Even though the service industry is unpredictable, I’ve always wondered how people felt towards restaurants that are short staffed?
Despite some positive encouragement from customers, some customers don’t understand why certain places don’t have enough people, unless if they’ve been through it before, which makes us feel better when we can relate to certain customers.
If I know a place is short-staffed, I won’t go. Part of why we go out to eat is to have someone else take care of us, and if we can’t get the care or attention we expect, there’s no reason to go. I’m not unsympathetic, but I have certain expectations, and if they can’t be met, I can’t see spending my time and money.
It’s irritating enough when it’s McD’s drive-thru. It’s worse if it’s a nice place that I really look forward to.
How do you know?
Do you mean, like, it’s a chronic thing and they’re always scrambling?
Because in a lot of places, it’s a day-to-day thing, and can even change by the hour. ("X called out .. " “Again?!?” “I know, but Y is on the way and Z said they can come in for a coupla hours later.”)
For example, you’re at the host station, waiting… and waiting… and finally someone rushes by and says “We’ll be right with you” and you wait and notice that the place is a madhouse. That’s when it’s time to consider your options.
It’s particularly irritating because the only people you can complain to are people who are ten times more impacted by the shortage of staff than you are.
I usually feel bad for the staff. There’s an Asian restaurant near our house we went to shortly after Covid restrictions were lifted. It’s a mom & pop place, so there’s not a whole lot of staff to begin with, but I could see they were overwhelmed by DoorDash and phone orders and were clearly behind schedule. They never gave us our egg rolls and I didn’t bother correcting the bill on the way out.
There is a Chinese restaurant in Little Rock Mrs. Odesio and I used to frequent pre-Covid. It came under new ownership before Covid, and while they got rid of the Sunday dim sum buffet (damn them), the menu remained largely the same and everything tasted good. When we tried to go back after Covid restrictions were lifted, during their posted hours, they were unable to provide us with sit down service because they had no servers. After the second time it happened we stopped trying to go back.
Like I said, I usually feel bad for the staff because it’s not their fault. I went to Chuy’s a year ago and it was both understaffed and very, very busy. Our waiter was busting his hump to the point where he was sweating quite profusely in the cold, cold restaurant and he even apologized for taking a bit long to refill drinks, chips, etc., etc. When it came time to pay the check, I told him he did a great job and of course I left him a decent tip.
What I think when I see a restaurant understaffed is management has failed somehow. Maybe they’ve created an unfriendly work environment, maybe they don’t pay enough, maybe they forgot to schedule enough people. I don’t really know what it might be, but odds are good management screwed something up.
I’m struggling a bit to understand what the OP’s point really is.
FR I eat out a lot. Have for most of my life. Rarely fast food.
If a restaurant is short of people right now this instant minute, that can often be just a matter of a demand spike, or as @purplehorseshoe says, a confluence of people calling out. I’m not happy when it happens and often I’ll go elsewhere if I figure it out quickly. I’m generally sympathetic and understanding to the server dashing about trying to feed me & whoever many others.
A place that is chronically understaffed? Hard no. I can sympathize with the plight of the workers, but that manager / owner needs to quit abusing their customers and their workers in the name of lower costs. The best way for me to do that is cause them to go out of business. Bad managers & most bad owners cannot learn, they simply move on. And the industry being what it is, the workers will find another job at a better-run place soon enough.
A place that does a large Doordash, etc., business so I can’t tell anything about how backed up the kitchen is by how full the front of house is? I try to avoid those too. Due to incentives and penalties from the delivery companies, ISTM that in-house orders are de-prioritized by the kitchen. Again that’s a management failure. I don’t reward failure if I can help it.
“Unsurprised.”
(These days, I genuinely half-expect it.)
IF I LIKE THE PLACE — Wow, they’re really having to dash around. I’ll have to remember to be extra patient if it takes a long time to fill my order. Hmm, could I use a job? I could ask if they’re hiring.
IF I DON’T MUCH CARE FOR IT — Heh, looks like they’re going under. Probably nobody wants to work for them. Maybe a better restaurant will take over the space once they’re gone.
As long as the food is good, I don’t care much. Service is not a priority for me when I eat out.
Like any other inconvenience, it depends. Tolerance varies with desire. Some places are guaranteed to be poor service (slow, errors, attitude, etc) but you deal with it or plan around it since it’s good. Other considerations are distance, unfavorable or (especially) unreliable hours of operation, your craving gets 86d (Doh, I really wanted that papaya salad!), etc all add up to places you might not choose to visit.
I’d never go to Popeye’s in a hurry or bad mood. But I do crave Popeye’s so I wait till I have 90 minutes to kill, grit my teeth, and hope at least the food is good this time.
If the staff that is there are hustling, it doesn’t bother me much. Maybe a few people called in sick. Maybe they can’t find someone. If it is chronic I won’t come back. If on the other hand the staff are chatting while people are waiting to order, then I’m offended.
Not just restaurants. Our Safeway often has an inadequate number of checkout stands open. (Like one on July 3 when a lot of people buy a lot of stuff.) That’s not the workers, that’s the incompetent manager. And the checkout stands are not the only problem. I’ve written in to them before.
A few days ago we were at the local Kroger about a half hour before closing time. Mrs. J. was talking with the employee helping her with the automated check out (we had enough stuff that we needed to run separate checkout kiosks). He told her there were no human cashiers at that hour because they were unable to find candidates to hire.
The checkers at Safeway used to be hired with good pay and benefits, but they changed it so newer ones didn’t get as much, to save money. If your Kroger’s is like that, it might be part of the problem. Still, there seem to be lots of staff running around filling pick up or delivery orders. I guess that makes more money for them.
If they can’t find people to hire, raise the wages.
Supply and demand, people. Just like gravity, it’s not just a nice idea: it’s the f***ing law.
I had a fairly unique experience with a short staffed place once. I went to one of my regular bars. My regular bartender from a different bar was there..working. I knew he lived in the area and saw him there sometimes. Turns out that someone called out sick, and my bartender friend offered to help out for a few hours.
So in that case..I was impressed, and happy to leave a nice tip.
If the self checkouts were as big as a cashier station I might not mind but when you have a cart-full of groceries & the checkout area is only big enough for one bag what am I supposed to do with that one bag once it gets full as there isn’t enough clear room in the cart to place it in there yet; can’t even put it on the ground without interfering with someone; you, the person next to you, or the aisle to get thru behind you. Clearly that means you shouldn’t check out with a lot of groceries there.
I was in the groc last month about 8:30 (open until 10pm) with a cart-full; there were no open cashiers & when I asked if they could open one the idiot at the self checkout area (I’ve dealt with him before he truly is an idiot!) offered to help me. Ummm, I know how to use it, there just isn’t sufficient space for as much groceries as I have; how do you propose to fix that? I told the manager that cart-full of groceries, with a bunch of cold stuff was theirs to return to the various aisles; it’s amazing how quickly the found someone to check me out.
We went to a place yesterday after a ball game where they apologized in advance for being short staffed. We were in a back room, so I figured they might forget about us, but they did a great job. I would have never known they were short staffed if they hadn’t told us.
This.
We collectively don’t get the customer service we collectively want; we collectively get the customer service we collectively demand. And 1% Karens with 99% sheep isn’t going to work; both approaches are failures.
In other threads we’ve done this a bunch, but my view is all self-checkouts should be labeled express-only. And for certain at the stands with limited space. The self-serve stands at my brand of grocery store are all designed for just one hand basket of groceries to be scanned leading to two or three bags tops. Anything larger simply doesn’t fit conveniently. I’d go so far as to install a physical barrier a wheeled cart can’t get through leading to the self-checkout area.
Of course that requires they actually have checkers on duty to staff the other registers. Aye, there’s the rub.
You can absolutely demand it - but you have to be willing to pay more. That’s what it comes down to. It’s not that people are “sheep” - it’s that some choose price point above all else. It is unreasonable to expect the same price for great buggies and all aisles with cashiers as for crap buggies and 1/0 cashiers and a bunch of self-checkouts. You get either more service or lower prices. People overwhelmingly choose lower prices.
I don’t like (and rarely choose) self-checkouts myself, but I don’t act like I’m “doing their work for them” when I have also seen the general (and expected) trend that places with more service have higher prices. Every customer gets to choose the business with segment/style that best meets their priorities.