I work at a food hall establishment and all the shops are so small they can only fit one person at the register, the problem with this is that anytime you have to take a break, go to the bathroom, or do anything away from the shop there are almost always customers waiting to be served that amazingly never seem to understand that you had the audacity to walk away to take care of essential duties not involving them.

We have signs that clearly state we are away but customers still don't accept it, they want to be served but the cooks at our place can't do that because they can't communicate with them so it's only doable when I return. This creates a very stressful situation when I go on lunch, a whopping 10 minutes paid or 30 minutes unpaid, where customers or even other vendors will come to get food but I'm not there and the cooks will come out and frantically call my name to come serve them expecting me to jump up and, sometimes repeatedly, keep serving customers.

Spoke to the owner about it and they said that I'm entitled to take my lunch in "peace," yet the issue is that this wasn't communicated to the kitchen so they still flag me down every time. Just the other day I had a sign up on our tv that replaced the menu and it said "On break will return in 5-10 minutes." The lady that came up read it and I hear her exclaim "Well is it 5 OR 10 minutes?!" I knew exactly what was going to happen and the cook came out yelled my name and waved me over and I begrudgingly walked over for her to order a shitload of food only right before her saying "Oh are you sure it's okay?" As she clearly saw me eating before interrupting my meal.

Just blows my mind that customers refuse to accept that workers aren't on standby 24/7 to serve them at a moments notice and even though I'm entitled to take my break it somehow has been twisted to a point that I'm still having to get up from eating and serve people. I do make exceptions for other vendors since I know they are on time crunches to eat lunch to but I'm about to go eat out of line of sight of my place so that I don't ever give them the opportunity to interrupt me at all.