The thing is, you don’t know if the customer is just an asshole or oblivious. So, I could confront you and risk being yelled at (which I really don’t want to deal with at the end of a shift), then stand around waiting for a half hour, OR I could skip the yelling and just stand around waiting for a half hour.
I work at a restaurant inside a park. We open an hour after the park opens, and one of the store entrances is attached to the park welcome building. The doors for that entrance do not securely lock, and can be opened, with a bit of struggle, while locked. You know it’s going to be an interesting day when you have to kick people out BEFORE we open. We don’t turn the lights on until open, but every couple weeks people still manage to get in and expect to be seated.
You can hear them struggle with the door from across the room. They walk into a dark restaurant. You say “I’m sorry we don’t open for another 15 minutes”. Most of the time their response is not to apologize and leave. I’ve heard the open ended statements “Well we’re here now”, or “your doors were unlocked”, or even the more presumptuous “can we eat in the trolley?”. They are still made to wait outside and are inevitably mad about it.
I will choose to avoid confrontation anytime I can, as most of the time I don’t have a choice.
Yeah, there’s always an oddly large amount of houses in my neighborhood who don’t hand out candy. They’ll have all the signals of participation: decorations, porch light on, interior light on and nothing. Especially on bad weather nights, the kids only really hit up the visibly active houses.
We usually go to the other side of the neighborhood too, where there’s greater participation (our immediate area doesn’t have a lot of kids, so not a lot of houses either). Folks probably resent us when we choose to drive due to weather, park and unleash trick or treaters. We’re not from out of neighborhood though (just don’t want to walk the extra blocks in freezing rain) and even if we were, why does it matter? I put out/hand out candy every year and don’t care who takes it. I bought it for the purpose of giving it away after all 🤷♀️. Last few years I’ve been driving to random street corners that look busy, and hand out while sitting on the trunk of my car, lol.