Waitress left 2 pennies and note by customer

[davsand]

164. Dunno if this is a hoax or not. However, I almost always tip or else ask for a Mgr.

Couldn't tell you if this particular note is real or not. Frankly, IMO, most people are not gonna take the time to write anything down if they are pissed off--at least that was my experience during the years I worked service industry. In fact, most folks, if they are pissed off at bad service or bad food just pay the bill and leave. Then they don't go back to that particular restaurant again, or worse yet, they leave and then tell everyone they know how bad the place sucks.

Waiting tables is one of the most difficult jobs I have ever done. It is physically demanding and a lot of people are really PICKY about food (food and money will get you every time--I swear to gawd!) I can joke about it here at DU, but from the customer's perspective they are PAYING for this stuff--they have a right to be picky. (Tell me you have never said it yourself at some point or another!) Some folks are not just being picky to be jerks and you can never forget that, either. Try living with Diabetes, some sort of digestive issue, or food allergies for too long and you will quickly learn that people usually have a very good reason for asking for food the way they do. Yeah, there is always gonna be the one guy in a hundred who's out to bust your chops, but more often than not there is a very good reason why people act the way they do.

Wait staff is at the mercy of the kitchen and sometimes THAT is a real minefield. On any given night the chef might be in a really bad mood, the line cooks might be surly, and even the dishwasher might have an attitude on when he walks in the door. If you piss off the kitchen that can just KILL you as a server. Potentially, every order that goes out is gonna have some kind of issue, and that means that either your tables' food will take forever, or else you are gonna be catching crap all night about the food that is over/under cooked, the cold food, the wrong stuff on the plate ("I ordered this without onions!&quot or the messed up sides. It makes you look awful as a server too. It doesn't matter what order you turned in--what ends up on that plate is what the customer judges you by.

Waitstaff is at the mercy of the floor manager, and that can be a PITA as well. I don't care how good you are with keeping drinks full or how cheerful you are--if the floor manager tells you to go clean the beer cooler, you gotta do it AND juggle those three or four four-tops you just had walk in the door. If you are lucky, you have a couple of other waits there to kind of cruise by and make sure everybody is happy while you are on your knees scrubbing and keeping the floor manager off your ass. If not--you are gonna be scrambling.

Usually, the waitstaff is the first one to hear about any problems and a lot of times they hear it in less than positive ways. What is so sad is that very often the real issue is not 100% due to a poor wait, but maybe some combination of things. The manager on duty really needs to hear this kind of stuff because they can't fix it if they don't know about the issue. I know some folks view it as "tattling" but I hold a little different perspective.

Let's say two or three people walk out of Bistro X and they are pissed off. They go to a party and tell a few other folks about how bad the experience was at Bistro X. Those folks share the info with a few other folks, and pretty soon the rap on Bistro X is that it sucks and nobody should eat there. The restaurant down the street LOVES hearing Bistro X is crappy, and they are gonna tell everyone else. Pretty soon Bistro X is going down the shitter, and you have a bunch of employees who are gonna not have jobs anymore. It might be that Bistro X really did have bad food or bad service all the time. It might also be that Bistro X was a pretty good place but it had a bad server, or a bad kitchen, or a bad floor manager, or some combination of all those things but NOBODY FREAKING KNEW so it couldn't be fixed!

I'm gonna talk to somebody that can fix it.


Laura

PS, I did it for a few years and I made pretty good money at it.