To arrange to descend on my local Starbucks with an army of toddlers after being told to keep my one year old laughing child quiet in there today by miserable manager?

[Elsmom]

I would understand if I was letting him run riot but he was sitting lovely (for once!) and laughing!

Shoutymum that is just clear-cut awful. Clearly that woman should not have been running a customer service business!

Indeed not. I hope she's since gone out of business. I don't normally wish bad things like that on anybody but if you run a business dealing with the public all day the absolute minimum requirement is to be polite, even if you can't be pleasant.

I was there and the miserable cow was just being completely out of order. He was laughing and happy, sat nice in his pushchair not banging spoons or shrieking. Whatever your opinion on the sort of noise or laugh a baby might have, if you can not tolerate kids go to a pub or something! The thing is there were no complaints from any customers, this patronising bitch, however she felt about the laughing should not have marched over to us in front of a whole shop of customers and made us feel like embarrassed, told off school children. There are certain levels of customer service you expect when handing over your money to businesses and this stuck up, rude woman needs retraining in the art of basic manners.

Don't want to listen to the normal noise level of children? Don't work in a coffee shop that welcomes families.

You do realise you need to obtain approval from a stringent panel of cats -bum -mouthed individuals to take a small child out in public.
I hope he was holding his pastry fork in the correct hand (the right btw)
And really, you shouldn't have him laughing, becaus either people might be feeling miserable, and while it's fine for their space to be invaded by adults with nose-bleed inducing BO, or the boorish noise of ppl holding very important conversations among their grown up peers, the sound of a toddler laughing might be a tiny weeny bit too high pitched.
YAbu
And you need to move to turkey or Portugal or Greece or Spain or cyprus where your laughing toddler will have his cheeks squeezed affectionately.

That's going to make me chuckle all day. Thanks!

We have similar in our local cafe Nero. You'd think it'd be almost unheard of by now but seems some people are intent of being rude.

We always use a non chain local cafe if we can, they tend to be more laid back. In fact our most frequented cafe manager is a hero in my eyes! There's a group of us who have been meeting there once a month with the smalls since they were about 6months old (oldest of group is now 5). We've encountered our fair share of grumpy customers in there complaining about noise (sometimes fairly) and breast feeding (never fairly IMO) but the manager has always come to our defence. He's always polite, asks after the children and makes sure we're all comfortable. As a result we love him! And in return we continue to spend our precious pennies in there.

I'm sorry the Op and others have had horrid experiences. Twitter is a great way to make a complaint as you get very quick response as they hate anything negative being out there for all to see.

When did everyone become so intolerant of babies? I don't live in the UK and my 15 month old is an extremely happy squealer. But here people accept babies as they are, laugh along with him and take pleasure joining in with his obvious pleasure.

Youre welcome happytalk

i don't live in the uk
That's exactly why you had to ask.

She was probably confused. I find people rarely laugh in Starbucks. It's more contemplative shock at the magnitude of shitness they're paying to experience.

Pret like a good laugh, are cheaper and have better coffee.

"Children should be seen and not heard"
But often not seen either tbh
And the comments made about it being ok as long as its a quiet laugh or they're not actually moving or making themselves known in case somebody needs to concentrate on adding their twitter feed between sips of frappe are simply underlying that it's NOT ok.
The uk is sooo intolerant of children.

I agree, PleaseJustShootMeNow. My son is half brazilian, when we took him there I was taken aback by the amount of affection he received from people in the street, shops etc. young, old, almost everybody we came across played, spoke to him and were genuinely lovely towards him. In contrast, I was on a bus with him here once and he was waving at a packed downstairs as we were getting off and saying bye bye to people and not one miserable git responded to him.

Ha TheRealAmandaClarke spot on

TSSDNCOP

Weird as all Starbucks near me are glorified crèches
I would/could not drink a coffee in there

I agree. I've lived in the USA and South Korea and the UK are still holding onto that awful Victorian ,children should be seen and not heard, attitude.

Yes. There are limits. But one has to expect a normal amount of noise from children. Families do have a right to exit the confines of their 4 walls before the kids reach the age of 18.

Maybe that's why the English are seen to be so reserved compared to others! Well I'm sure there are going to be many times where my son warrants a good telling off but daring to have a chuckle in public is not going to be one of them!

I love the MN response which is basically "well, your baby must have been laughing wrongly".

Hope you didn't stir your drink, OP, people didn't pay good money to listen to you clinking a spoon on your cup.

We really need a like post button - some of these responses are certainly brightening up my day!

OP When you arrange the Mass Descent please can I come too? No GC (yet!) but some cousins' children who can yell for England, and I would just love to see the manager's silly face!

The more (and noisier) the merrier Andrewoff gg :)

Depends on how much noise he was actually making. And it looks as if you were encouraging him to make more noise. I like a coffee in peace tbh.

Brian I think some MNers fall over themselves to show how intollerant of children they are because they are secretly to be posting on a site called MumsNet, and want to show that lots of MNers are serious, child hating, grownups :o

Vivian you won't get coffee in peace in Starbucks - or, as Amanda said, is adult noise, laughter, loud conversations, slurping, eating sounds phone conversations etc. fine, just not sound related to somebody not old enough to vote?

What have I said Viviennemary that could possibly lead you to that conclusion? I have clearly stated exactly what happened. I do apologise that I didn't have my decibel recorder on me but I repeat... We were talking to him while he was sitting nicely eating his sandwich and he was LAUGHING! Nothing more, nothing less. I have also clearly stated that I am aware of others around us and have removed him from other situations where he was disturbing others. I am not blind to the fact that he is a toddler and can be too noisy at times but believe me this was not one of those times. I came on here for impartial views, it would be wasting my time to come here bending the truth or the replies would not mean anything. I didn't come on here to be called a liar thank you very much.

I actually like to have peace and quiet while having a coffee too. The age of the person making the noise is irrelevant except that adults have to exercise responsibility for their own noise and children are too young to so adults have to take that responsibility.

I wouldn't choose Starbucks if I wanted peace and quiet though, and simply wouldn't expect to find it there.