YYT82

RangerNS

Holding several chairs for yourself isn't "for yourself". You can hold one chair. Or maybe N chairs for the N people in your party you came up on the elevator with.

The difference is stuff. If I'm in the lounge, my stuff is in the lounge. I'm in my seat, or its holding it for me as I'm getting food.

We are not yet at a point where we are hotseating. Carrying around our stuff like sherpas, foraging food and then hunting for a seat. Moving to make room for a party of 4? Well, maybe. Playing seat Towers-of-Hanoi because they let in 150 people into a 130 seat lounge? Sorry 20 newbies, wait your turn.

musicmtl

As long as your jam is in containers up to 100ml.

I think that's fine, and pretty much the norm from what I've seen. Better to claim your spot than to try to juggle luggage and plates.

NordsFan

LAX MLL 17MAR: waiting for AC788 which has a 75 min departure delay. No more than 15 pax here.

The F&B ladies are doing good work especially the one who is calling out the slobs who are reaching into the tortilla chip bowl and the cookie jar with their bare hands. In the last hour, she has caught 3 people doing it since I arrived at 2000.

"Sir, sir ! Please use the tongs !"

acse17

It'd be nice if they scrapped free lounge access for anything under 50k. That would clear up the lounges a little bit.

Bohemian1

Assuming that includes pax there because of premium CC access, then sure. But that would be very unlikely.

acse17

At YVR I had to badger the attendant to take away the vat of soup when I saw that the lid had fallen in (as they're wont to do) and her first instinct was to just fish it out and wipe it down.

flyquiet

That's the problem with the huge quantities in one serving container. Once they are contaminated, the whole batch is fouled.
It is not as though the consumption rate is so fast. They could easily top up the platters and soup vats slightly more often, a bit more labour for a lot less (a) wastage or (b) uncomplained-about contamination.

24left

Exactly.

I suggested that to the then-manager of the former AC LAX MLL back when it was in T2 (in the old NZ lounge) after I saw one of the large serving spoons in the hummus bowl.

As with everything else, a few things come together in these situations:

1. People who put the serving spoon in the bowl instead of on the small metal dish in front of the food item. They don't care or that's what they do at home.
2. Lounge staff who aren't trained (or don't care) in the art of foodservice delivery, safety and maintenance

To be somewhat fair to AC, I see these issues in hotel Exec Club lounges, I see it in some other airline lounges. It is partly the customer but more importantly, it's the airline or hotel who offer the lounge and the companies who run the operations.

The YVR Dom MLL staff have always been better than other MLLs I've been to about telling customers about things.

flyquiet

Agreed that it is not exclusive to MLL. I saw this in the salad bar at Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens as well: the tongs fully immersed in the salads.
I did not buy any salad.

littlea905

I was in the Trans-border MLL at YUL a few weeks ago. I watched the following occur in the span of about 10 minutes, which makes me wonder what kinds of gross things are happening when I am not looking.

Watched one lady walk up to the bowl of tortilla chips, put her fingers in the bowl, pick up a chip and put it straight in her mouth. Tongs are completely obvious. Yuck.

A few minutes later I had gone up to get a chocolate chip cookie out of the jar (with Tongs!) and noticed that someone had dropped one on the counter. Whoever that person was decided to leave it there and not throw it in the trash. In hindsight i should have just thrown it away myself, but I digress.... I go and sit down and while eating my cookie I watch another grown adult walk up to the jar and rather than taking a (possibly clean) cookie out of the jar, picks up the dropped cookie on the counter and proceeds to eat it.

Where do these people come from? I might expect this kind of behavior from a kid, but an adult? People are gross.

RangerNS

The problem with that is that the classy resting trays don't actually hold the spoons or tongs. If you look at them funny, the tongs will flip off and hit the floor.

flyquiet

I have never understood tongs for the chips. Why can't they find a scoop or something that won't crunch the chips to smithereens, and maybe people will use the implement.

To avoid emotional trauma about the cookie, though, I will tell myself that the person that ate the cookie from the counter had removed it with tongs and placed it on the counter and forgot it there and came back to get it. Slightly less disturbing that way.

RZR

Tongs are supplied because providing a scoop would lead to much waste. It also helps me ..... I wont eat as many

bocastephen

At least she was doing something - I regularly see people using their hands and taking dirty plates back to the buffet, the staff just watch and do nothing, and yes, I yell at customers who stick their hands in the dishes, or ask them to get a new plate (I don't normally yell at the dirty plate people). I've really unloaded on a couple people in the MLL over the years who were sticking their hands in serving dishes repeatedly. I know Canadians might not be used to us Americans yelling at someone in public, but if that's what it takes to help train these morons to act properly, so be it - I don't mind. Of course at the YYZ TB MLL, where I end up doing most of my yelling, when I tell the clueless staff they need to change whatever dish was contaminated, they just stand there like deer caught in the headlights until I can get a manager, some of whom are equally clueless. I've seen it outside of the MLL in Canadian restaurants, so I've just assumed there is a general lack of hygiene knowledge in Canada, which is strange for a country that makes it feel like a crime to cough in your hand instead of your elbow.

I probably see 1 person in a US airline club do this for every 4-5 people in a MLL, and in Asia, outside of generally dirty mainland Chinese, I would see this done .001 times for every 10 times in Canada, especially in Japan - and when I see it, it's always a foreigner.