Not a Dine & Dash, But Walked Out Because of This in St. Cloud [OPINION]

I have never worked in the food industry.  But I have had many roommates throughout the years that have, and I have listened to their stories.  Some of them are pretty horrible when talking about certain customers and their behavior.  There are things like setting the salt and pepper shakers so that there is no way to pick them up without it spilling all over, people just making a complete mess with the condiments that are on the table, and working the "drunk shift" is always challenging not to mention the lack of people tipping recently.  So I do realize that being a server definitely has it's challenges.

But, when you have the opposite thing happening, such as an inattentive server, things can go South quickly the other way too.

This is what happened to a group of us at a St. Cloud restaurant on Saturday night.

I do feel a little like "get off my lawn", but this was craziness.

We got to the restaurant and it was not busy at all. There were a few tables, but literally just a handful.  A server came over and took our drink order almost immediately.  Most of us just had water, but a couple of us had drinks from the bar.  Those were brought out right away too.

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After about 20 minutes or so, they came back to take our food order.  That was after asking them to do that.  Then we waited.  And waited and waited for our food to come out.  Nothing.  Not even a check in to let us know that they were working on it, or an apology for being slow, or even a hey - do you need any other drinks?  Nothing.  At one point a server walked by our table (there were 7 of us) and shrugged and kept walking.

We saw several rounds of food coming out of the kitchen and be delivered to other customers.  Many of whom came in after us.  At one point we did ask the manager what the hold up was because we had been waiting for so long.  She did say at that point that she would "check on it".  We still waited quite awhile.

Finallym after waiting for an hour and 15 minutes (again, it was not busy) we collectively decided to leave.  We never received our food, and the people who had ordered drinks left a some money on the table for those.  But they could have comped those too...just because.

One of us did mention to the manager that we were leaving and why.  She just said nonchalantly, "sorry".

We did go to another restaurant at that time, and we were discussing the issue amongst ourselves.  The table directly behind us heard what we were saying and they piped up and mentioned that it's happend to them as well.  So, obviously it's an issue.

So, question is... how long do you wait before you just walk out of a restaurant for bad service?  I don't mean a dine and dash, because if you actually received your food, you should pay for it.  I mean just straight up bad service.