Waiters Reject Signing Bonuses, Hobbling an $860B Industry
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Restaurant life is hard, thankless and can very much a toxic lifestyle. I worked at 5 restaurants in the city and all of them had their unique workplace culture than ranged from fairly nice to down right exploitation and abuse [1].
Drug use, alcoholism, and often times undercutting your peers so you are scheduled shifts during prime hours just drives morale down. There is high turnover because of these things. Now that you have trouble hiring is more indicative of not wanting to be treated like crap than "restaurant staff won't come back because lazy". It's baffling to me how out of touch these restaurant owners can be when it comes to the question of not being able to retain staff.
This comment comes across as resentful; but it's important to highlight the less understood aspects of restaurant culture. Generally, it was fulfilling and left me with valuable skills. But, I'd never dare to go back to that lifestyle.
[1]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2017/07/14/wat...
Of course this is true. Many jobs suck and no one would work them unless they must. If I have the choice of working for a jerk bussing tables for $11/hour for variable 30-40/hours per week to getting $16/hour for 40 hours through unemployment, I will choose not working for more money. That’s rational.
Of course I’d also choose not working over $11/hour with the world’s best boss.
It’s not revelatory that many work in jobs they don’t like just to make a living, pay for kids, etc etc.
Sure not being a jerk is a good move to retain employees but I don’t think it matters in the “work for less money < not work for more money” equation.
I didn't leave the industry because of the money or the hours, both of which I liked, but because of the bosses. I've had bosses make fun of my (assumed) religion and hairline during staff meetings in front of the whole team. I've had bosses who were happy to punitively decide who was and wasn't going to make money that day. Managers who hire young women just to sleep with them. One guy wore a gun and flashed it around at work. It's worse if you're a woman.
How about not acknowledging your request for an important day off until the night before, then saying no because they forgot to schedule someone else? Every manager I ever had pulled that one. Sorry mom, we'll do your birthday party another day.
My longest stint was two years at Legal Seafoods, where every week the schedule came out the day before it was effective, and it changed every week. It's not fun not knowing on Thursday if you have to work Friday morning.
I say this as someone who used to love food service until I tired of the abuse: nobody should have to work in that environment.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2021/02/10/covid-job...
Cooks at #1, then factory work, agriculture, then bakers at #4, construction, procutions, sewing, shipping, grounds, customer service, then again "chefs and head cooks" at #12 and at 13 is "Computer occupations, all other" which surprised me and then second to last, bartenders. So food service is well represented.
Where are the waiters/waitress/servers on that list? I'd expect them to be at higher risk than cooks, since they're out there walking around.
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/01/sexual-harassment-is-pervasive-in-th...
- It's a rough job, and the labor economics are all skewed. Even pre-pandemic restaurants were struggling with balancing tipped pay with kitchen pay through a variety of approaches. Removing tipping had very mixed results.
- A lot of restaurant workplaces are very toxic, through a combination of the culture, bad management, etc. While there are a lot of small businesses where the owner/manager are bad, restaurants have disproportionately high staffing requirements, which means that the bad managers impact a larger number of people
- Lack of career advancement. At the low end of the restaurant market, people tend to just age out after early adulthood, or take a management track job. At the mid-range of the market, you might bounce around from place to place, but there's not really a path up and out. At the high end there's the most opportunity, but even then the salaries are not that high, and many of the better paying FOH jobs (captain, somm, GM) have been consolidated down to reduce labor costs
- Restaurants are not confident enough yet to understand what their business looks like in a post-pandemic world. That is making them hesitant to make transformative shifts like salaried servers (non-tipped) or investing in career development for kitchen staff. It's a lot easier to contemplate these things when you have a general sense of what the next few years look like, and I think there's just a general sense of unease about what comes next.
I love restaurants, it's something I really enjoy, and while I understand the people who just want to get fed and get on with their lives, I think the hospitality aspect of it (for me) can be nice. I think the industry as a whole has been structured unsustainably for years, though, and the pandemic just accelerated what would have become clear over the next 5-10 years.
EDIT: one last factor - I think there was also an ever-increasing shift towards higher expectations from customers. Shows like top chef, better access to ingredients, and casual chains with higher standards have raised the bar for everyone. I think that's good for diners, but there's a lot of restaurants that were already going to struggle to compete and the pandemic also is accelerating their demise.
Amazon will probably sell fresh cooked meals from their fulfillment centers, delivered in their trucks.
"All restaurants are Amazon."
Most nights I make a salad with feta, goat, or parmesan cheese, split grape tomatoes, snap peas, kalamata olives, a shredded carrot, avocado, and crushed tortillas, in 15 minutes. Sometimes I make fettucini with fresh sauce from the same tomatoes (blanch for 20s in the pasta water and peel, microwave for 5 min with chopped bell pepper, salt, pepper, olive oil; sauté noodles with the sauce for 2) and parmesan, in 20. How can they compete?
Also how important is a waiter? Half the time here in Colorado they high on 420. Can't I just use an app to communicate with the kitchen an have an expediter bring it to my table?
I would say no we don’t. I would be interested to hear from people who disagree as to what elements of a servers position you think would be better left to a human instead of an app. Clearly fast food joints don’t use servers but their food quality is always subpar and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a restaurant quality business that didn’t use servers so I wonder what I’m missing.
It did not last long.
Doesn't seem like it made much of a splash.
For example, why I do need to wait until a waiter notices me, then have them bring me a bill and dissapear, then wait for them to come back to collect the bill, then wait for them to come back and bring me a receipt? That is often a 30 minute wait when you are just trying to pay and get on with your day. Why can't I swipe my phone, have some RFID tech embedded into the table present a bill, I pay and then leave. That is a 10 second process instead of a 30 minute process.
And you can still have humans around to make sure things are going smoothly and to resolve issues, but there are many portions of the dining experience which would benefit from apps instead of waiters. Think -- why are you handing a stranger your credit card? Why can't you order ahead? If you know what you want, why can't you order right when you sit down? Why can't your phone buzz you to tell you your table is ready. Think of all the information the phone can provide about the menu items -- not only pictures of the meal, but nutritional information, which farm an item was obtained from. Possible substitutions. All the stuff that you have to deal with the waiter to find out. Why do you need to wait for a waiter to come by and tell you this information? Why do you have to wait to hear the specials instead of looking them up? Or cost of market-priced items. There are whole worlds of added value that apps can bring to the dining experience that would simplify life for both waiters and customers. And all of this can be integrated into reservation/review systems for a tech stack that can provide all the info about a meal, handle meal ordering and billing, handle reservations and seating, and aggregate reviews. And the staff can still be there to greet you, to bring you your food, and to resolve any problems you may have. They just don't need to wait on you, constantly polling to see if there is something you need.
The moment someone with vision approaches the problem as something to add value to the customer and give them a better overall experience is the moment app-based dining takes off.
Vapiano is a German chain that is quite nice and do over the desk orders. They hand out beeper for pizzas which is good for longer wait meals.
I would wish waiters just were a thing for high end restaurant that can afford to be properly staffed.
Customer service? Imagine having to fill out a support ticket because a robot brought the wrong kind of juice to your table. I think the act of actually bringing the food out could be automated for sure, but in most places with servers this is solved by having some staff only focus on delivering the food while the servers handle individual table issues and "onboard" new customers. Ultimately people choose to dine-in rather than go through drive-thrus for 1) food quality and 2) the social atmosphere. A restaurant with no servers is just a room with a bunch of tables - a cafeteria, if you will. And of course some people are happy with cafeterias, but if you're spending big I think you expect more than just a cafeteria, and with that comes the human element of being able to interact with others.
Wait. Why should I worry about getting down voted? These aren't points or money or bitcoin. There is no reward at the end of the day for how many votes you rack up on hacker news.
I had an opinion, I should have added more substance to the comment (I added some more below), but regardless. My opinion didn't offend anybody, I didn't purposely set out to hurt/insult anyone. I didn't use foul language. The opinion seems to be out of favor, yet no one addresses the fact that paying waiters > $20 is going to be a big problem coming out of the pandemic. (inflation, deflation, stagflation, chose your poison)
I have noticed it for a while, there seems to be group think on hacker news, kinda smells like stack overflow.
You mean a waiter? Someone has to exist between kitchen and table, to take payment, set out food, remediate order issues, and at fancier restaurants, pair and serve wines, and essentially act as a salesperson for the menu. Why would I want to get up from my table and interrupt my conversation, collect silverware and my food, and bump into other people doing the same thing when I can have someone bring it to me?
Also using an app is just gross, are you going to have people wait for another app to download, install, and possibly create a new account so that they can sell your personal information, when you could just tell someone what you want?
Why do we have to keep people employed in low-end jobs, such as waiters? I go to quality restaurants and they can't even get good waiters. I'm an educated consumer, I don't need someone to tell me what I should order. Besides they are just trying to upsell on high-profit margin items. I don't drink so that is out of the question. I do believe in waiters at restaurants where the chefs are award-winning or the meal is going to be over $200.
Waiters are like robots anyways. 1. They come over to the table, repeat a generic script their manager has taught them. 2. They return with drinks. 3. They come back with the food. 4. At the exact moment that you have food in your mouth, they come over and ask how your dinner is. (As if they cared) 5. Would you like dessert? Yes, here is our menu. No, here is your check.
Agreed I don't want another app on my phone, however; but dealing with poor service, just doesn't seem worth it. I'm really starting to enjoy getting downvoted, it gives me hope that I'm not thinking like everybody else, which I believe is important. Especially on this site.
Servers are still needed, but I do enjoy the simplicity of ordering from an online service with tableside "delivery".
My parents, however, would not agree. They wouldn't be able to order their own food from a digital menu.
If a restaurant can't find waiters, because of high demand. Then the market will dictate the next move. I noticed a lot of armchair economists on this site, but times have changed. Maybe the ideas of order apps and Covid are going make ideas like:
> Nolan Bushnell, the former founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, launched a restaurant chain in 2000 called uWink
a little more popular. When the costs of goods gets to expensive the market will adjust accordingly. Maybe getting rid of waiters or changing the business model of restaurants will be an unintended results of high demand for employees.