[QUOTE=fetus]
Hrm. You’d think it’d be a problem in retail, where employee theft is the biggest component of shrink.
I’ve never had bad credit until recently, and I guess I just believed it when I heard that “bad credit = no job”.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe it’s different in California, but I recently had a second job at a Panera Bread and they didn’t check my credit.
Early on, I worked at a Friendly’s restaurant, scooping ice cream. Friendly’s got its start as an ice-cream place, and although they served horrific fast food (burgers and “melts”), they were still predominantly an ice-cream specialty store.
One night they ran out of vanilla ice cream.
Vanilla is the foundational flavor of most fancy ice-cream dishes.
That was bad – almost as bad as a gas station running out of gas – but immediately became infinitely more complicated by the development that our waitresses were bone-stupid.
“We’re out of vanilla,” I told them. “Tell the customers and see if they want to substitute another flavor.”
Back would come orders for vanilla dishes. I’d call the waitress over and re-explain.
Back would come the order, now for a different dish that required vanilla.
Over and over, all night, with every waitress, we played out this charade. There was one male waiter on staff, but he was too busy trying to chat up the waitresses to really wait any tables, so I don’t know how dumb he was. But they were amazingly, exasperatingly dumb.
“You have to tell the customers, so they know what to order,” I’d say.
“But they’ll be mad if we tell them we’re out of vanilla!”
“They’ll be even more mad when they learn that, despite your raising their expectations, they can’t get it anyway. Just be up front about it.”
“Why do I have to be the one to talk to the customers?”
:smack:
I left that job within the month. The manager begged me to stay, offering me anything but money or tangible benefits.
Sailboat
:rolleyes: I wasn’t going to respond to it, but the reason I don’t think Tazo tea is worth paying for is because it’s shitty tea. I pay good money for better tea all the time.
I have the best story. I manage a Wendy’s. One Sunday night a few years back, we ran out of oil. For the gas tank. In addition to the fact that it was about 10 degrees in there because it was January and we had no heat, we couldnt heat the fryers, the oven, or the stove. So we couldn’t sell fries, chicken products, potatoes, or chili. And we couldnt feel our fingers.
Typical order:
Customer-I’ll have a 5 piece nugget, and a small fry
Cashier-I’m sorry, we don’t have any fried products right now, so fries and nuggets are unavailable
Customer-Okay, I’ll have the spicy chicken sandwich instead. And the fries.
Cashier-sigh
We did this cherade with every customer for about 3 hours before corporate finally let us close early. Meanwhile, I was on the phone with the head of maintainance the whole time, who was trying to convince me I was doing something wrong. The little gauge pointed to empty…how complicated is that? Apparently a bill got missed by accounting, so the oil company cut us off for lack of payment.
And as for running out of normal stuff, that’s usually just a lack of planning. Or storage space. One of my old stores was so tight in storage, we had to keep cups and stuff in the freezer out back. Food and stuff can be justified by not wanting to waste it, but paper stays good forever. It’s usually a matter of someone not noticing we didn’t have any lids or whatever.
[QUOTE=Pammipoo]
One of my old stores was so tight in storage, we had to keep cups and stuff in the freezer out back.
[/QUOTE]
[hijack]I was at a restaurant last night that had shelfs in the dining room! Every now and then a cook would wander out through the dining room, grab a can of something, and head back to the kitchen.
[QUOTE=Frank]
[hijack]I was at a restaurant last night that had shelfs in the dining room! Every now and then a cook would wander out through the dining room, grab a can of something, and head back to the kitchen.
[/QUOTE]
That reminds me. We also kept stuff in the dining room, underneith the booth seats. If you pry up the vinyl seat, there’s empty space underneith. We used to keep paper towels and toilet paper and stuff in there. I remember one day the ladies room was out of toilet paper, and there were customers sitting in the booth hiding the TP. “Excuse me, can you stand up for just a minute? That lady really needs to pee!”