How cool is it that you can make a restaurant reservation online? And you can see the menu online. And if you’re ordering out, you can place your order online, and even set the time when you want to come pick it up. It’s easy, painless and convenient. No waiting for someone to answer the phone, or finding out that someone misheard and screwed up the order. It’s wonderful. So why then should restaurants have phones anymore?

Gregory Ryan, 39, owns and operates two restaurants in California’s Santa Barbara County: Bell’s and Bar Le Côte. Neither of the restaurants has a phone line, a decision Mr. Ryan said was made because they have small teams. People reach Mr. Ryan and the restaurants through email and Instagram direct messages, which he said “are a good way to be able to connect and speak with people in very, very quick ways.” After being in the restaurant business for 15 years, Mr. Ryan said about 80 percent of phone calls are “typically a waste of time.”

“That’s not anyone’s fault,” he said. “I’m sure it’s annoying for folks. We try not to be. What is better for my business is my day-to-day mental health and my staff’s mental health — for me, it’s not answering the phone.”

There was a time when the prevailing thought was what is “better for my business” was having business, having customers come in and purchase what you’re selling, because without them you have no business. No more. Customers’ concerns are “80 percent…typically a waste of time.” The burden of customer service now impairs people’s “mental health.”

There are now a multitude of ways to communicate, most of which involve as limited human interaction as possible. Messaging through a variety of platforms is easy, even if it presents some peculiar issues with clear communication. What could be handled in a two minute phone call could require 50 texts, and you still can’t tell if the person on the other end understood.

When they respond with an emoji or non sequitur, or some stock reply that leaves you wondering if you’ve just spend a half hour “chatting” with a bot that was never, but never, going to be able to resolve an issue, it appears that restaurants are increasingly becoming more than willing to take the risk of another angry, lost patron because it relieves them of two burdens: the first is customer service, which can be too mentally and emotionally taxing for restaurant staff. The second is unnecessary direct human contact, which has the potential to be unpleasant and, to restaurant owners, wasteful.

One argument made is that time on the phone for dumb calls is time lost. Of course, the only different between time lost on the phone and time lost messaging is that the former doesn’t require actual human contact. Ugh.

Mr. Ryan said that even when the restaurant could afford to hire someone to answer the phone, it still did not make sense for the efficiency of the business. Focusing on the guests inside the restaurant, especially in a pandemic, is more important, Mr. Ryan said.

“I think post-Covid, there is such a focus and a concern on the guests that are in the dining room, and trying to make sure that they feel like they are being taken care of and engaged with, and it is something that you’ll continue to see more and more,” Mr. Ryan said.

Taking care of guests in the house is important, although this strikes me as ridiculously disingenuous, given that the new more progressive approach to restaurant staff is that they should be expected to “wait like slaves on their masters.” If they eventually get food to the table at all, the customers should be thankful and not only tip extravagantly but offer to wash their feet for the centuries of waitstaff oppression. At the very least, should patrons wash their own dishes? Are they too good for wash dishes?

There is nothing wrong with alternative means of communications, if that’s what customers prefer, but that there is no phone number raises a different issue. Missing a credit card after visiting a restaurant and trying to find out whether it’s being held behind the bar or being used at the local weed dispensary? You can text, but what do you do in the 39 hours until someone responds with “we value your business and will investigate the situation”?

When telephone companies charged local calls by the unit and calls outside your area by the minute, there was an incentive to keep calls to a minimum, use the phone only when necessary and be succinct. Now that telephone calls are a commodity, they’re becoming archaic. As kids, we would spend hours on the phone (local calls only, of course, or there would be stern words from dad), often without speaking but knowing that the other person was there. Today, a great many young people would rather cut off a finger than dial a number and have to talk to a person.

I don’t call restaurants to waste the host’s time, mostly because it would be a waste of my time. I use Open Table like any other thoroughly modern Millie to make reservations. But if I need an answer to a question from a business that wants my patronage, not to mention money, it seems reasonable to expect it to be available, if not necessarily responsive. Is it too much to ask?

To be fair, if a restaurant believes their guests are too much of a pain to be worth talking to, that’s their choice. If it works for them, great. If not, they will fail. If they can’t afford to have someone answer the phones, or the staff is too busy providing excellent service to customers in the dining room, assuming that’s the only aspect of customer service that matters, perhaps they will thrive despite ignoring the wasteful expectations of the people whose money keeps the doors open and the staff fed.

“One of my first thoughts was how lucky for those employees that they don’t have to worry about answering the phone during their shift,” she said. “I know how much time that can take away from doing your job when you work in a restaurant, and especially if it’s a busy night and the phone is ringing off the hook. That can really take the time away from the folks who are already there and trying to enjoy themselves.”

But if restaurants, en masse, come to believe that they no longer need telephones, and realize that their customers are sufficiently well trained to have either extremely low or guilt-ridden expectations when paying higher prices to cover the cost of increased employee salaries and benefits, patrons may soon find their options limited, just as it is with outsourced customer service for consumer goods, which may also soon become a thing of the past.

The customer may not always be right, but when we reach the point where we’re constrained to thank a server profusely for bringing food, any food, to the table, we may regret this shift in the restaurant experience, when the foremost concern isn’t serving customers, but to spare the staff from speaking to human beings lest it impair the staff’s mental health.