You have identified an aspect of the person with yourself and even though you yourself presumably don't walk acting like a jerk feel like you need to justify their misbehavior as if you were defending yourself. You don't need to keep defending them.
If that makes some strangers on the Internet think I'm a "jerk", so be it.
If you're given a single serving without asking, then you have almost no resemblance to the people being criticized here.
Your earlier post said you "wouldn't feel even slightly guilty" about wasting food in a way that implied you would act similarly to the people being criticized here, taking a whole bunch of pieces. If you do that, you should feel guilty. If you weren't trying to imply a similarity, you communicated your point badly.
I'd rather see the restaurant try to solve a problem than arbitrarily punish people, especially when "people" might include myself under the wrong circumstances. But I guess no one likes to hear nuance.
If you were trying to suggest nuance, you didn't do a great job of it.
"in that situation I wouldn't feel even slightly guilty about it" is jumping to the opposite extreme.
> All I suggested
You definitely suggested more than that.
Then you're reading something I didn't say.
If you do that, you should feel guilty.
Guilty of what? It's a business, not a charity. If that's where I happen to be stuck having dinner, and if they're unwilling to accommodate my preferences even at additional cost, I'm not going to go hungry or cheat on my diet purely out of politeness.
They can either solve the problem and increase their revenue, or accept that they've created an edge case situation where some food will be wasted. Punishing their customers would accomplish nothing except loss of business and negative Yelp reviews.
It's not politeness.
If we distill "all you can eat" down to the basics, you take a small amount, you eat it, only then do you get more.
It's generally fine to reorder those actions, such as by getting more food upfront, but the outcome needs to be the same as the basic version. That's the business deal being made. If you make a deal with the intent to break it, you should feel guilty, outside of exceptional circumstances.
If they're not willing to serve something acceptable to you, that's bad of them, but it doesn't mean you get to break the rules. Even if you "had" to be there for some external reason.
Also ejecting someone, or cutting off their supply, is probably nicer than charging them for eight pounds of extra food.
And again, this only applies to all you can eat situations. Not other restaurants, not plane meals.
What they shouldn't do is arbitrarily add new terms to the deal after the fact. Customers should be allowed to make an informed decision. If I know that they'll kick me out for eating, I can decide whether to leave or stick around and eat later. If they just kick me out without warning in the middle of my meeting/event/whatever, no one is happy and they look like assholes.
In practice, these are questions I would ask before paying and sitting down, but that shouldn't be expected. The business should either state its terms up front, or provide an early warning when they notice the behavior and offer a full or partial refund. Waiting until someone has eight pounds of rice piled up and then suddenly kicking them out is a ridiculous escalation, and they'd only lose more money when the customer rightfully disputed the charge.
All of this isn't to say that the guys in the story weren't necessarily in the wrong. What I am saying is that we simply don't know. Demanding they be kicked out is making an awful lot of assumptions. We have no idea why they were there or what their interactions with the staff may have been. As other comments have pointed out, there's a good chance that they were in fact charged for the leftovers.
The commonality is willingness to flagrantly violate social norms, entitlement, and lack of empathy.
What I've learned from such situations is that subtlety is wasted and tolerating misbehavior leads to encouraging more from that party and others. Conversely there is near zero cost or even a benefit to be had from squelching it. Such customers are on average worth less than nothing. They will consume half your support trying to screw you and all of your profit if you let them.
Saying no is even surprisingly trouble free when you have been consistent and only becomes a struggle when you have a policy of sometimes given in.
The hardest behaviors to extinguish are those which sometimes pay off. See arcades, lottery, and slot machines.
The worst polict to adopt is forcing front line employees to be the enforcers while managers make exceptions. This leads to the strategy of constant escalation.
The best counter is you can speak to a manager but he'll give you the same answer then do it when need be.
And the word "guilt" is being tied to the hypothetical version where we do have the information.
You're a jerk, because you're trying to defend someone who probably behaves worse than you, by equating yourself with that person.
If they had permission and were okay with spending all that extra money on leftovers, it's between them and the restaurant. I don't like wasting food on principle, but now we're getting into fuzzy issues around the relationship between supply and demand. At the end of the day, if someone wants to spend their money on food and throw it in the garbage/compost, that's essentially their business.
I'd have more of a problem with it if it were meat, because there's no reasoning around the fact that an animal was killed for it. Rice is in more abundant supply with with less severe negative externalities to its production. We also don't know how much rice it was; "eight pounds" was an eyeball guesstimate that could be completely wrong or exaggerated for narrative effect.
And it's not character assassination when it's such a vague anonymous anecdote.
Your wording strongly suggests that you took it personally and were defending yourself and them together. If that's not what happened you need to work on how you phrase these things.
The top response at the time I commented implied that the individuals in question were "deliberate food wasters" and "despicable".
The reaction is mostly to your second comment, not the first one.
> The top response at the time I commented implied that the individuals in question were "deliberate food wasters" and "despicable".
Okay? It's still a vague anonymous anecdote.