We had a couple who would always reserve the 9am Saturday tee time, with their two teenage boys. They were historically late, rarely did they show up early enough to warm up and hit balls. Every Sunday, they would show up either right at their starting time or even a few minutes afterward. Each and every time they expected to get out as soon as they arrived.
One morning I had enough of it. I'd warned them repeatedly over the prior months, to no avail. They showed up two minutes late, tee sheet was packed... we were turning walk-ons away we were so busy. "Sorry, you're not getting out this morning. Next time available is well after noon." They were furious. "What do you mean? We had a time! We have this time every Sunday!"
"Yep. And every Sunday you show up late, creating a backlog, and everyone following you gets pushed back. Not today. This will not happen again as long as I'm running the operation."
They demanded to speak to the owner. The owner talked with them, gave them a free round of golf, chewed my ass out for being uncooperative, and that was that. And their crap continued week after week.
Apparently they knew the owner well enough to get those sort of privileges.
I didn't walk out that day. I should've. But I hung around another year or so. But there came a point when I just no longer wanted to be a part of the shit show there.
Slow play is to be expected once in a while, especially if it's a difficult course (and ours was/is). But if it's not addressed, then people stop coming, unless it's the only option available. It's one thing to have a slow group holding things up... that can be remedied with a good ranger on top of things (which is a thing of the past most places nowadays). But when you lose 4 minutes on the starting tee, that's not getting made up until there's a break in the tee sheet.
Mismanagement sucks. And the owners are only concerned about getting as many people as they can on the tee sheet. What they don't get, and what baffles me, is that their thinking is completely contrary to what keeps people wanting to come back to play. Shortly after this run-in with the couple, we had a period of about 3 months when we couldn't fill tee times on weekends during the prime hours. The owner asked me why I thought that was.
"Because a lot of people don't like spending 6 hours at the golf course." He didn't like my answer. But it was the truth. He probably would've fired me, had he not been in a situation where nobody else wanted to work there. I left that following year. I made a vow that I would never again work in the golf industry, and I haven't regretted it.
Perhaps the maintenance end of things would be different... outside in the fresh air, riding a mower, not dealing with the bitching golfers... but working in the shop, with management, became something that I despised.