A lifetime of restaurant work tells me that the rule of thumb seems to be “we’ll close whenever we please” and unless corporate is breathing down our necks to stay open until the second hand ticks over sometimes it’s hard to resist the temptation. You just worked a 60-hour week, you have a new baby at home you’d like to see, your 1-hour operating cost wildly exceeds your projected revenue for 10 PM on a Tuesday night…a cook has threatened to knife the dishwasher and half your wait staff is in the parking lot smoking a joint… you can see how it might happen. It’s bad customer service and it probably hurts most places in the long run, but it happens all the time. I don’t know about where you are, but here a prominently-displayed sign that says “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone at any Time” is pretty much carte blanche to open and close as you see fit.
We used to close early all the time. What would probably be illegal is locking the doors if it prevented people from leaving. There may also be issues if you served alcohol and the alcohol inspector couldn’t get in, or so forth. So what your manager said may have referred more literally, to locking the doors with people still inside. (FWIW, our doors permitted you to exit whether they were locked or not, so it was policy to lock the doors 15 minutes before closing ‘for safety,’ although it was really more to enforce that we were closed, I think.) We didn’t have the sign BitterOldPunk mentions, but it was an unwritten rule. The business, although open to the public, remains private property. It’s the right of management to restrict who can and cannot come in — case in point, we have a number of people who have been banned. (Obvious restrictions apply: if we did something discriminatory, like barring black people from coming in, we’d surely run into some legal problems. But it’s entirel
Once upon a time, I worked at a video store. Our closing time was 9 p.m., and I locked the front door at 8:55 p.m. (unlocking it only to let people out). I didn’t care who I alienated, and neither did my boss. We got burned too many times by people who scooted in at the last minute, saying “I know exactly what I want, I’ll only be a second” who then wandered around the store for a half hour while we fumed. We needed to have all the customers out of the store by closing time so we could do cleanup, inventory, balancing the cash register, etc… A couple of inconvenienced customers weren’t more important than our need to get out of there and get home to our families. (Besides, the cranky customers almost invariably learned their lesson and showed up earlier next time).
Certainly not illegal. Can you imagine enforcing such a law? Think back to your waitressing days. Did you ever work the close shift? Functionally, a restaurant is “closed” about half an hour before the time on the sign. I was once worked at a Pizza Hut, and during the last hour open, serving customers was the last thing on our mind. We were mopping and sweeping. We were counting down drawers. We were preparing supplies for the next day. I worked the kitchen, and from eleven to midnight I was taking apart the make-table, packing away all but the bare minimum of ingredients. Everything got wiped down, and the small collection of pans I left out stayed on a sheet of cellophane so my nice, clean table wouldn’t be soiled should I have to fill another order. The to-go-only thing at the end of the night was a pretty common practice. I’ve seen some version of this at every restaurant I’ve worked. The last hour that they’ll let you in the door isn’t really an hour you want to be ordering food.