Mike: Serving the Masses
Y&F St. Louis TeamEditor's note: We challenged all of our finalists to "Write a blog: Writer’s choice: write about whatever suits your mood. "
While I have the attention of a large mass of people, I want to talk about the restaurant industry, which is how I’ve made my living the last 4 years. For some reason, many people believe that waiting tables is easy. Let me destroy this misconception: waiting tables is by no means “easy”. As a waiter you are expected to be a plethora of things: a mind reader, a beer and wine connoisseur, a food allergy specialist, a culinary expert, etc. I would like to take this time to clear the air of some misconceptions of the restaurant industry.
A couple years ago, Oprah Winfrey released a statement saying that it was okay to tip servers less than 15% in times of economic decline. A billionaire is telling people it’s okay to under-tip their waiters. Of course, this did not sit well with myself and many of my co-workers. Many people see servers carrying around a large wad of cash and automatically assume all of it is ours to keep. If that was the case, I would not be writing this blog. Usually, 75% of the cash you see us handling goes to restaurant for payments made by the customer.
Servers generally make $3.65 per hour plus tips, which means we rely on our tables for our income. And not only that, but the quantity of tables we get per night determines how much we make. Of course we want a lot of tables because that means we make more money. However when quantity goes up, unfortunately quality of service for each table goes down.
Everyone at one point or another has received bad service from their waiter. Whether they forgot your appetizer or forget to put your dressing on the side, I’m sure they didn’t purposely do it since the quality of our service tends to influence the quality of our tip. People tend to get extremely frustrated at restaurants when the server doesn’t stop by to check in as often as they should. I completely understand why since you are paying not only for your food but also for a great experience. But people have to remember that the server is not doing this intentionally and is serving more people than just them. They can’t help the number of people who decided to come in that night. If you see your server running around please keep this in mind before you yell or ask for a manager.
Being a server, I hate giving people bad service. I feel bad because I know that they deserve better and I can do better. But sometimes you have to make sacrifices in your quality of service so that you can help the masses.
As a server, I want to make your stay at the restaurant as comfortable as possible. I greatly appreciate your business. I thank you for putting me through school and allowing me to live the life I do. But please remember that even though you’re there to relax and be taken care of, we are there to work not only for you but many others. All I ask is that if you see us running around as if we were on fire and please have some patience with us. We don’t mean to ignore you. No matter what anyone says, servers work hard for their money and we appreciate your business.
Mike
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