I think that what you should do is treat the service people like they are real people. Don’t act like they are mindless drones who are not worth your attention. Look at them, tell them what you want and if there is a mistake, be polite when calling their attention to the mistake.
i.e. “You stupid fuckhead, you forgot to be sure that my fries were extra crispy, you are worthless and should be fired, I want to talk to the manager so I can get my entire meal for free” really isn’t very nice and hurts people.
It would be better to say something quietly like “I asked for extra crispy fries, could you fix it for me?” They will fix the mistake and will often volunteer to comp the meal to make it up.
What the hell are you reading into people’s posts to think they are implying they would respond like this? They are simply saying that they should expect to get what they ask/paid for. Is that so unreasonable? Where do you come up with the assumption that they called their server a stupid fuckhead?
Truly you are a man of the ages. A gentleman and a scholar.
With the attitude you appear to have in the post I quoted, you should stay away. Far away. Everyone will be happier that way. You’ll be happy. Food service workers will be happy. Dogs and cats will get along. Rush Limbaugh will hug Al Gore. It’ll be…honestly it’ll be fucking magical.
Employment conditions in the U.S. seem remarkebly similar to those in the Third World.
What I find obscene is that your employer has the stranglehold of supplying Health Care for you, so if you get sick you’d better not piss him off, and that staff are forced to beg off of the customers to get a living wage.
And calling it tips doesn’t change things, we have tipping in the rest of the Western World but they are an unofficial bonus for over and above average service, not giving customers (At a whim) the power to cause a shortfall in the wages that the employer should be paying.
Well, a remarkable amount of Americans live in the Fourth World, many of them while holding one or more jobs: below the poverty level in a First World country.
That’s because America is becoming a third world nation. This thread demonstrates it perfectly, little people aren’t allowed to get sick, or even complain about their jobs in a forum specifically designed to let people vent.
The problem is, most people don’t ask for the manager or owner and yell at him/her for understaffing. They yell at and try to intimidate their server.
Not to mention that, in my experience, there are certain customers who, once they’ve gotten their way via these tactics, will start trying to see just how far they can push before somebody finally has the guts to tell them “no”. They will, a little bit at a time, ask for this or that kind of special treatment, or special items that aren’t even on the menu, and they’ll just keep trying for more and more and then when they finally push too far and get told “no” they blow up and storm out and threaten to never come back and tell everyone they know not to eat there.
It’s not the $90-150 cost of the meat. I actually found the explanation in an industry magazine for bars, on why it’s bad for bartenders to give away drinks. The usual justification is, “Hey, that shot of bourbon cost the boss maybe 50 cents.” Sure, it cost 50 cents, but giving it away free costs the boss (the business) the 50 cents plus the $5.00 (or whatever) markup they would have gotten had the drink been paid for. Likewise, that $90-150 prime rib, once it’s cooked and sold by the slice, might turn into $400+ in revenue, depending of course on how many slices you get out of it and how much you charge for each one.
Basically, it’s not so much about losing the cost of the goods as it is about losing the revenue by not having the goods on hand to sell.
I think where the problem that occurs with the restaurant business, and cooking in particular is that restaurants offer something that pretty much anybody can do for themselves at home. Or at least think they can do for themselves. People who don’t drive 18-wheelers generally don’t think they know how to drive an 18-wheeler. People who aren’t accountants generally don’t think they can do full-charge accounting. People who aren’t carpenters don’t generally think they can build a house.
But people look at restaurant cooking and think, “Hey, I can cook! My wife can cook! My mom can cook! How hard can it be?” And it never occurs to these people that they/their wife/their mom was normally cooking one meal at a time and everybody at the table got the same things cooked the same way. They weren’t cooking 27 different things prepared 13 different ways all at the same time, perfectly timed so that all the individual plates for a particular table are ready at the same time, all in 15 minutes or less. (And honestly, this is one reason so many new restaurants fail - people who said “how hard can this be” discovered just how hard it can be).
You know what was the most difficult thing for me when I was a breakfast cook? Dry toast. Easiest fucking thing in the world to make, and easiest fucking special request to screw up. Believe it or not, subtracting a regular ingredient is considerably more difficult than adding an extra ingredient. I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of muscle memory, but I’ll go ahead and quote from Wikipedia’s article on the topic:
“Muscles memory has been used synonymously with motor learning, which is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition. When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems.” (italics mine)
Most cooks who have been in a particular restaurant for any length of time have probably prepared each item on the menu hundreds or thousands of times and have an established rhythm/pattern that they go through while preparing each item, without consciously thinking about it. In my toast example, I was never thinking of each step involved in making toast. It was all one thing: “make toast”. The toast popped up, I grabbed it with one hand while simultaneously grabbing the butter knife with the other, slapped the bread down on the cutting board, smeared the butter on it, put the slices together, cut them in half, and slapped 'em on a plate. The whole process took less than 2 seconds and was processed by my brain as “all one thing”. Then I would yell, “FUCK!”, throw it in the trash and start over again. It’s the same with anything else on the menu.
You’re right though, it really is “extra effort” to leave something off.
No. In every restaurant I’ve worked in, I made the same amount of money on a busy day as I made on a slow day.
The other one I “love” is what I’ve heard from numerous owners over the years: “The more business we do, the more I can afford to pay my cooks!” What they really mean is “… the more vacations I can take to Cabo!”
My state abolished the “tip wage” a few years ago as well.
I honestly can’t even remember the last time I called in sick, but in my case I simply never get sick, or at least never get anything worse than a cold (except for that bizarre case of chicken pox way back when I was 21; I was a shoe salesman at the time and probably picked it up from some kid). And I don’t have any patience at all with people who are “sick” because they drank too much the night before. I drank like a fish in my 20s, and I still showed up for work, on time, every day. Hung over as hell and with a pounding head? Sure. But I showed up, dammit, and did my job. But I’ve had to deal with fellow cooks who called in sick all the fucking time … and always on my day off, so that I’d have to come fill in for them.
And yeah, cuts and burns are just part of the job. If it’s not severe enough to require going to the emergency room for stitches (done that twice), just put a Band-Aid on it, pull on a rubber glove, and get back to work. When I was the graveyard cook at an all-night restaurant, I was working alone (as I normally did) one Friday or Saturday night when the 2:00AM bar rush hit, and not too far into the rush I accidentally splattered some hot oil and got one hellacious grease burn up my hand (it raised a beauty of a blister shaped exactly like the splash). This was my right hand, the same hand I needed to flip the eggs in their pans and wield my spatula, and holy shit did it hurt every time I got my hand anywhere near the gas burners or the grill. But I didn’t have any choice but to gut it out - the restaurant was full, I was the only cook, and there was no manager to cover while I treated the burn. So I just dealt with it for the next hour or so until the rush died off. Then I went and sat my ass down on the floor of the walk-in cooler and let the cold air relieve my pain. One of my waitresses found me in there and kindly treated the burn for me.
As for understaffing, this is not something usually done by store managers and supervisors. That’s a corporate thing. Do you really think managers and supervisors WANT to run understaffed? We’re the ones taking it in the ass because we’re understaffed. But for someone in corporate, far removed from the actual running of a restaurant, they just see numbers and bonuses. Frankly they don’t give a fuck about customer service. I remember times where we had to tell a cook to leave during a rush because he’d hit overtime, leaving us totally fucked. That’s how much corporate cares about customer service.
That’s just it – they have NO IDEA, and when they walk into a situation where production is key, it’s more often than not a clusterfuck.
Cake decorating is a perfect example. It’s one thing if you do it from home, but it’s another thing if you do it as a job. Over the years we’ve had countless home decorators come in to interview – which they pass with flying colors – but completely fall apart during the practical, where we give them the cake, icing, and equipment and see how they do. It’s hard. It really is.
Many years ago during an overnight shift I was attempting to pull an old, rickey, rubber-burned-off-wheels rack from the oven. I yanked it, and the whole rack came tumbling on top of me. I instantly put up both arms to protect my face. Our night crew leader drove me to the ER. Two hours later I returned and finished my shift with both arms, elbow to mid-forearm, wrapped in bandages. I still have the scars.
My first trip to the emergency room resulted in taking the rest of the day off. I’d essentially nearly severed the whole tip of my left thumb while chopping salad lettuce - right through the thumbnail. It wasn’t a simple cut, it was the tip of my thumb that had to be stitched back on. It required such thick bandages that I wouldn’t have been able to grip anything in my left hand, it continued to ooze blood even after the stitching, and the thickness of the bandages would have prevented fitting a rubber glove over it. Thankfully I had the next two days were my regular days off and I was able to return to work on schedule.
The second trip to the ER was for a simple cut straight across the pad of the first joint of my index finger (I’d pushed the trash down in a trash can and “found” the sharp edge of a tin can lid). Got it stitched shut, covered it with a simple bandage and rubber glove, and came right back to work.
