Dunk
23rd March 2011, 19:53
I work at Swenson's Drive in Restaurants while I go to school.
The two biggest perks of working at Swenson's are that they schedule your shifts around your school schedule, and the tips for a waiter working a decent schedule are typically very good.
But we deserve those good tips. We must "sprint and smile" to every customer, a practice which I've been told by many customers is degrading. While I tend to agree, the necessity of sprinting around the lot is obvious - if we don't sprint, customers don't get their food in times competitive enough with other chains, and we may lose customers. Our job is physically intense, high impact on the joints, and at times, heavy lifting when it's necessary - for instance, when we have to pick up friers or move boxes of frozen food. Servers at Swenson's get paid the state minimum wage for servers. You never get a raise. Servers do not get free food, even after a year of working at Swenson's. If company property such as trays for customers is stolen by customers, we are held liable and must pay for them - as if it was our responsibility to stop theft. Servers must attend what are called "curb meetings", where all curb servers come on Saturday or Sunday mornings to what is supposed to be a voluntary meeting. Unpaid, of course. Because these two hour training sessions were unpaid, and were supposed to be voluntary, I purposefully skipped out on two of them. The second time I skipped out, a call was placed to the restaurant from the corporate office, telling the unit manager that I was not going to be working as a server that day, but as an inside worker on the fountain. So I made 1/3 what I usually make in that day. I learned the hard way that these meetings were not voluntary, and that if I continued to skip out, they would either continue to force me to work inside or perhaps look for an excuse to fire me. We don't get sick time, and if we can't get our shifts covered by someone else, we either work sick or get fired when we don't show.
The "inside workers" or people who work on the grill, at the fountain, or the friers start at just above minimum wage and never get a raise. After working at Swenson's for a year, inside workers get one free meal a day. There are no benefits. Of the ~90 employed servers, I would say ~85 are white males. The rest are white females. Our lone black server quit not too long ago. You see, Swenson's policy is to only hire full-time college students, and they hardly ever hire a new server who isn't referenced by a current server. Conversely, I'd say 70-80% of the inside workers are black. They never interact with customers; they are never seen by customers. Out of the dozen or so unit managers, one is black. The four corporate managers are white.
No one at Swenson's work full-time except for managers, and even then - I've talked with a low-level manager that told me she didn't receive a biannual bonus that her male counterpart received, and that they won't give her any days off, and often don't pay her time and a half when she gets overtime.
Cameras around Swenson's are used less to protect company property and more to spy on waiters. I've watched the corporate hiring manager access a live feed on his Droid and say to me "Let's see how many mistakes I can count in the next minute."
Anyone who has worked in the service industry who pooled their tips can understand more easily what I'm about to explain next, but I'll try to make it easily understandable for those who haven't.
Servers write a customer's order on a guest check. The guest check is brought to the cooks and the cashier, the cashier being the manager. The cooks prepare the food, the cashier totals up the cost of the order and prints the cost on the guest check. The Future POS system automatically logs what is ordered, how much, etc, and it's main function is to keep track of revenue. At the end of the day, servers open the safe and are handed a deposit slip by the manager - this deposit slip has on it the total amount of revenue that will be in the deposit - this amount accounts for total sales minus credit card transactions, because there is obviously no cash to deposit for those transactions. Whatever cash is left in the safe after the deposit is made is the pool of tips that servers equally split.
A specific corporate manager at my company will oftentimes come to work at a restaurant, probably a few times a week. He'll assemble the prepared food and work as the cashier. I've witnessed, and many, many other servers have also witnessed this corporate manager grabbing a napkin instead of a guest check, and ringing up some of our most expensive items - such as a bucket of chicken, and throwing the napkin into the trash. I've also seen him pull the guest check out of the small printer and write down the correct total for the order, but when I ask for a receipt for the customer, he has rung up additional items the customer did not order. This way, the customer pays the correct amount for the order, but the revenue for my company is artificially inflated since no buckets of chicken or the like were made or sold. So where does the money to pay for these phantom items come from? Our tips. He artificially increases the revenue, which therefore reduces our pool of tips. He steals money from a bunch of college kids. This guy is in his mid-50s, has a family, has a high-salary, good-benefits job, and he steals money from young adult workers who desperately need the money.
There are many more stories to share. There's a woman who recently quit - or was fired - who has been picketing outside of Swenson's claiming she had been sexually harassed by two managers. I don't know if that's actually true, but I know she's been picketing.
Anyway, these are my examples. Share yours.
The two biggest perks of working at Swenson's are that they schedule your shifts around your school schedule, and the tips for a waiter working a decent schedule are typically very good.
But we deserve those good tips. We must "sprint and smile" to every customer, a practice which I've been told by many customers is degrading. While I tend to agree, the necessity of sprinting around the lot is obvious - if we don't sprint, customers don't get their food in times competitive enough with other chains, and we may lose customers. Our job is physically intense, high impact on the joints, and at times, heavy lifting when it's necessary - for instance, when we have to pick up friers or move boxes of frozen food. Servers at Swenson's get paid the state minimum wage for servers. You never get a raise. Servers do not get free food, even after a year of working at Swenson's. If company property such as trays for customers is stolen by customers, we are held liable and must pay for them - as if it was our responsibility to stop theft. Servers must attend what are called "curb meetings", where all curb servers come on Saturday or Sunday mornings to what is supposed to be a voluntary meeting. Unpaid, of course. Because these two hour training sessions were unpaid, and were supposed to be voluntary, I purposefully skipped out on two of them. The second time I skipped out, a call was placed to the restaurant from the corporate office, telling the unit manager that I was not going to be working as a server that day, but as an inside worker on the fountain. So I made 1/3 what I usually make in that day. I learned the hard way that these meetings were not voluntary, and that if I continued to skip out, they would either continue to force me to work inside or perhaps look for an excuse to fire me. We don't get sick time, and if we can't get our shifts covered by someone else, we either work sick or get fired when we don't show.
The "inside workers" or people who work on the grill, at the fountain, or the friers start at just above minimum wage and never get a raise. After working at Swenson's for a year, inside workers get one free meal a day. There are no benefits. Of the ~90 employed servers, I would say ~85 are white males. The rest are white females. Our lone black server quit not too long ago. You see, Swenson's policy is to only hire full-time college students, and they hardly ever hire a new server who isn't referenced by a current server. Conversely, I'd say 70-80% of the inside workers are black. They never interact with customers; they are never seen by customers. Out of the dozen or so unit managers, one is black. The four corporate managers are white.
No one at Swenson's work full-time except for managers, and even then - I've talked with a low-level manager that told me she didn't receive a biannual bonus that her male counterpart received, and that they won't give her any days off, and often don't pay her time and a half when she gets overtime.
Cameras around Swenson's are used less to protect company property and more to spy on waiters. I've watched the corporate hiring manager access a live feed on his Droid and say to me "Let's see how many mistakes I can count in the next minute."
Anyone who has worked in the service industry who pooled their tips can understand more easily what I'm about to explain next, but I'll try to make it easily understandable for those who haven't.
Servers write a customer's order on a guest check. The guest check is brought to the cooks and the cashier, the cashier being the manager. The cooks prepare the food, the cashier totals up the cost of the order and prints the cost on the guest check. The Future POS system automatically logs what is ordered, how much, etc, and it's main function is to keep track of revenue. At the end of the day, servers open the safe and are handed a deposit slip by the manager - this deposit slip has on it the total amount of revenue that will be in the deposit - this amount accounts for total sales minus credit card transactions, because there is obviously no cash to deposit for those transactions. Whatever cash is left in the safe after the deposit is made is the pool of tips that servers equally split.
A specific corporate manager at my company will oftentimes come to work at a restaurant, probably a few times a week. He'll assemble the prepared food and work as the cashier. I've witnessed, and many, many other servers have also witnessed this corporate manager grabbing a napkin instead of a guest check, and ringing up some of our most expensive items - such as a bucket of chicken, and throwing the napkin into the trash. I've also seen him pull the guest check out of the small printer and write down the correct total for the order, but when I ask for a receipt for the customer, he has rung up additional items the customer did not order. This way, the customer pays the correct amount for the order, but the revenue for my company is artificially inflated since no buckets of chicken or the like were made or sold. So where does the money to pay for these phantom items come from? Our tips. He artificially increases the revenue, which therefore reduces our pool of tips. He steals money from a bunch of college kids. This guy is in his mid-50s, has a family, has a high-salary, good-benefits job, and he steals money from young adult workers who desperately need the money.
There are many more stories to share. There's a woman who recently quit - or was fired - who has been picketing outside of Swenson's claiming she had been sexually harassed by two managers. I don't know if that's actually true, but I know she's been picketing.
Anyway, these are my examples. Share yours.