No excuse for this and it looks like the restaurant tried to do the right thing - I'd give the owner a pass if it were my kid.

That said... I have seen some absolutely horrible behavior from children out in public. I try to be tolerant of it if the parent is at least "trying" to control their child.

But when a parent is indifferent to it all and does NOTHING about the behavior (at the expense of others around them), then I have a problem with it.

I can think of a few times when i'd like to have given a "little F*cker" receipt to someone on an airplane.

Stupid mistake, definitely worthy of firing.

That said, and I can't parse the time frames given in the story, but it sounds like they may have gone to a restaurant during the dinner rush (6:15 pm), and are blaming a 20-minute wait for their food.

If so, that's fairly ridiculous. I used to manage a restaurant in Atlanta, where we were given license to tell unreasonable people to f*ck right off.

Once, during the lunch rush, and during an unprecedented surge in the place's popularity with the business class, a guy complained that he and his girlfriend had waited 45 minutes in line, then 20 minutes for their food. I asked him if he saw any correlation between the two wait times, and he was clueless. His comment was that our "service was 'lacking.'"

Keep in mind, this was a super-cheap mission-style burrito joint, that had recently become "hip," (in the sense that a local weekly called it "hip" enough times for the entire city to dogpile on it) where a family of four could definitely eat and have drinks for way under $20 US, total. Our most-expensive item was about 4 dollars.

His retort was that he saw employees lounging behind the registers while they waited in line.

I told him that if he wanted to be in charge of when our employees took their state-mandated breaks, he was welcome to fill out an application, and work his way up to Manager. But that he would have to start out in the dish room, like everyone else.