Anyway, I didn’t get the sense from Matt’s posts that this was meant as a “having kids makes people more selfless and understanding” sort of debate (correct me if I’m wrong) in a general sense…and speaking of children, one of mine just woke up so I gotta go…

I’m not saying waitresses should be shitty to kids. I’m explaining that sales is callous, and you’re just upset because you’ve seen the callous underbelly of waitressing. My point is you shouldn’t take this attitude of the waitress — a salesperson — and extrapolate it to the general population of people without children, as you did in your response to Mel B.

On the issue of waitresses bumping up tabs, I’d like to think that not every server has the restaurant’s bottom line as their primary concern. At the very least it does the bottom line no good to treat a certain class of people, whether they be children or gays or Jews, as “vermin” (as Dawn said). I mean, this waitress basically says that families with small children should never set foot in a nice restaurant, but should be relegated to the ghetto of T.G.I. Fridays (which in my experience has wait-staff who can be just as unfriendly to families as in any “fancy” restaurant).

Best places to eat out with kids: Baan Thai in Fort Wayne and Kotobuku (Japanese) in Toledo. Come to think of it, I’ve yet to have a bad experience with waitstaff in a Japanese, Thai, or Indian restaurant with kids. Maybe I’ve just been lucky or maybe there’s a cultural appreciation of children that’s lacking in the more whitebread American restaurants. Who knows. But if I have a good experience I tip well and I will return again and again.