Disservice: It takes months to find a customer, but only seconds to lose one. The good news is that we should run out of them in no time.
If we don’t take care of the customer, maybe he’ll stop bugging us.
Even more reason to lose one rather than risk losing two.
Have you noticed that all of your speculation here involves things that are unlikely or else make no sense? The guy got seated at a table with a bunch of other people. Obviously there were enough people to serve Wanderer. It is not plausible that it would become substantially more difficult if he was seated fifteen feet away at his own table.
Jesus. The crowd of people who lurk in the pit in order to immediately tell each pitter that they are wrong to be angry is getting seriously tiresome. Here’s a hint, Revtim, to you and the others: if you have to make up some ridiculously unlikely or completely nonsensical scenario to undermine a pitting, it might signify that the pitter is right. This whole “refuse to let anyone get away with pitting anything, under any circumstances” schtick is getting really old.
Wow. The poor people running breakfast buffets should switch to an easier job, like juggling flaming chainsaws while riding simultaneously unicycles, playing in one-man bands, and running nuclear submarines.
The bottom line is the hostess was doing a bad job. If they were understaffed to the point that they couldn’t offer service to Wanderer, they should have politely and apologetically said so. Since they didn’t, what we can surmise is that she wouldn’t seat him at his own table (a pretty minimal request) because the staff of the restaurant is so ridiculously rigid and incompetent that they simply can’t bus dishes from a table when the section boundaries change.
Ridiculous. If they don’t have enough staff to seat more people, it doesn’t matter if they’re in two sections or one. In that case, you can politely explain that you simply can’t seat them.
Yeah, all restaurants have sections, there would be no other way to make sure that everyone knows which customers they are supposed to be helping and no way to make sure the work gets evenly distributed. Not assigning sections would seriously harm a waiter’s ability to provide good service. Instead of glancing over to their section to make sure water glasses are full, etc. they’d have to walk around the restaurant, try to remember who is theirs (believe it or not, you all look pretty much the same to a waiter) and hope nothing goes awry before their next trip to that corner of the restaurant. Furthermore, they’d always have a host yelling “Tables 9 and 24 are yours!” instead of being able to assume everyone seated in their section is their responsibility. This could lead to people being seated and then forgotten in the bustle.
It’s hard to appreciate just how much of a ballet waiting tables is. It’s a lot like a video game- you have this huge never ending list of things you need to do, and people are always throwing new things on to it, and you have to keep rearranging it according to where you are, where you are going and what the time restrictions on these tasks are. On good days you end up moving intuitively around the store, instantly placing each task in the right order, and moving seamlessly with the rest of the staff. On bad days, it’s a lot like losing a video game. Anyway, part of getting in that groove is having instant visual cues as to what is going on on each table.
Not all restaurants close sections. In my experience most places that close sections are places that drastically reduce staff at a certain time- like an all-night place that may have eight servers during the day but only one late at night. It allows the single server to make sure they can see everyone and nobody languishes in some dark corner forgotten. As business picks up and new servers start their shifts, new sections can be opened for them and it lessens some of the chaos that comes with shift-changes.
This was my thought as well. You seat one person in a new section and everyone else wants to sit there too. If you couldn’t understand why the section wasn’t available for use, the other patrons won’t either. Even with a buffet, servers can get stretched too thin. Been there. Done that.
As to the issue of staffing, it’s not an easy thing to do for a hotel dining room. I used to work in the main dining room of a resort and it seems as if we were always over/understaffed. Even if you have meal plans and such that guests can sign up for, it’s still guess work to figure the number of staff you need. It gets worse if you don’t have accurate house counts, etc. You can have a bottom line manager who gives you staff based on a dollar amount as opposed to necessity.
[QUOTE=Excalibre]
Jesus. The crowd of people who lurk in the pit in order to immediately tell each pitter that they are wrong to be angry is getting seriously tiresome.
[quote]
The title of this thread is “Is it that hard to open a new section”. The answer to that is “Often, yes.”
I promise you, nobody in the entire history of the world has ever said “Being a waiter was the easiest job I’ve ever had.”
The bottom line is that the hostess was making decisions that aren’t easily understood by some yahoo standing at the sidelines. Maybe it was a bad one, but most likely it was one appropriate for the circumstances, which you do not know or understand. Just because you’ve seen a restaurant doesn’t mean you know how they work.
Most of us have the luxury of not having someone who thinks they know how to do our job watching us and judging our every move. We all have to do stuff in our jobs that seems byzantine or non-sensical, but ultimately have a very good reason for being done that way. Hostessing is VERY byzantine, but ultimately barring something horrible everyone gets to eat.
It looks to me like what happened was she asked the waiter next to the closed section (who, we’ll remember, pays her) “Hey, do you mind if I seat this guy here and you take care of him” and he said “No way- you just sat three guys and a row in my section and I’m busting my ass here. I’m already falling behind and going to lose out on tip money. Bob over there has a fucking table open and two more about to open up- he needs some work. Plus this guy already seems like a demanding customer and if you seat him in the closed section those other groups are going to want to know why they can’t sit there, too. No way!” so she did the best she could and sat you in Bob’s section because she couldn’t very well tell you to go back to the front and wait some more.
I don’t doubt it. I’m just irritated at seeing someone with a complaint about service try to vent a little bit and being descended upon by a swarm of overworked servers explaining why it made perfect sense. Not seating him twenty feet away at his own table does not make sense; if the staff cannot handle busing a table (since he was just going to a breakfast buffet) when it’s not within the usual borders of their section, they’re simply incompetent.
There is a lot more than simply bussing. You still need to refill drinks (and breakfast usually means lots of coffee refills), check up, get requests (“Can I have some strawberry jam, not just blueberry? Is it possible to get a little cup of mayo? When are you going to put out more bacon?”), clear empty plates throughout the meal, and deal with the check.
As an experienced server, busser, host, supervisor, and any other job you can think of in the food service setting, I can tell you that it’s not a matter of just one table. One table in a new section becomes several very quickly. It gets harder to turn away new tables in that section once someone is seated there. I know it seems like a slippery slope argument, but food service runs on slippery slopes.
Also, servers can become overworked even with a breakfast buffet. Again, this is coming from experience and not bitterness. It’s not a matter of incompetence.
Now if Happy Wanderer wants to be pissed about this still, more power to him/her. This is the pit after all and that’s the way this place rolls. I’m just trying to correct some misconceptions that I’ve seen here. The decision not to place him in a new section really does make perfect sense.
Yeah, what percentage of buffet servers can actually do anything more complicated than refilling coffee? :rolleyes:
All the drinks at this place were in dispensers, even the coffee 
To the others-
Let’s see, I have stayed in 4 of the 7 or 8 similar hotels along this stretch, all so similar that I sometimes forget which I have to come back to 
and at least one of the other places lets you seat yourself, and the other’s don’t have problems with a simple request.
And as for being a demanding customer, I think all I asked for was Tabasco at the other place. There, the coffee and juice were dispensed by a staff that while fewer in number provided a higher level of service to a similar crowd of people. No, this place is poorly managed. Like I said, diners had empty plates stacking and the busboys were loafing. What does that tell you? Maybe if those guys would clear some plates, they would move diners along who were basicly finished, and open up some tables but that seemed too advanced for them.
I have been in some good hotels and some bad ones and the brand and price level isn’t always an indicator of what you are going to get. It all boils down to the expertise of the management and the dedication of the staff to provide decent service. Everything else is just an excuse in my book. If you want to fiddle with nine pages of seating charts to figure out who does what in a restaurant with four servers and two busboys, and you think that is the simple way, then whatever. It shouldn’t be my problem.
No one has mentioned tip pooling either, which it seems to me would relieve a lot of stress.
Um, so maybe Bob could help the guy out by taking over one of his tables? Is this really rocket science? And what happens when a group comes in that demands a lot of special attention and stiffs on the tip? Shit happens. It all evens out in the end. Again, a lot of this could be ameliorated if everyone would tip properly, and if people were pooling tips so all these petty jealosies don’t keep popping up. One place where we go you can actually hear the staff arguing in the back. Owners too. If they weren’t our friends…
The bottom line is if you listen to the people who have been posting from the service staff perspective, you’ll notice that the customers are basicly regarded as dollars to be divvied up. While tips may be a good system for motivating the staff to provide good service, it also has a downside when that is warping the customer experience to the negative.
Another thing is that they give you the short end of the stick when you are dining alone, but that is a whole other pit
And really, just listen to yourselves. It’s a friggin restaurant for crying out loud.
I think you are misunderstanding. While seating the OP in the old section or the new section works out to having the same number of total people to serve, once he sits in the new section then other people will want to sit there and soon both sections will be filled with the same number of servers as were taking care of ONLY the old section.
The OP says that the hostess did say that they were short-staffed. How is “Sorry, we simply can’t seat you” (what you suggest they say) any better than “Sorry, we can’t seat you in that section because we are short-staffed today”? Anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out that if they are short-staffed they don’t want to fill up an entire new section with tables when they are already having trouble keeping up with the tables they do have.
Regarding all the other staff who were hanging around seemingly doing nothing: it’s also possible that they were short-staffed in the kitchen - not of servers - and the cook on duty could not keep up with having several more tables needing food.
Oh, maybe he’s completely correct and the hostess, wait staff, and management were all flaming idiots who knew absolutely nothing about running a restaurant and who really should have put him in the new section. Or maybe the OP made a whole bunch of assumptions that show he really doesn’t know anything at all about how a restaurant usually works. Kind of like your own posts.
Several years ago I was in a “Daily Grill” with my dad. The brilliant tactical strategist that was our hostess seated us. 10 minutes went by. 20 minutes went by. After a while we were just trying to see how long it would take them. All this time we are surrounded by wait staff cruising by and it is very obvious we are not being served. After like 45 frigging minutes, someone notices. There were people seated in the booths on both sides of ours and still we didn’t get served.
Brilliant system you have there guys. One mistake and the mindless automatons that work there don’t even notice you for the better part of an HOUR. Please, never get a job were being observant and making decisions is required. Some jobs require that, y’know. Of course, people with jobs like that aren’t constantly afraid they won’t be able to buy groceries becuase the pay is so poor that they have to squabble with co-workers over the crumbs.
Restaurant workers like to bitch about how hard their job is, how low the pay, etc. Believe me, there are many jobs a LOT more demanding and stressful. Some even require you use your BRAIN. Quit yer whining and go back to school if you don’t like it.
It also probably doesn’t help that this is Los Angeles and a lot of the folks waiting tables are brainless wannabe actors :rolleyes: A lot of them will be waiting tables longer than expected
But you see, **Happy Wanderer[/b, your experience of being forgotten is exactly what the hostess is trying to avoid. You can’t just “take a table” for someone without running that risk, and in my experience “taking a table” is only done in the most extreme circumstances. If you shake things around early in the shift, hour later after so many shift changes and map changes you are still going to have waitstaff not entirely sure what customers are theirs.
I’m not saying the system is perfect. Few are. In your life time as a diner you are likely to experience at least a few times when people made some pretty big mistakes. All workplaces experience a mistake now and then. My boyfriend’s workplace just sent ten thousand dollars of chicken on a ship to the Philippines without the proper paperwork. It’s gonna get turned away at the port. Surely you can point to some boners that have happened in your workplace. But you don’t have a bunch of hecklers standing around insulting you. Yeah, I’m a little bitter. I once had a man stand there for 25 minutes making a running commentary on my every move, my breeding, etc. when in fact I was busting my ass to make sure he got a place to sit. It’s just not cool to treat working in a restaurant as some sort of character flaw. If you wouldn’t say it about your lawyer, don’t say it about your waitress.
My advice to you is stay out of restaurants. All restaurants are a little short staffed- the profit margins aren’t that great. All waitstaff is a little ruthless. All kitchens are a mass of cursing, screaming and stress. It only took me getting $50 stolen from my register and one girl lying about my shifts in an attempt to get me fired for me to get the hell out of the business. Now I make twice as much and you know what…my job is absolutely and completely stress free and I honestly do next to nothing (which, honestly, is something most dopers could claim. Most of us post from work…as a waitress I often couldn’t find time on my shift for bathroom breaks.) It’s clear you are set on thinking the worst, so for your own stress level I suggest packing your meals.
A couple friends and I went by a restaurant in DC at about 10 PM on a Friday. The host told us he didn’t have any tables available, would we mind waiting? Meanwhile a tenth of the restaurant actually had people in it; there was this huge expanse of empty tables throughout the restaurant. We just giggled, because while we knew he meant they had only enough staff for that tenth, it looked really silly. (That’s what waiting at the bar is for.)
But that’s where you get the best stories!
Not-so-Happy-Wanderer, it’s obvious you’ve not done restaurant work (which I thought was a requirement to get through school in the US!). If it pleases you to believe that this was sheer incompetence on the part of not only the hostess, but everyone else in the restaurant, hey, go to town.
But will you accept this, if you take nothing else out of this thread, from those of us who have restaurant experience? You asked “Is it so hard to open a new section?” The answer to that is that generally speaking in many restaurants (all, in my experience), yes, it is. They wouldn’t be seating people crammed in as you described if they could easily open another section.
as to the tip pooling, at the last restaurant I worked at (upscale french) we had tip sharing, the waiter collected the tips and shared a portion with the busser assigned to their section, the kitchen staff and the hostess. That system worked well because it was the people servicing that table that got a share.
I have never liked the concept of tip pooling (as in splitting all the tips collected that day between everyone) because I leave a tip for the service I receive from that waiter, not the service given to others by someone else. Why should the other staff be shortchanged or rewarded for the service or lack thereof given by someone else?
Is this a prerequisite for pitting now? Can’t I complain about my car breaking down because I’m not a mechanic?
The hotel restaurant didn’t have enough staff on hand to be able to seat hotel guests comfortably. Sounds like a cock up to me.