Tales from the Restaurant

Tales from the Restaurant
Where you'll find all the restaurant dirt you'll ever need.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Racism and Overstaffing; A Recipe for Success!

On any given Monday, you typically don't see too many restaurants full to capacity. That luxury is only seen on weekends. This is common knowledge, and one doesn't have to be qualified in management or restaurant mechanics to arrive at this conclusion. The restaurant at which I am employed had over eleven people working a Monday night dinner. Let's just let that sink in for a moment.

Finally, after two and a half hours of pretending to punch in orders at a terminal (but instead playing Texas Hold 'Em on my cell phone), I was given a table of three Asian people, a young male student who was evidently taking his non-English speaking parents out for dinner.

If there's something that creates a stereotype, it's when certain people consistently do the same thing over and over completely independently of each other.

In this case, they ordered lobster...which is what all Asians who visit this particular restaurant do.

After a lobster between the three of them and God knows how many tap water refills, I dropped the check.

On the credit card device at the table, the options for gratuity are twenty, eighteen, and fifteen percent. Because of the fact that I assumed I wouldn't be tipped well, I left them the machine on this screen, but because of the grace of God and Murphy's Law (not to mention the tenacity of people who refuse to tip well), I was left under ten percent of the total.

Because this was my only table of the evening (and because of the fact that I had to tip out the support staff), I left my shift this evening with less than five dollars.

I would have made more money today if I had been making Air Jordan sneakers in a warehouse in Indonesia.

Such is the business I've committed my life to.

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