If you've ever worked in the food service industry , you certainly know the pain of customers coming in right minutes before closing. While it's still technically appropriate and enforced by management, the last thing you want after an eight-and-a-half-hour shift is to stick around an extra hour for a couple of customers. If you've never worked in hospitality, it's understandable that you might not understand the common decency of the appropriate window of hours of operation. But my personal be…

How is this meant to work

Table politics

Mind your own business

We've all been there.

Working at a restaurant is kind of bad for your health. I've seen both front of house and back of house people succumb to alcoholism, drug addiction, burnout and dark depression. I've experienced some of these ails as well. Unfortunately, working a high-paced and high-stress job kind of goes along with those pitfalls. But for all the glaring problems with restaurant work , the industry can help people develop much-needed empathy and compassion. Servers, bartenders, and even broke line cooks are…

One of the best parts about being a salaried employee is that you don't get called in for random shifts on the weekend. At least I don't, but y'all stay safe out there. There's nothing worse than preparing for a nice long day of doing nothing than receiving a call from your manager. When I worked at a dog bakery, I was always the person saying “yes” to picking up this one girls shifts. If it sounds like I was being a pushover, it's because I was a pushover. For me, it was hard to leave money on…

Businesses fundamentally misunderstand how the average person approaches reviewing something. Unless you are a “Local Guide” on Google Reviews, you are not going to leave a review for a service unless it's a 1-star or a 5-star experience.

There's evil, and then there's restaurants stealing tips from their employees. Restaurants already don't pay their workers enough to live on most of the time. Tips are usually the only way restaurant employees make above minimum wage, and when you take that away, they have next to no pay to take home. When restaurants do something this slimy, they try to hide it. Who could forget the Kitchen Nightmares episode where Gordon Ramsey exposes the restaurant owner who steals his servers' tips? The ow…

Anyone who has worked as a waiter knows that people who don't tip are the worst. In the United States, many waiters only get paid $2 hourly and, therefore, only survive on tips. Some restaurants don't even pay their servers an hourly wage. This is basically common knowledge at this point, so for most people, not tipping is simply out of the question. But there are always those people who get angry for the insistence that they tip. I find that these come from two camps. The first camp is Boomers…

One of life's greatest pleasures is being able to complain about a job you hate . If I wasn't able to tell my close friends and family about the annoying customers and often more annoying coworkers at my customer service jobs, then I don't know how I would be able to survive. Even when things weren't so bad at work, it's fun to share work stories. When I worked at a dog bakery, a customer told me she owned a dog funeral parlor. I was so taken aback that all I could say was, “I'm sorry" To that,…

Whoops

There are many

Highway robbery.

If you're an Anthony Bourdain fan, or have worked service, you may have seen this quote pop up during your internet travels: ‘You can always tell when a person has worked in a restaurant. There’s an empathy that can only be cultivated by those who’ve stood between a hungry mouth and a $28 pork chop, a special understanding of the way a bunch of motley misfits can be a family. Service industry work develops the “soft skills” recruiters talk about on LinkedIn — discipline, promptness, the ability…

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