A mother has sparked a frenzied debate by asking if cafe staff were reasonable to ask her to clean up after her baby.
The woman said on the British parenting platform Mumsnet she’d taken her child to a family-friendly cafe, but as she was leaving, one member of staff bought her a dustpan and brush and asked her to clean under her child’s high chair.
The post split views on the site, with some saying of course she should clean up the mess and others insisting the cafe employee was rude.
In her post, the woman said she and a bunch of friends go to a cafe each week, and she wrote that the previous week one of her friends had been told off by the manager for not cleaning up her baby’s mess under its high chair, and she said that, on a more recent occasion, when she was packing up to leave, she got given a dustpan and brush to clean up food that her child had dropped.
She added that if it had been an excessive amount of mess she would have of course cleaned up automatically, but she clarified that it was a few bits on the floor.
She then relayed the story to her mother, who was disgusted by the cafe and urged her to leave a negative review, but she was so torn over the situation and so sought counsel from Mumsnet users. However, her post didn’t garner much sympathy.
Most mums were extremely critical of her for not cleaning up the baby’s mess.
One wrote that they were shocked at how often they see people strolling out and leaving a mess all over the floor, and she added that if an adult dropped food they’d pick it up and that you should do that for your baby too.
Another wrote that many parents, unfortunately, don’t clean up after children when out or let them run riot because the place is child friendly.
A third wrote that if she stepped into a cafe and there was food on the floor, they would walk out, and said that if the staff were busy and they’d caused a mess, they believed that it was only right that they cleaned it up.
Others implied that the cafe was probably trying to prevent the gathering of mothers from coming.
It’s not just children though. Adults leave tables in a complete mess these days, and the same goes for cinemas et cetera, and it seems that people have no manners and no thought for the waiting staff.
If you don’t do it at home, then perhaps people shouldn’t do it when they’re out, and it’s discourteous. After all, who wants to sit next to people that are acting like pigs?
Restaurants and cafes typically have staff that clean when people have left the building, and that is the job they’re paid to do, although it’s always nice when someone offers to clean up after themselves.
What happened to good manners? Sadly, they’ve gone.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 