I was just 14 years old the first time I clocked into work at a Subway restaurant in the posh enclave of Lafayette California. While the average person doesn’t exactly consider working in the restaurant industry as being a dream job, for the kid who ate from a trash can to survive it was probably a dream come true. For me, it would mark the very beginning of a journey that would span more than a decade of my young adult life, as well as help to define who I was, what I would become, and better realize the harsh realities of the world that surrounds us.
The Ups and Downs of The Restaurant Industry:
Like any other industry, profits, wages and overall sustainability in the restaurant industry are very much dictated by economic conditions. For instance, when the U.S economy peaked in the late 90’s, I quickly found myself often earning thousands of dollars a week as a server. Likewise, when the economy began to collapse in the early 2000’s, I found myself on the verge of homelessness, living out of my car and working for minimum wage.
One lesson I learned from the economic ups and downs was that in a really good economy restaurants, like any other industry, must compete for the best workers; and more often than not, many will pay whatever it takes to secure the talent they need to get the job done. When Americans were flush with cash in the 90’s, restaurants were faced with steep competition for workers, and given the fact the average worker was beyond lazy, the only way to secure the hardest working individuals was to offer a better set of benefits and a higher salary than the competitors did.
At my peak, I earned close to $50 an hour, and at my absolute lowest point I earned just $3.25 an hour. Pay in this industry often fluctuates drastically, leading to a lot of uncertainty. When I worked at Denny’s as a server, at one point I literally had 40-gallon garbage bags stuffed with tens of thousands of dollars in cash! Indeed, back in the 90's you could make an awesome living in the restaurant industry. Back then your level of education didn't matter, as employers were more concerned about how well you did your job. It was a time when experience and capability were often more valued by employers than a piece of paper that said you were educated.
Then of course there were the hard times! When I worked in fast-food restaurants my paychecks were often so little they seemed to simply vanish within hours of being cashed, and hardly covered a mere fraction of my bills; despite the fact I was often working upwards of 75+ hours a week at times. While the amount of work I did in the fast-food industry wasn't all that hard, these jobs really sucked because they ate up all your time, and they were incredibly boring.
The Harsh Realities:
One harsh lesson I learned from my lengthy stint in the restaurant industry was that life isn’t always fair. Contrary to popular belief, I quickly learned that good looks mattered more than education, and promotions were often given to those who were favored the most, rather than those who were the most qualified.
When I turned 18 back in the late 90’s, I worked for 2 Denny’s restaurants just a few miles apart, often switching back and forth depending on where they needed me. It was my very first job waiting tables, and not long after starting the first thing I realized was that the customers were more interested in having sex with me than they were the food on the menu.
I have to admit I loved the money and attention people threw at me. On a really good week I could take home close to $2,000 in tips for just 35 to 40 hours of work. Talk about a dream come true. I honestly thought I was going to get rich from this job! But as the old saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Though, I often felt uncomfortable having 35 year old married woman hit on me in front of their husbands when I was just some 18 year old kid serving food. Sometimes the husbands would get mad at their wives, other times they'd get mad at me. Like its my fault? Other times their husbands would hit on me too, very strange indeed. Regardless, the wives dumped their purses out on the table when they left, and I always took the money :)
There was a knockout blond I worked with too, she was raking in the dough as well. When people hit on her, she always just played along, and milked an extra $20 to $40 for a table. Can't go wrong. In some cases I think she took things a little too far. But I have to admit its kind of hard to say no when some millionaire is handing you the keys to their jag, their home, and their credit cards to boot.
My work in the restaurant industry later lead me into another industry that was far more lucrative. But that's kind of a sore subject, and I guess its something I'll talk about when I'm ready to.
My co-workers often resented the fact they didn’t earn but a portion of what I did for doing the same amount of work. While no one wants to hear this, the fact is, if you’re not good looking, you’re going to earn a lot less than your co-workers in a work environment where you rely on tips.
The Vanishing Job:
An even harsher lesson I learned from the restaurant industry was that there are no guarantees in life, and your job can disappear in a second flat. All it takes is for a manager to decide they don’t like you and your job is gone. I’ve had this happen to me several times, and it’s something you just come to expect working in this trade.
In other cases, you could also lose your job simply for the fact the restaurant you worked for failed and shut its doors. Such is the case with a Wendy’s restaurant I worked for. One day I showed up to work only to realize the restaurant was closed, and my job was gone.
It was too bad too, because the Wendy’s I worked for was independently owned and operated, and the owners paid me really well. I was often paid double-time to work on my days off, and raises were once every few months.
As it turns out, the company who owned the Wendy’s location I worked for also owned virtually all the Wendy’s locations in all of Missouri. When our restaurant closed, the rest fell like dominoes with it.
To be honest, I knew what was coming before I lost my job, as an assistant GM told me point blank, the company that owned all those Wendy’s was $35,000,000 in the negative and bleeding cash badly.
After everything was said and done, I pretty much assumed the over $2,000 in back pay they owed me was gone and I would never see a dime of it. But to my surprise, they actually did pay me back in lump sum payments over the following few months. Even when their business fell apart, they made every effort to stand by their employees, one had to really honor that.
Corporate Restaurants Suck:
When comparing the experiences I had between working in both corporate and privately owned restaurants, the corporate ones sucked the absolute worst! Remember that amazing Denny’s job I touted earlier? What if I told you it was an absolute nightmare! Besides the fat tips I brought home every night, I also got the luxury of dealing with cooks who smoked crack cocaine while preparing the customers food, an assistant GM who spent more time snorting coke off his desk than he did managing the restaurant, and co-workers who were so stoned they’d screw up every order they made and I got to listen to angry customers scream at them all night.
Not to mention the coke-sniffing assistant GM was a full-blown racist! He didn’t like white people, and he made that clear from the get-go. Sometimes he was actually very reasonable when he sober, other times not rational at all. But drugs can do weird things to people.
And, just forget about reporting the issues to Denny’s, you got no response regardless of the issue; they simply didn’t care.
The only reason I tolerated it was because the money was too good to let go of. There were other issues as well, including a co-worker that once tried to stab me without any explanation as to why, and managers who stole hundreds of dollars of my credit card tips. (The girl that tried to stab later apologized though, I was willing to accept it).
When I questioned management about the hundreds of dollars in missing credit card tips, I was fired. I knew they were the ones who stole it too, they were the only ones who had access to it.
Ironically, the GM was later fired for stealing money right out of the cash register, I wasn’t surprised.
The corporate restaurant that screwed me over the most wasn’t Denny’s though, but rather Steak ‘n Shake! When I first started working for this restaurant chain, I had already had a full-time job working in an Italian restaurant (one of several I had worked for), but the pay there wasn’t cutting the bills.
Steak ‘n Shake offered such good pay and the tips were so good, I didn’t think twice but to quit my other job at an Italian restaurant altogether. This restaurant chain was high volume, and for this reason you could really earn a lot from tips alone. It also paid the highest wage I ever received as a server, over $10.00 an hour plus my tips!
Just 2 months into my job at Steak ‘n Shake, and I was earning an average of $35 an hour, and on the weekends my hourly earnings could peak at the $50 mark. But I also worked all positions in this job; often cooking, waiting tables, while answering the phone and filling to go orders, it was wild!
I had originally started the job agreeing to work 25 hours a week to keep a second job I had, and the manager agreed not to schedule me for more than that. Yet, within my 2nd week they had me working 60+ hours a week, and I was pretty pissed off. The GM apologized for not sticking to our original agreement and offered to pay more to make up for it.
So, while the average server got paid just $2.13 an hour in wages at the time, I immediately got $7.50, then it jumped to $10.25 a few months later.
But the job I thought was so great went to crap when the GM announced she was leaving to start a new career, and a new GM would be taking her place. In the meanwhile, we had a temporary manager take over the restaurant for a period of 2 weeks. The temp manager was extremely short-wired, he had a monster of a temper, and he proceeded to fire dozens of employees from day one.
During that 2 weeks time, he fired more than 2/3 of our restaurant’s total staff. Knowing this guy was a loose cannon, I decided I would just agree with whatever he said, and try to avoid any confrontations with him. Too bad it made no difference, he fired me as well. In fact, he fired so many employees, the only 2 employees left were me and him the day he fired me.
That very day, I realized something was seriously wrong with this guy. His eyes were bloodshot red, he was acting very strange, and it was obvious he had a serious drug problem. Concerned for the safety of myself and customers, I attempted to contact another Steak ‘n Shake restaurant, but they blew off my concerns. The customers too were growing weary of the guy, as there was no explanation as to why the only 2 tables in the whole restaurant had waited over an hour and were still yet to receive their food. They got up and left, he then fired me a minute later. What a whack job.
The thing was, I already knew I was going to be fired, as the new official GM had ordered staff to fire me during a manager meeting a few days prior. I thought this was kind of ignorant given I had never met the lady even once, she had no idea who I was, yet she wanted me fired? Apparently, it came down to my wages. I was tipped off by a shift manager as to what was going on. Despite her insistence of what was coming, I just hoped for the best and hoped she was wrong.
Later on I ran into a Steak ‘n Shake executive by accident here in St Louis. I was beyond irate and honestly took it out on him. Not that it was his fault personally, but he was definitely responsible for the policies that allowed his management to treat their employees so horribly.
After I got fired, Steak ‘n Shake blacklisted me from working for their company. Though the executive insisted he would remove the restrictions, and I'm honestly not sure if he ever did. Still though, given what happened, and the fact the deranged manager’s actions resulted in serious financial harm to myself and others, I’m hardly willing to forgive and forget. They did me wrong, and a simple apology doesn’t make up for the thousands of dollars in bills I was unable to pay as a result of their negligence.
After all, I made huge exceptions to help them early on, working over 60+ hours a week when I had no obligation to do so.
Crazy Customers and Co-workers:
From the customer who threw plates at me at Denny’s, to the lady who chucked a burrito at me in Taco Bell, I’ve honestly seen it all. When it comes to the restaurant industry, employees in this realm are often looked down upon by the more affluent of society as being trash who deserve to be stomped on.
And, don't even get me started on the drunks, they were a trip indeed. The late nights drunks were really friendly and generous, while the day time ones were typically extremely irate and would often start fights with the other guests. Sometimes we had to throw them out, shit happens.
After more than a decade of the leaving the restaurant industry, not because I wanted too, just because there was no work, I had found a job at another Italian restaurant (go figure). This was just back in Oct of 2017, and let me tell you, this was the most dysfunctional restaurant I ever worked for in my life. All the kitchen equipment was broken, and the bulk of employees were extremely negative to say the least.
While the restaurant’s owner and manager constantly praised my work, some of the employees were making it extremely difficult, if not impossible for me to do my job. I was being screamed at endlessly, sometimes for hours on end, and I could honestly only take so much before I snapped myself.
I finally snapped hard one day after a shift manager started screaming at me and threatening me, and I don’t take threats lightly. I got so mad the employees freaked out and ran and hid behind the refrigerators and elsewhere, it was pretty funny. I then quit my job.
Over the following months they tried to get me to come back to work, but I refused. Despite my financial hardships at the time, the amount of stress I endured dealing with that restaurant’s mentally deranged staff was simply more than I could bear.
Welcome Home!
While those corporate restaurants were a total nightmare, most of the jobs I held in family owned restaurants were amazing to say the least. Back in the early 2000’s when the economy started to collapse (no thanks to Bush’s trickle-down tax for the rich), I found myself unemployed and literally begging for work.
With no options left, I walked into an Italian restaurant and offered to work just for food and gas for my car, that’s how desperate I was. Despite my begging and pleading, it was the same story, the owner said business was bad, and they simply couldn’t afford to hire anyone.
For whatever reason, he changed his mind as I walked back out to my car, gave me a 40 hour a week job on the spot.
The money wasn’t always that great working for the Italian family, but I have to admit, they treated me like one of their own. I’d honestly be lying if I ever stated they didn't favor me over everyone else.
When my car broke down, they gave me one! I never paid for food, I had paid vacations, and over time I grew very close to their family; even having attended one of the owner’s weddings. I was definitely treated like a king!
I went through the thick and the thin with these people. We sometimes fought and argued, but at the end of the day we all respected and appreciated each other. The restaurant business can be a stressful one, and you have to know that sometimes things will go wrong, people will fight, but not to lose sight of what really matters, keeping the business rolling!
Meaningful Relationships:
Throughout my restaurant endeavors, I met a lot of great people, and I have to admit, considering I was so strong willed when I was younger, people often sought me out in times of trouble. I was always the shoulder to lean on when things went wrong with my co-workers. I think people really trusted me, and I think I honored the fact people trusted me enough to share their life’s most difficult of circumstances with me; however painful they were.
Those relationships instilled a great measure of empathy in me over time. While I didn’t always have a solution to every problem, there were a few times where I did what I had to do given the dire circumstances of others. I once gave a co-worker everything I had, roughly a few hundred dollars, so she hopefully wouldn’t end up homeless in the street.
But money doesn’t fix everything. In one situation I had a co-worker I could tell something was seriously wrong with. I knew she was homeless and living out of her car, but one day she came to work visibly shaken. She admitted to me she had been raped. In such a situation, handing someone money doesn’t make pain like that simply go away.
5-Star Restaurants Don’t Always Pay 5-Star Wages:
Contrary to popular belief, those upscale 5-star restaurants that charge $50 for a plate and $20 for a glass of wine aren’t as lucrative as many typically assume. In fact, if I were to compare the average priced restaurant to those 5-star ones, the upscale ones paid among the poorest of wages I ever received.
The highest earning potential in the restaurant business is often achieved working in a buffet setting, and not without cause. You see, buffets often have high customer turnover rates throughout a typical day, and servers often make substantially more in such a setting than they otherwise would in a typical sit-down restaurant.
Likewise, while the tabs racked up from those 5-star restaurants are often substantially higher than the average, I’ve learned from experience the customers of such restaurants will often only tip the minimum required, and often less than the industry average of 15% if they can get away with it.
You also typically tend to less tables in a 5-star setting, meaning you have less potential to earn because you’re dealing with less people.
All being said, despite all the negatives, I have to admit I had more good times than bad working in the restaurant industry. I also built relationships with some of my co-workers that appear to have lasted a lifetime. Likewise, I learned some valuable lessons along the way as to just how unfair life can be in some situations; as well as how rewarding it can be in others. Despite the many dead ends of the restaurant industry itself, it was the relationships I built with others during this time that compelled me to get educated and do more with my life, only a good thing.
As a final note: If there’s one message I really want to emphasize out of everything I stated here, its that people in the restaurant industry are often mistreated by the public and unfairly judged based on their line of work. People often assume because they’re college educated that those who work in the service based industries are lesser than they are.
Well, I’m college educated today myself, and I don’t see any justification in treating others as a lesser than myself.
What goes around comes around, and you should probably treat others with the same level of dignity and respect you would expect for yourself.
Written and published by Daniel Imbellino. Feel free to connect with me on Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielImbellino