Can You (Nicely) Ask Your Customers to Leave?

I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a post from Richard Shepro, a lecturer for the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery. He was booking a reservation online for a restaurant in the U.S. when he saw that the website included a “return time,” a note that a two-top would have the table for 90 minutes, and a four-top would get two hours.

The tweet took me right back to a job I...