Types of People You See at Denny’s
[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]
Denny's: Always Open, Never Worth It.
Below you will find a list of typical Denny's customers. This is not comprehensive.
1. Sad, tired dental hygienists who don’t want to go home to their 18 children, so sit in a sticky red booth until midnight, nursing a cup of coffee and ordering a single pancake.
2. Truckers, both men and women, who consider themselves part of the “in” crowd once they successful consume a Lumber Jack Slam and 2 cream cheese waffles without projectile vomiting all over the waiters' Reeboks.
3. Poor college students, who just want to go out for food, but who only have one ten dollar bill, and therefore cannot afford to leave a tip.
4. Local garage-bands, who smell of weed and sweat and consume an entire pot of coffee each. They all have long greasy hair that falls in their eyes, which they keep pushing back with their hands, feeding the greasiness. There is one balding band-member, who the rest call “gramps” and who takes his coffee decaffeinated, thank you very much.
5. Public school librarians and their educated, but annoyed children. Annoyed, because they never get to play video games or watch TV, which means all they do is read and become smarty-pant eggheads, but which doesn’t guarantee them a steady income, despite their future PhDs.
6. Elderly couples who cannot hear very well and who mistakenly wear navy pants instead of black ones. They bicker with one another over whether to order one meal and split it, order two separate full meals, or each order two side dishes and call it a day. The old man (Pete) tells his wife (Gretchen) to “Hurry up and decide already, I’m starving!” as his hearing aid squeals and a wad of saliva escapes from the gap between his two front teeth.
Gretchen in turn shouts back, “Hold your goddamned horses!" As her menu drops to the flor and becomes stuck to a wad of half-dried syrup.
7. Entire Little League teams and their very tired parents. One boy spills a glass of milk. Another swears profusely and smells of sweaty feet. Another lingers beside his mother, not because he's a mommas boy but because she's a helicopter parent. One family "forgets" to pay and everyone else chips in a nickel to split the difference.
8. Vegans, who nibble on a dry side salad while the rest of their friends indulge in birthday cake pancakes and bouncy sausages. "Have you seen What The Health?" one says loudly. "No, but I've read The China Study 18 times," says another before googling the nearest cruelty-free, grass-fed, pasture-raised, organic, non-GMO smoothie shop on their smartphone devices.
9. That one kid from high school who is fundamentally disturbed by the corporate system and lives off-grid in a van, only venturing on-grid to shower, buy food, earn money, and interact with other humans.
10. A single old man, who is annoyed by the raucous little league team, loud vegans, rotund truckers, and sad hygienists. All he wanted was to drink bad coffee in peace while reading equally bad news in the local paper, which he tucks beneath his arm as he gets up to leave in case any hooligans outside require a good whacking.
P.S. This list is anything but comprehensive. Find a list of vegan-friend Denny's options here,
xoxo
Sarah Rose