Slate has an article about how many/most restaurants hold the waiter responsible when customers sneak out w/o paying. Are there any Doper/owners out there who care to defend this practice? How can it be so prevalent when it seems so, basically, unfair?
There’s nothing to defend.
it’s their job to watch their tables and make sure people don’t walk out
Issues like this have been in the news a lot lately. The bottom line is that a lot of people in the food industry suffer wage theft and get taken advantage of by management. None of it is defensible.
Do you mean that the practice is so obviously immoral as to be impossible to defend, or so obviously justified as to require no defense?
Moved Cafe Society --> IMHO.
I’ll defend it:
The only reason anyone walks out on their tab at a restaurant is because of 2 reasons:
- The waiter was inattentive or terrible.
- They are lowlife scum who want to dine and dash
Either way, the waiter is to blame. It is YOUR responsbility as a waiter to suss out who is trustworthy to be eating at a restaurant, and who is going to responsibly pay. It is also your responsibility as a waiter to offer service so good that no one would leave without paying, even those who walked into the establishment with intent to do so from the beginning.
How’d I do? 
The “reasoning” is that if there were no consequences for the server there would be no disincentive to the server pocketing the entire payment from cash paying guests then claiming that the guests walked out without paying.
Table waiting jobs that I’ve had, there’s been a voluntary agreement among the servers that if one of our co-workers got hit by a walk-out, we’d all chip in to cover it. The entire staff would end up taking a $5 hit or so instead of one server getting hit for $40 or whatever. It was a voluntary agreement because we all knew that it could just as well have been us in the same situation.
And we contributed because we trusted that our co-worker wasn’t lying.
Management extended no such trust and would take no responsibility at all. Corporate policy tends to be “fuck 'em”.
I watched a dine and dash happen once. I wish I would have done something more now that I think about it. I felt bad, the restaraunt had just opened and everyone was in training mode. I hope they took it easy on the waitress.
This part.
I wonder how often restaurants have been successfully sued for this practice. I imagine it’s for amounts that pale in comparison to lawyer fees.
It’s not defendable
What’s next - deduct amount stolen from bank tellers during armed robberies?
They are already often pay these people below minimum wage - any shrinkage should be eaten by the store - not by employees. If they want to pay the people above minimum wage and have them agree to this when hired - I suppose I might be ok to some extent, but in no case should the amount they get be below minimum wage.
They are not unionized and labor protection laws are very weak in America, so they are screwed, especially in a weak economy when jobs are at a premium. Management does it because they can. That’s capitalism.
There’s a third situation: the customers are friends with the waiter and want a hookup on a free meal. Not technically a walkout, but the restaurant is losing the money because of the server’s actions.
I worked tables in college, and some of the servers would let their friends eat off the buffet for free. The real scam, though, was reusing the same buffet check for multiple tables. You could expect several tables of two and the entire check would be 2 buffets and 2 refillable drinks. If the customer paid cash, a server could drop the check again.
I’ll assume you’re being ironic but it illustrates why what the restaurants are doing is wrong. No restaurant is going to give its servers the authority to turn away customers because they look dishonest. And no restaurant is going to back up its servers if they take any action against a customer who makes a run for it without paying. The restaurant just dumps the “responsibility” on the servers without giving them any means to control the situation. And having done this, the restaurant now has no motivation to deal with the problem - it doesn’t have to worry about thieves if it can make its employees pay the costs for the thefts.
Then the management is doing a piss-poor job if this isn’t caught.
Oh, I agree. The buffet scam was caught.
Right. If an employee is engaging in this activity, then they’re essentially embezzling, and the proper recourse is to call the police on them, charge them with a crime, fire them, whatever. It’s not to punish everyone in order to disuade a crime from being committed.
That’s the thing, though… it really isn’t, and shouldn’t be.
In a world where waiters had impeccable precognitive powers, I agree that they would be irresponsible not to put their skills to good use. (Those who for some reason continued working as waiters, despite their ability to win the Powerball jackpot.)
But nobody does, and you can’t always tell who the dine-and-dashers are by sight. I had some teenagers run out the door on me once, and they looked like all the other teenagers I served who did pay their bill. They weren’t Dickensian ragamuffins with sooty faces, nor were they wearing striped shirts and Hamburglar masks.
And see how long your employment continues when you begin turning away customers at the door. “Sorry folks, you look like you might be deadbeats.” The only safeguard would be to demand a credit card up front, to run a tab like bars do. But few restaurants are going to implement that policy, especially when they can just make the waiter pay for the theft.
I would think it would depend on how the cash out was designed. If the customer was to pay at a register by the door how would you hold the server responsible? If, on the other hand, the server was the cashier then maybe. I think restaurants do this to absolve themselves from any responsibility and it’s not defensible.
And there’s a third scenario. The server carries his/her own bank. At the end of the shift when the tallies are done whatever is left over belongs to the server. If a walkout occurs they are surely responsible. I worked at a fast paced outdoor restaurant that used this practice. They told us not to run tabs. If we did it was our own choice. If we gambled and lost well, it was on us. Though usually, like a poster above mentioned, the troops rallied and everyone chipped in…