I’m almost 50, and I assure you that this isn’t something new. My first job was at a pizza joint in 1985, and it was the most soul-deadening professional experience of my life. Kids were HELLIONS. It was a rare day when some 9 year old wasn’t standing on a table, or throwing silverware across the dining room, or even one time, crawling up to whack the video projector we had for cartoons with a red pepper shaker. And very rarely did parents do anything. My manager at the time, who had worked there since 1969, laughed at me when I expressed horror at all this, telling me, “this is the business, get used to it.”
(I won’t even go into the time when I delivered a pizza and the customer’s horrid little pre-pubescent shot a bottle rocket at my car, and the dad laughed, “That’s what you get when it’s not here in 30 minutes or less!” Do I even need to point out I was actually way early?)
Anyway, in the service industry, you get to see the worst in families. A friend of mine, she got stabbed in the leg working at a Shoney’s by a young kid with a fork. Some fun never goes out of style.