10 percent on a Friday night...

When you work at a corporate restaurant chain, there is no possible way to get away with upsetting your guests. The management will do anything to keep even the worst of customers from never returning. A guest lost is considered a crime to many of the franchise owners in the casual dining industry...you know, the people who don't quite deal with the types of people who manage to put you in the weeds for hours after they have left the building. Apparently their hard earned dollars being spent on microwaved and deep fried food is more important than your integrity and work ethic as a server. We as servers need to make a living too.

It seems that a lot of customers not only do not know how to tip, but also do not realize that there are such things as tipouts, taxes, minimum wage, and teamwork. The mere fact that servers in corporate chains and often mom & pop style restaurants only make a measly $2.13 an hour is not stated when a guest walks through the door. At the moment of the initial greet, as a server, it's incredibly hard to not have a preconcieved notion that you are either going to get a great tip, an average tip, or no tip at all.

Tonight I had some kids ring up a $50 check. They got refills, extra sides, extra sauces, and anything else they asked for. When it came time for the check they paid with a credit card. As they were leaving, they laughed and signed the credit card slip. When I picked up the slip there was a dash through the tip line and no money on the table. For about a half an hour these kids hung out in the patio area outside chatting with some friends. If I were to ask them if there was anything wrong with the service or in any way dispute the fact that I just paid $2.00 out of my pocket in tipshare for them to eat when I should have gotten at least a $7.50 tip (at 15% when the standard is now about 18%) I could have risked losing my job. Instead, I kept my cool for a few minutes and then proceeded out the front door. I waved to the kid who paid the bill and said to him "Thank you, and take care." They laughed. Little did they know that they robbed me of an hour and a half of my time at a table I could've rotated twice. They also did not care. Maybe they think that servers get paid hourly? This is something I will never quite understand. On top of their lack of a tip, most of my tips for the night were less than 10%. The few really great tips I recieved all seemed to make up for the bad tips leaving me at 10% of my sales after tipping out $60 in tipshare and dropping another $20 for the food runner.

Sometimes I think to myself "is this all worth it?" I could be working a 9-5 job where I am getting hourly pay and benefits, but I choose the flexibility of serving because I am still in school. For the most part, serving food is a gratifying job. When my guests feel good, I feel good. When my guests are rude or are complainers, I feel distressed. Tonight I sent back several items to the kitchen, mostly things that were just flat out caused by kitchen neglect. It felt good to know that none of these things were in my error, but the guests don't seem to think this way. I don't cook their food, I just ring it in on a computer and sometimes run it to their table. We have a runner system where everyone works as a team. When something comes out wrong, the server gets blamed. There's nothing I hate more than someone complaining that their steak came out wrong when I rang it in correctly and the guest lowers my tip because of a kitchen error. The kitchen still makes the same money in salary no matter what goes wrong. Why can't servers at least make the money they deserve?

I wish an automatic gratuity law would go into effect sometimes. There are restaurants in New York City that add an automatic gratuity due to the large amount of tourists in the area. At least the servers who work in those restaurants can be guaranteed to make a certain percent of their sales per night. Our restaurant is very hit or miss. I can't understand how I can walk with 30% of my sales on a Monday night when the restaurant is extremely slow and only make about 8-10% on a weekend when the movie theatre next door is overflowing into our restaurant. I just hope that someday the corporate owners of some of these chains will take into consideration the hard working people that make their restaurants so successful and give great service so that the guests will keep returning for more microwaved and deep fried food.