There are tons of young people who eat alone at McD's. No one notices. Why does it seem perfectly OK to everyone for a young person to eat alone, but not an old person. It seems to bother middle-aged people the most. What is their problem?
I cannot count the number of times I've dined out alone in my life. I took many years to crawl out of a house-poor pit, when I never ate out (but always ate alone.) Then I started dining out nearly every night of the week, partly because I was tired of cooking, and partly to be around other people. It also gave me a chance to stay on top of my magazine reading. I was probably 40 or so when I made the transition. I've encountered a couple of people who shot disapproving looks, but the most annoying thing has been those few times where restaurants would rather not seat a single diner, or they mismanage the situation. I always go at off-hours after the rush, mostly to avoid crowds. So I represent a sale during a time when there are few--if any--other customers. It's not as though I'm occupying a table and displacing a party of four, nor does a server get screwed by drawing just me rather than 4 diners. Yet I've been seated and then sat for 20 minutes without anyone coming to even take a drink order. I get up and leave, sometimes giving the place a second chance later, but never a third.
What I eat has never been very important. That was the way it was at our house when I grew up. Get the meal over with and move on to something more interesting. I never cared to eat at places that have waiters. They want you to eat, leave the tip, and move on. If I go out to eat with someone I'd rather just have coffee and linger. Fast food places are the best for that. Even alone, some little thing always happens that gives you something different to think about. Other than, "Gee, the house needs dusting, again," or, "I should wash the dishes now."
Eating out alone has never bothered me. Good thing too because when I traveled a lot for work, I did it often, though I’d opt for room service if available just for comfort reasons.
When I eat alone, I usually have conversations with the wait staff at my regular haunts. I sometimes have conversations with other diners around me, and have shared my table a few times if the place was packed. One time I was chatting with an elderly couple, their adult daughter and the daughter's husband sitting in the booth next to me. We discovered that her sister worked for my father some 30 years earlier. We only had that conversation because the elderly woman wanted to know if I spoke Polish.
I have that issue in Firefox, but is shows fine in Edge. Here is its URL if you want to play with it: https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.UXr_0d63i7Ep6a-D4NScjgHaK0?pid=ImgDet&rs=1 I think these are OIP file types. Firefox does not like image URLs if they don't end in .jpg or .jpeg or .gif or some other file type extension, even if they embed fine for other browsers using the Image function. I've been down this path before with some of Shirley's stuff (not her fault) and keep forgetting that this file extension is the causal issue. The only fix when this happens is for the Poster to save the file to their hard drive and try to convert it, and then Upload it to here. It's a good practice to do in general anyway, in case the image might get moved or deleted from the linked website. Saving/uploading stores the image on this forum's server, so it will always display regardless of what happens with the originating website. Since I've already veered this far off topic in your thread and you might make use of this info...I've attached files I have uploaded here to other forums (I lost my Photo Bucket account), and they display fine for me on that other forum as long as I am logged in to this forum. But no one else there can see them (and neither can I if I log out from here.) I had no way of knowing until another member over there told me he got on all my images that were attached from here. I logged out from here, and then I could no longer see any of my images in that other forum. We now take you back to your regularly schedule thread, which is already in progress...
Thanks, @John Brunner ! I have a lot on my plate right now, but maybe I will chew on that, the next time I am dining alone.