is going to cause him to lose more business (as we’ve seen here). I just wanted to point out that his frustration came from somewhere.