To hate restaurants with tables this close together? (Pic included )

[ohchristmastrees]

Just the two of us and we will be stuck on one of these tables.
Does anyone else hate being this close to other people when you are eating ?

This is absolutely the norm in France, even in quite expensive restaurants, so it looks quite normal to me.

How awful for you! I’m so sorry. That’s rubbish.

Or, to minimise price rises as they realise that the market in their area will only bear a certain level of pricing. So to make it viable they have to either reduce costs (where?) or fit in more covers. Therefore it’s almost certainly more about preventing a loss than maximising profit - which I realise is 2 sides of the same coin. But framing it as something to maximise profits puts a certain spin which is not underpinned by reality in most restaurants. It’s a high cost, low margin game on the whole, operating on margins insufficiently high to absorb a c 20% increase in their largest cost (labour) without doing something. Now, you might prefer a 20+ % increase in the prices, but I expect they know that most customers would not.

A few chain restaurants can be like this I actively hate being to close to others during eating a meal