» Coffee roust:
A coffee klatch at an east side McDonald’s is rousted by a security guard for violating the fastfood restaurant’s 30-minute time limit.
My day at McDonald’s started with breakfast and the boot. That’s right, I was kicked out of McDonald’s on Milwaukee’s east side this week. It’s what I get for hanging with the wrong crowd, in this case, the restaurant’s morning coffee klatch. Every McDonald’s has one.
Our offense? We lingered too long and were busted for violating the 30-minute time limit, even though there were plenty of empty tables.
“You gotta start wrapping it up,” the stern security guard warned our booth at the 42minute mark.
I kept on sipping and talking with Marylyn D’Amore-Kruger and Jay Onisch, retirees and longtime regulars at the McDonald’s at 1614 E. North Ave., a little west of Oakland Ave. Another member of their group, Mike “Ringo” White, nervously left before he could be ejected.
About 25 minutes later, the guard issued a final, though polite, order: “I need you all to pack it up, please.” He had a gun and handcuffs and other scary things on his belt, so we headed for the door.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a prisoner in a cafeteria and the guard comes up to you and says time to go back to your cell,” Kruger said, laughing at how over the top that sounded. She made the comment earlier as she invited me to join her and the others to see what happens.
America has more serious problems than time limits at McDonald’s, of course. But Kruger and Onisch and the other breakfast club pals who join them think the limit should apply to trouble-makers only.
“This is what I think,” Kruger said. “A security guard should be for security. He should know if a person has been sleeping there for two hours and if they’re fighting with each other. That’s the time for a security guard to go into action.”
She is not speaking hypothetically. This particular McDonald’s was plagued with street people sleeping in the booths with all their bags of possessions, bathing in the restrooms, panhandling in the drive-through lane and causing disturbances.
So owner Jeff Steren took action and in October hired security guards to enforce the time limit. In part, he was trying to make his regular customers like Kruger comfortable when they visited.
“But when they realized it meant them, too, it caused some problems,” Steren told me. “I’m just trying for consistent enforcement. Otherwise, it looks like I’m doing favoritism. How could I leave that morning group of regulars and kick out other people?”
That’s easy, Kruger said. Just tell the guards to apply common sense and give a break to customers who aren’t squatting, showering and panhandling.
Steren, who owns 11 other McDonald’s restaurants and strikes me as a reasonable guy, said he did tell the guards to be generous on the allotted time for the morning regulars, but not to toss out the limits entirely.
In defense of the guard, he did let us sit there for more than an hour, which is way longer than I usually spend at McDonald’s. And I noticed he was putting away trays, pushing in chairs and doing other chores around the place.
Steren doesn’t use security guards at his other locations, and starting next week he plans to get rid of them on E. North Ave., too. If need be, he will bring them back.
Kruger won’t miss the guards and warnings.
“This is my routine,” she said. “It’s how I like to start my morning. I have breakfast. I have the paper. Then maybe I get a dessert and a hot cocoa. I’m not asking for the world. I’m only asking for an hour and a half.”