I worked briefly for a restaurant owner who was both unethical and clueless. He’d had long-term success as an orchardist, and somehow thought that would translate to success in the restaurant business.
At my previous job I’d been the full-time breakfast & lunch cook, but the owner of that place decided to stop serving breakfast. Breakfast had never been profitable there, but the place did so much nighttime business — it was a popular bar with a younger clientele — that they could justify being open for breakfast. But the night business eventually dropped off to where it couldn’t “subsidize” breakfast any longer, so breakfast got cut. That left me doing just lunch, which amounted to just four hours of work a day for me. So I moved on, despite liking the job.
Cutting breakfast also meant that the morning bartender/waitress needed a new job, and we ended up getting hired as a “team” by a newer restaurant/bar. She was actually hired first, and convinced the owner to bring me in too, since she already knew him and he trusted her word that I was a good and reliable cook. Since I didn’t have a driver’s license at that time, and this new job was not within walking distance like the previous had been, the arrangement was that the two of us would work the 7:00AM - 3:00PM shift together, and she would be my ride.
That shift was the first problem I saw: opening at 8:00 for breakfast was doomed to fail, since most people in this town who regularly eat breakfast in restaurants have already done so before 8:00AM.
After two weeks, the owner up and decided that he wanted my coworker working the busier afternoon/happy hour shift. He told her this, and she said, “Well then, I quit.” So there went my ride. The boss said he’d take care of either picking me up himself or having somebody else do it. Except he kept forgetting, and I’d have to call him, and by the time we’d get to the restaurant we’d end up opening even later or not having time to get everything ready.
It didn’t take too long to discover that none of the vendors would take his checks — he’d bounced too many, and they insisted on cash on delivery. One morning the truck showed up and unloaded, and the boss wasn’t there, but had left it to the bartender to hand them a check he’d left for the purpose. Which, of course, the driver wouldn’t accept. The driver simply loaded everything back onto the truck and drove away, refusing (rightly) to hand over the product until the owner showed up with cash. I also learned from other employees to run straight to the bank with my paychecks, to make sure those didn’t bounce.
He didn’t have enough patience to wait and see if things would work, so he was constantly changing what time the place opened, which simply left the few morning customers we had confused. And he’d keep changing the menu to “see if this works” to bring in more business. But if it didn’t “work” in a week, he’d change everything again. And again. And again.
He was a racist, too, though I doubt he saw himself as one. The two dinner cooks were Mexican, and did good work. More than once the owner came in to the kitchen toward the end of my shift to ask, “What time do my Mexicans get here?” Not “Antonio and Jose”, but “my Mexicans” :rolleyes:
Eventually I learned where he was getting his financing for the place. His older sister, a sweet, naive, elderly woman, was loaded, as in “multimillionaire”. He was milking her for everything he could get — he spent close to half a million of her money simply decorating the dining room. And kept asking for more, and more, and more. And she kept giving it to him. She only saw him as her dear baby brother who could do no wrong in her eyes. And despite all the money she was dumping in the hole in the ground, the boss somehow still couldn’t pay the bills or keep checks from bouncing. Turns out he was pretty much drinking all the revenue.
At the end of my fifth week there, I looked at the next week’s schedule and discovered I’d only been scheduled for 16 hours (where I’d been working 40 hours/week). It turned out the guy had decided that serving breakfast just wasn’t worthwhile and had cut it out, without mentioning a word to me — I knew nothing until I looked at the next week’s schedule.
That’s when I said, “I’m done here”, and just didn’t go back.