Mom With Baby in Coffee Shop Mad That They Wouldn’t Stop Grinding Coffee Beans So Her Baby Could Sleep

Some “AITA?” posts have me looking over my shoulder to see if I’m being punked because they’re so ridiculous. This is one of them. OP explains that she went to her local coffee shop during the afternoon with her 9-month-old daughter.

“The second I walked in,” she writes, “I was struck by how loud their coffee grinder was. It wasn’t just shut off in a few seconds though, but kept going and going, since the third barista was grinding a HUGE bag of coffee all at once.”

This begs the question, “Ma’am, do you know where you are? You do realize that coffee gets ground in coffee shops, right? Did you forget that in the past couple of months when you were forced to make your own coffee at home?”

She goes on to complain that the noise of the coffee maker made her daughter wake up, and she wouldn’t stop screaming. “After five minutes,” she writes, “I ask the barista if she could stop using the coffee grinder as it’s disturbing my baby, and she agrees and turns off the machine.”

“Hey, real quick, could you stop doing your job and stop making sure you’re able to provide your product for other customers? My baby needs peace and quiet.” That’s basically what she told them.

Obviously, they couldn’t keep the machine off forever, and they turned it on again right as her daughter started dozing, causing her to wake up again. “At this point, I snap at the barista for turning it on when I’m still there,” she writes, “as she can clearly see that she has caused my daughter to cry again. The barista says she was doing something else with the grinder that was more urgent, but could she really not have waited until I left?”

This is one of those situations where I would really suggest that the woman writing this take a beat to consider any of the words that are coming out of her mouth. Perhaps, maybe, just potentially, there are people in the world besides you. Think about it! There could have been other customers who needed their drinks, any one of a variety of cleaning or preparation tasks that needed to get done.

It’s a coffee shop and you, OP, are complaining that they’re making coffee. That’s not um, OK…at all! But of course, OP’s not interested in self-reflection. She’s all about that corporate complaint.

When she got home, she emailed the manager and explained the situation. The manager apologized and gave her a free gift card, most likely to appease her. She told her husband (I’m counting three times now, that she has either lived through or repeated this story, and during none of them did she stop and think about what she was doing), and he told her she was wrong and overreacted.

But she didn’t want to believe him, so she explained the story a fourth time, this time for Reddit, to see what they had to say. And they ripped her to shreds! “The manager doesn’t agree with you,” one person wrote. “He just gave you the good service speech and a gift card so that you won’t harm his business by b——- about it. If your child is sleeping, it is not the rest of the world’s responsibility to keep quiet. It’s your responsibility to take your child someplace appropriate for sleeping — which is not in the middle of a retail business.”

“The barista was doing her job,” someone else wrote. “It doesn’t matter if it was urgent or not — it is her job. If you don’t wanna be around noise for your baby, don’t leave your house and enter a public space where there will be noise. You did overreact massively.”

Look, I understand that it’s hard to be out in the world with a baby. But you can’t ask businesses to stop doing their business because it’s waking your sleeping child. The world doesn’t revolve around you.