Restaurant Praised for Standing Up for Its Young Workers

A restaurant has won over thousands of people online after displaying a simple sign asking customers to show some basic respect to the employees serving them.

The sign was photographed and later shared in Reddit’s MadeMeSmile community with the title, “A nice sign in a restaurant.”

It quickly took off, receiving around 128,000 upvotes and more than 1,200 comments at the time shown in screenshots of the post.

It wasn’t difficult to understand why.

Sitting right at the counter was a message that customers could hardly miss:

“PLEASE RESPECT OUR EMPLOYEES!

For many of them, this is their first job.

They are teenagers.

They are someone’s child.

They could be your child.

Please DO NOT BE RUDE!”

There was nothing complicated about the message.

The restaurant simply wanted people to think for a moment before losing their temper with the person behind the counter.

That person taking an order or handing over food might be a teenager working their very first shift. They might still be learning how to deal with customers, use the register, remember orders and keep up when things get busy.

More importantly, they’re still a person.

That reminder seemed to be what connected with so many people online.

One Reddit user summed up the strange reality behind the sign perfectly, writing: “I love this sign. I hate that we need this sign.”

Others felt exactly the same way.

For them, it was great to see a restaurant publicly supporting its employees, but disappointing that customers apparently need to be reminded not to mistreat workers in the first place.

“I think it’s insane that we need a sign to remind others to be decent human beings,” another person commented.

The conversation soon moved beyond teenage workers.

Several people pointed out that being young or inexperienced shouldn’t really be necessary reasons for treating somebody kindly. A person shouldn’t have to be someone’s child, or working their first job, to deserve respect.

One commenter put it much more directly: “It doesn’t matter if it’s their first job, it doesn’t matter if they’re teenagers, doesn’t matter if they’re your child or not, people are people and deserve respect don’t be an asshole.”

For anyone who has spent time working in a restaurant, café, shop or fast-food counter, the frustration behind those comments probably feels familiar.

Customer service can mean dealing with hundreds of different personalities during a single shift. Most interactions might be completely normal, but it only takes one angry customer to turn an already stressful day into a miserable one.

One fast-food employee responding to the post admitted there are days when they would love to simply tell rude customers to make their own food.

“Good. I work in fast food and every day I want to tell several customers to go home and make their own goddamn sandwich,” the worker wrote. “This service is a privilege not a right.”

That comment gets at part of the reason the restaurant sign received such a huge response.

From the customer’s perspective, an order that takes too long or arrives incorrectly might be an annoying five minutes. For the worker behind the counter, it could be one small mistake during an eight-hour shift filled with dozens or even hundreds of orders.

Now imagine being 16 or 17 years old when someone starts shouting at you over it.

For teenagers entering the workforce for the first time, those experiences can stick with them. Their first job is often where they learn how to deal with pressure, responsibility, difficult conversations and people they have never met before.

They’re going to make mistakes.

So do experienced adults.

The restaurant wasn’t asking customers to ignore bad service or pretend mistakes don’t happen. The message was much simpler: there is a difference between pointing out a problem and humiliating the person who made it.

Several people in the discussion also brought up another familiar idea. How someone treats waiters, cashiers, cleaners and other service workers can tell you quite a bit about them.

“I think you can learn a lot about a person based on how they treat wait staff/customer service people,” one commenter wrote. “You can clearly tell who has never worked in that industry before.”

It is probably one reason the post connected with so many former service workers.

People who have worked behind a restaurant counter know what the job looks like from the other side. They’ve dealt with the lunch rush, impatient customers, wrong orders and moments when several things go wrong at once.

They also know how much difference one patient customer can make.

Interestingly, the restaurant’s original message was specifically about protecting young employees, but the online discussion eventually became about something much broader.

Respect shouldn’t depend on age.

It shouldn’t depend on whether someone is working their first shift or has been doing the job for twenty years.

And it shouldn’t disappear because somebody happens to be standing behind a counter serving you.

One Reddit user eventually asked the question that seemed to sum up the entire conversation:

“Honestly, why is it so hard to just be a decent human being”

Maybe that’s why such a small restaurant sign ended up reaching so many people.

It wasn’t really about food, orders or customer service.

It was simply asking people to remember that the person standing across from them is a person too.

And sometimes, apparently, that reminder still needs to be written on a sign.