When You're Here, You're Disposable

One of the other serving blogs I follow is written by a woman who was fired from Capital Grille (a Darden Restaurant) for writing a blog similar to this one. In her posting this week, she told the story of another server who was canned for something he said that was taken the wrong way when he wasn't even at work or at a work related event. Read the full story here.

It is just so insane the lengths that corporate restaurants like the Capital Grille and The Italian Restaurant and the like will go to make sure not a single douchebag will vow never to come back. They seriously would rather fire a good hardworking server than have some piece of trash redneck bitch say she "Ain't never gonna eat here again." If you read the comments on that blog post, you also saw the story of a woman fired from Red Lobster because a guest who was a total bitch claimed she was racist, based on nothing. It's scary and infuriating knowing that your side of the story or your opinion mean absolutely nothing to the management. They literally DO NOT CARE. Well, I wont say none of them care, but the one's that care don't get to be GM's, and all the final decisions come down to them.

When I was 20, I worked at Target for a year and a half. Now Target is a big corporation, bigger than The Italian Restaurant, but I can easily say I was treated with way more respect there than I am at the IR. The Store Manager there, a fucking rad guy named Lenny, didn't take shit from anyone, and he didn't expect us to either. He was a very nice, very calm and reasonable guy, but when assholes started busting out that "let me talk to your supervisor" tone and trying to get free shit, the show was over. I watched him on more than one occasion dish peoples attitudes right back to them, and hold firm to our policies, making sure to remind them that they were company policies, he didn't write them. If someone got really bad, if they swore at him for example, he would tell them he was not going to continue the conversation and walk away or hang up, and he advised us to do the same. He would say something like "If someone starts getting really unnecessarily rude or they use vulgar language, just say 'if you are going to talk to me like that I am not going to continue this conversation' and if they continue, just hang up the phone or walk away from them. Nobody can talk to you like that, I don't care who they are."

It was great knowing that someone had my back. That if I didn't let someone walk all over me, and calmly and politely stuck to my guns, I wouldn't get fired or yelled at but praised. I don't know what it's like working at Target these days, or if it was just because of Lenny, but I never worried that making a simple mistake would cost me my job. I knew they realized that I was human and it was to be expected. I didn't know that this was not something I should count on from an employer.

Today one of my coworkers, a smokin hot lady we'll call...Autumn (ha), had a table intentionally fill out their credit slip in her full view so she could see them write a big fat zero in for the tip. After the fact, she was justifiably angry at this blatant slap in the face, and regretted not having said something. I asked what she would have said

"I don't know, like 'what could I do in the future to get a bigger tip than zero?' or 'how can I improve my service since you clearly didn't like it?'"

Well I am damn glad that Autumn didn't say anything, because at the IR and other douchebaggy corporate restaurants, this is grounds for immediate termination. They see this as embarrassing the guest, even if it is an honest inquiry done in good faith. Many of us would genuinely like to know if there is something we are doing that rubs people the wrong way because obviously we don't want to be unwittingly hurting our tips. This happened to a girl that I trained with when I first started at the IR. Her name was Mae, and she was a really cool chill person, not prone to getting upset or angry with guests. One night after we had been working there about 4 months she had a table of about 6 or 7 that had appetizers, drinks and the works, so their check was well over $100. After they got up to leave, she grabbed the book off the table and saw that they had stiffed her, absolutely nothing for a tip. She was so surprised, she figured she must have offended them in some way so she went to the lobby where they were just about to walk out the door. Approaching the person who paid, she said "Excuse me, was there something I did wrong, did you not like my service?" he replied that no, she did a fine job. "Well I'm just confused because normally when you get great service you leave a tip, and I just don't understand why you didn't tip me." I don't know what his answer was, but whether he complained to the manager or someone who overheard did, she was fired that night. There is just no gray area on this. It doesn't matter if you are so so nice and discreet about it, you are NEVER to ask a guest why they didn't tip you.

Another woman I worked with was fired after working for the IR for something like 14 years because a guest complained about her. She didn't do anything in particular, they just didn't like her. Maybe she was really busy and they were really needy and she wasn't able to conceal her frustration enough, who knows. But she had had two other complaints within a 6 month period, so that was it, they axed her. Never mind that people often complain about their service in order to get their food for free, most managers would rather fire a good employee than lose a shitty customer.

The big wigs up at corporate make all these "rules" or "service standards" as they call them, and think that by telling the local managers that we have to follow them, no exceptions, that they are creating a well-run reliable work machine. When you take circumstances into consideration, or human error, you are weakening the "machine." You forgot to ring in that dessert? Fired for stealing. Doesn't matter if it's an accident, if it's never happened before, that you didn't know or like those people and therefor had no reason to hook them up, FIRED. But we aren't machines, we are people who will fuck up pretty regularly and because we do doesn't mean we aren't good servers or employees. Putting us in a constant state of fear over whether we will get fired for any given mistake doesn't make us a stronger work force, it just makes us bitchy and annoyed and hate the managers a lot more than we should have to.

None of it is really worth it. With the current economy, we aren't as busy as we would normally be, so we are making way less in tips. Given that we are only allowed to take three tables at once (and yes I do know someone who was fired and then later rehired for taking more than three tables), people are walking with 50 bucks on closing shifts (this is not good). Some of us are considering going elsewhere, even just across the street, to someplace where at least if they are treating us like shit, we have the cash to show for it.