If the servers duties prevent them from monitoring all tables every second, they shouldn’t be held accountable. That’s the owner’s/manager’s job to figure out.
Okay, today you’re the manager. What’s your solution?
Nobody’s freaking out about it. We’re just discussing whether it’s right or wrong.
And throwing out hyperbole isn’t helping your case. I’m not likely to believe nine out of ten restaurants fail in their first year from somebody who says a policy has been around for a billion years.
Bottom line is, you can screw up at any job and cost your company thousands in lost revenue. Let’s say by not applying a server backup correctly. And while you might get fired, no sane person is saying you should be responsible for the lost revenue if it was unintentional. In fact, if you get fired that minute, they are obligated by law to pay you until you are terminated.
Losing a restaurant 50 bucks in food/drink because you were busy doing the other parts of your job similarly DOES NOT entitle the company to pass that loss on to you. It’s wage theft, pure and simple.
Manager/Assistant/Other is out on the floor generally supervising which includes being aware of what stage the tables are at in their meal.
Alarm all secondary exits from the dining area.
In the case that’s blown up in the media lately, it’s actually illegal in that state (New York) for managers to dock waitstaff for dine-and-dash. But they get away with that because most people are too scared to lose their job and get a reputation of being difficult employees, similar to why employers can get away with breaking the law/labor regulations on other matters.
This. If the cook leaves a box of hamburger sitting outside the freezer all night and it spoils, or if someone screws up an order and the whole thing has to be remade, or if the wash guy knocks over a stack of plates, you eat the cost. Shrinkage is part of business.
Suppose the owner could eliminate all thefts by hiring a guard to stand by the door. From a financial standpoint, he’s better off not hiring the guard.
Let’s say the owner is losing a thousand dollars a week due to thefts. All he needs to do is take a thousand dollars from his servers and he experiences no loss. Theft becomes a non-problem as far as he’s concerned and he has no reason to make any effort to stop it.
Better than no loss, he’s making a profit: those servers aren’t paying the cost of the meals to him, they are actually paying the price to the public, which is costs + his profit. If he hired an armed guard, all those dine-and-dashers would go elsewhere, and his sales would drop.
Alternatively how about a gas station owner that requires clerks let customers pump before they pay during daylight hours, arranges things so that it’s impossible for the clerk to see licence plates from the counter, doesn’t aim any of the security cameras so they can see the pumps, and assigns the clerk multiple other tasks (ranging from checking out customers inside the store, stocking shelves, making coffee, etc) that make watching the pumps like a hawk impossible. Oh, and very often the clerk is the only one on duty in the store. Should the clerk still be held responsible if someone drives off? I was so happy when corporate finally wised up and started making everyone prepay. I never had to pay for the gas, but I still had to fill out incident reports & call a hotline (& technically the store manager was supposed to write up whoever authorized the pump, but he never did).
It’s not the same thing. The cashier has control over whether or not his drawer is short; he doesn’t anywhere near the same degree of control over whether or not someone shoplifts. Even in a small store like a convenience store he can’t see everything, and even if he see’s someone literally pick an item up of the shelf and walk out there’s nothing he can do stop the thief other than threatening to call the police (who don’t give a damn unless it’s an actual robbery). At a lot of stores even accusing someone of shoplifting (not trying to stop them) will get you fired unless of course you either management or a trained loss prevention agent.
That’s exactly the situation I was in when I worked at the convenience store. Plus I couldn’t refuse to turn the pump on without risking somebody getting pissed off, making a scene, and calling corporate on me. Granted plenty of people did just that when we switched to pre-pay/pay@pump only, but at least then corporate wouldn’t email the SM telling him to write me up. When we made the switch corporate actually disabled out ability to turn the pumps on without entering a transaction so even management couldn’t make exceptions. 
There are two potential issues here.
One is real dine-and-dash, and it’s part of the cost of doing business. Just like retail will always have a certain amount of shrink, restaurants will have dine-and-dash. This needs to be figured into any financial projections and included in the decision to open or not open a restaurant. If dine-and-dash will break you, you have an unviable business plan. That’s all there is to it.
Then there are scams pulled by employees. The best bet there is to hire trustworthy employees rather than any wanna-be server off the street. That probably means more money. Then it’s all good management. Having a presence on the floor and knowing your employees can go a long way towards rooting out trouble makers.
What the current system now is doing is allowing management the benefit of hiring cheap, unreliable labor, and hefting the risk from that off on to the rest of the employees.
I agree completely. In the service industry, inviting your friends is a common thing to do. In fact while I was bartending and waiting tables, I made some long term friends that I met as customers. These are usually the last people you’d ever think of dining and dashing. Everyone would invite their friends and usually get some 50% tip and cheer. Sure, sometimes a drink or two would be comped, but that was the exception and not the rule.
Inviting your friends to your place of work to dine and dash as some sort of scheme smacks of some cheap high school job you dont care about. Because it’s certainly gonna get you found out quicker and there is not much gain from the server there. Wow, I invited my friends and they ran up a hundred dollar tab and I told them to dash. What are they gonna do, cut you in and pay you $30 or something of what they never paid at legal risk of theft of services? I could see kids doing that, but not anyone with any sort of wage they depend on.
I think that everybody who wants to call it bad management are ignoring one simple fact: The waiter/waitress is a colossal screwup, that is costing the company money, or else she/he is a crook. A server need only alert somebody else in the establishment when the guests are leaving, and problem is solved. No manager in a restaurant that I ever worked would leave it up to just the server to deal with it. They, and fellow waitstaff, would go out and kick the shit out of the offender before they got to their vehicles.
I was a bouncer in a high end restaurant, and a waitress came to me and told me that somebody had walked a check. I asked her what they looked like. She wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to come to the parking lot with me. She said never mind before I even got to the elevator. This is either a crook or a retard, and has no business being a server, and should pay if they walk off.
…as a former hospitality manager of fifteen years who lives in a country where “waitstaff paying for walk outs” is an unacceptable and illegal practice, the solution is simply to put systems in place where the odds of a walk out are greatly reduced. Never had one in my entire career. We don’t have the “server/bus-person” system here: we typically have waiters who covers a section, a bar-person and the host/cashier. The cashier normally is positioned at the door and knows who has paid and who hasn’t.
The waiter is the person best placed to prevent walk-outs, and also the person best placed to assist cheating. Thus making the waiter responsible for walk-out tabs is quite logical and efficient.
Due to the added responsibility and risk, the base wage should increase for waiters who are responsible for such tabs.
You are simply wrong, just wrong. In my experiences with outside tables and an inside bar, there is simply no practical way to prevent someone who is intent with walking out without a constant bouncer who watches the tables, which most places simply do not have.
Complete and total uninformed and unqualified poppycock.
Why THE FUCK does every thread on tips, fast food, or waitstaff generally devolve into some sort of round-a-bout ‘GET A BETTER JOB’ viewpoint by the ignorant?
SOMEONE has to perform these tasks if society continues to eat out.
The role of a manager is to hire, train and monitor trustworthy staff. If they are hiring feckless no accounts and end up Losing money, that is a story about poor management.
What’s to keep managers from abusing the system? I could invite my buddies in, then hold the waiter up while my friends skip out, sticking the waiter with the check.
You may say “the manager wouldn’t risk their job for that!” Exactly. Build buy-in, and the risk goes away.
And in a white collar job, the accountant is best placed to assist embezzling. So it’s logical that they should pay any bounced checks, right? Accountants make good money, so they should just consider it a cost of doing business.
Why not have a server watch the table??? Oh, wait…that IS their job!!!