A couple gets turned away by restaurant due to being understaffed. They decide to book via the web and come back a while later: ‘To us it just looked like business as normal and I personally felt like the manager was just in a sour mood’

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Olivia Arocena • Writer and Editor
Aug 13, 2026 1:45 PM EDT

Can entitlement be cured?

At this point, it seems like I'm looking for stories to prove my thesis about entitled people who don't realize how entitled they are because they've never worked in service and don't understand it.

To be fair, you don't have to have experience waiting tables or answering the phone to understand that the same person who's kindly telling you the restaurant is understaffed can't say no after you find a way to make a reservation, regardless of what they just told you.

The fact that the same person who hacked the reservation is now asking on Reddit whether she was the A… ehem gives me hope though, could that mean she will start noticing that probably no one is against her and 'doesn't want to serve her' and it's more of a 'they couldn't deny serving you if you made the reservation even if they really were understaffed' plus that they'd obviously fight to keep up appearances even though they were working twice as hard to give the customers a good experience overall?

To me, something has led the OP to wonder whether she was in the right, and that might be her own empathy trying hard to surface. In my mind, an attitude like this would only be partially justified on a very special occasion, you were planning to go to that restaurant on, and you forgot to make a reservation.

I get it; sometimes, as a customer, you just want what you want, and you'll try different ways to get it, but adding a little empathy to the mix can't hurt. I'm assuming the meal was uncomfortable for everyone involved, or maybe they didn't care if the servers were suffering as long as they had their much-desired meal. I don't know; maybe I'm being a little dramatic.

In the end, they got what they wanted, and the restaurant could provide it to them, regardless of whether they had to work some extra hours that day; but either way, something about this story doesn't sit right with me. Still, I'm curious to know: Would you have done the same? Were there no other places in town to eat out?

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  • waiter taking order from couple in restaurant
    via SpotOn

    The couple after they succesfully booked a table

    Subjects are models and not connected to the story

  • AITA for booking a table after being turned away from a 'fully booked' restaurant?

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  • disappointedly sat in the car, cursing ourselves for not just booking earlier. I thought it was total bulls that if we'd just booked they would never have said no, so I checked the website again to see if there were any problems,
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  • busy restaurant
    via Priscila Du Preez

    The overbooked restaurant

    Representation

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  • a table after a meal
    via DIANA HAUAN

    The plates after they did all that only for a reservation

    Illustrative image

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entitled customers entitled people karma entitled entitled people
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