Most stories about elderly customers possibly overstaying their welcome at fast food restaurants have focused on patrons who spent hours in the eateries, often buying little more than a coffee and a snack. But an octogenarian couple in Virginia say they were recently told to leave the McDonald’s they visited every afternoon because they had stayed beyond some imaginary 30-minute time limit.

In a recent letter to the editors of the Culpeper Star Exponent, the 85-year-old husband writes that he and his wife of 63 years would often go the McDonald’s in Culpeper during the early afternoon hours when the restaurant wasn’t as busy.

On Feb. 21, the husband says he and his wife were sitting at the restaurant when they noticed an employee cleaning the floor in their vicinity.

“[M]y wife asked her if she would mind not cleaning around our table until we were finished because of the dust it stirs up,” writes the husband, who says that this employee then took the issue up the franchise food chain to a manager who came out and allegedly asked them to leave because “we had used our 30 minutes of time allotted for customers who eat in.”

“[H]e says you two are going to have to leave,” the wife tells WTOP-FM radio. “He said your half hour is up and we need to clean this floor.”

The husband says they were not asked to relocate to another table so the employee could clean, or to sit with the WiFi-using customers who he says, “appear to spend a great amount of time with their computers at the establishment.” No says the WWII vet, “we were asked to leave.”

The couple left but they have not been back to that particular McDonald’s since.

The franchisee who owns the Culpeper location tells WTOP that he is investigating the claims and has reached out to the customers to apologize.

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