Getting better Restaurant Service Starts with you
Going out on the town to enjoy a meal with friends or family is something that most of us have had the pleasure of enjoying in our time off, and not many of us stop to think about the way that we treat those who serve us in these situations. Some of us are genuinely nice to the wait staff, and some are downright mean and treat these people as subservient and less than human. The service industry is rive with people who regularly are treated poorly by patrons, and a very often overlooked fact is that the staff are defenseless against customers who think that shouting is the right way to get things their way.
While in retail and online businesses there is very little that the staff behind the counter can do to a belligerent customer is minimal, being rude to your server could be a revenge served directly as your dish. Unlike other service industries your server is directly handling your food, and they can potentially make your meal very unpleasant.
In the movie, Waiting, a customer is very rude to her server, Monty, played by Ryan Reynolds, and speaks down to him as she places her order, and then again when the order is brought out and the woman demands that it be taken back to the kitchen. The rest of the staff, both wait and kitchen, are more than happy to pay this customer back for her behavior, and they do numerous gross things to her order, including shaking dandruff and spitting into her meal which the waiter then brings back to her. As the staff watch from the kitchen the customer takes a big bite out of her meal and nods her satisfaction. Mishandling food in a less than sanitary way is definitely frowned upon, but customers who are surly and mistreat their servers may have to face the fact that their food may have been mistreated.
Some people, if the service or food is less than satisfactory will leave the server a very small tip or none at all. It is common, particularly in North America, for serving staff to make minimum wage with the majority of their earnings coming from tips that their tables leave for them. Most establishments servers are forced to pay a percentage of their total sales for the duration of their shift to supporting staff like kitchen, hostesses, and bus-boys, and if you are tipping a very low percentage of your total bill, or not at all, the person who waited on you may have to pay money out of their own pocket to cover the percentage that is deducted from their tips at the end of the night to cover your table.
Something to keep in mind if the food is slow to coming out or the wait to even get a table is too long for your satisfaction: when it’s busy and you have to wait, the person who will be serving you was doing the best they could as fast as they could to turn over the tables they had in their section to free up the table for waiting guests, and they are not the ones in the back cooking your meal. The wait staff will have no say in how fast or slow your order is to come out of the kitchen, and pestering them to just check is not going to make your food magically appear any quicker.
If the food or the service is truly that bad that you feel your server does not deserve a tip from your table, speak up and ask for a manager. Speaking to the manager will also help because if the service you are getting from the waiter is fantastic but there is a problem with the kitchen, or if the service is deplorable, the manager can then work towards fixing where the problem is within the establishment, whether that be front of house or kitchen. Giving a small tip as a way to punish bad service can be very bad for future visits to the same establishment, as well.
Word spreads fast in restaurants about bad customers just as quickly as customers can spread the word to friends and family about a bad experience they had at an establishment. A server you stiffed one night may not be put on your table the next time you go to the same restaurant, but they may be on shift and may warn the server who is serving your table that you tip poorly; servers, because most of their wages come from tips, are working on incentive to get that extra little bit of cash, may be more inclined to give you less than satisfactory service in lieu of providing it to another customer who may seem more friendly and who they may reap a larger reward from.
Of course, the way that you treat your server is going to go a long way in how they, in return, treat you. Being rude to your waiter will make them despise coming to your table to check on how your meal is going, whether you need a top up on your drinks, and more than likely this will turn into a vicious cycle of you getting more and more upset as the service declines and treating your server worse as your meal wears on, and the service declining as a result.
Having a good time at a restaurant whether you are heading out for dinner with friends or family can easily depend on your attitude towards your server. There are many ways that your visit can be made unpleasant by your serving staff, from them simply giving bad service or taking revenge on your meal. No matter the repercussions that a rude customer may receive at the hands of their server, the person who is serving your meal is just that: a person, who deserves to be treated with respect and dignity as you would extend to any other person. They work long hours, just like many other people, to try to pay their bills and make a little money, and often have to deal with less than ideal guests and make less than ideal wages.
