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5 Things You Didn’t Know About Working In A Restaurant

We have all dined in a restaurant in some point in time. Whether it be McDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s. Hell, some of us might have had the balls to go to Hell’s Kitchen! But here’s a few facts that I’ve been through that might make you reconsider restaurants…
Five things you might not know about restaurants… 1. Managing a Restaurant takes up all of your time

When you decide to manage a restaurant, it’s worse than having a newborn child. You see, just like a child, it eats, breathes, shits, and cause havoc in your life. And just like a newborn child, it requires your constant attention. And like said new life in this world, you are ultimately responsible. It’s your day off? Fuck you! Somebody failed to show up for an important shift. You have a catering order to go out? You have to be there for it. You watch and plan everyday for as long as you’re in charge. Corporate makes you hire a new manager? Now you’re fucked. Not only are you responsible for making sure that they learn all the systems and procedures, you HAVE to let them fail so they can learn, only to clean up their mess. And as a training manager, you have the added cost of their labor on your books. Thank you powers that be! Let me hold some idiots’ hand and walk them through how to be a retard on my dime. Don’t get me wrong, we all need to learn and grow, but corporate doesn’t have to babysit. Speaking of babysitting…
2. The staff can be your worst nightmare.

Imagine that you are in charge of a high school classroom. Now I want you to imagine that classroom trusted to bring paying guests their food and getting along with each other. Through PMS episodes. Through break-ups. Through holidays. Through cooks getting mad at servers for wearing the wrong kind of perfume/cologne during their shift. Through servers getting mad at cooks because they didn’t notice they had a new hair-do. Trifling, petty-ass bullshit. Welcome to the wonderful world of servers and cooks. You see, it’s kind of a “love/hate” relationship there, they need each other to function. But the servers don’t see how the cooks can’t accompany a “simple” request (steak charred on the outside, but not burned), and the cooks can’t fathom how the servers don’t understand basic direction (Cook: The BBQ chicken had stopped being sold at 11 PM! Server: I put the appetizer in at 10:59…). And those are just the day-to-day occurrences. All these things lead to mistakes, mistakes that lead to food being “Repurposed”…
3. What you’re eating isn’t exactly what you asked for…

Quick, where do chicken nuggets come from? Confusing, right? We have chicken fingers, chicken nuggets, and chicken tenders. The underlying theme there? No simpleton, not chicken, it’s fast food! And how do fast food companys make money from you? Easy, programming you to buy greasy nuggets of death. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/16/fast-food-marketing_n_5366297.html
We are preprogrammed to buy anything sweet, salty, or fatty. It comes back to when we were in the “hunter/gather” mode. So there you are, sitting in your car. Sweating because it’s hot. Why is it hot? I think because you’re fat, and you just put Tabasco all over everything. Besides, you didn’t get the air-conditioner fixed when you should’ve. So there you are, eating to fill your gut. Bet you didn’t know it. These social scientists have spent most of their adult, and celibate, lives studying you. What you eat, when you eat, how hard you bite down on what you eat. All just to squeeze every last dollar from you. And they get paid for it. Hooray! And this also extends to how restaurants, as well as supermarkets, are laid out. All of the signage that you see (the stuff on the walls) is designed to promote the brand.
4. The “Five Second Rule”. Hey you, yeah you. See that juicy steak on your plate? Mmm, looks good, right? And how’s it taste? Great, right? Guess what? You ass just got Rick Rolled with the “Five second rule”. You don’t care because you don’t know what that is? Want me to tell you? Okay, I will. The “Five second rule” is an unwritten rule in EVERY restaurant. Period. If a chef drops an expensive item (steak, hamburger patty, pork chop, piece of chicken, ect..) on the floor, and he can pick it up in five seconds, it’s still sellable. I’ve worked in restaurants for over 20 years. Everything from washing dishes to managing restaurants. And in every single case, it’s always the same: the “five second rule” applies. One reason is that if a chef drops an expensive food item, you rinse it off and sell it because of the food cost. Another is that, and I’ll be blunt here, the customer will simply never know. If management sees it happen, they will either act like it never happened, expecting you to rinse it off and re-season it, or if it’s during a high volume period they will simply tell you to rinse it off and re-season it. It comes down to if you have to re-fire the food item, what the cost of the item is, and if it will hold the entire tables’ order up. Because profits!
5. Working for a “Family Owned” vs. working for a “Corporate”. This one is a no brainer. You’re fucked. When you work for a family owned place, you are at the whim and mercy for whatever is happening to them in their lives at that time. Wife is on the rag and she’s the only one running the place? You’re fucked. The owner is hung over and losing profits? You’re fucked. You see, when you work for a family owned placed, they think and feel like you’re a freeman working on their plantation. You don’t like it? Fuck you, there’s the door and don’t let it hit you on the way out. And they get away with it simply because they own they place, and if they say something, that’s the way it is. There are plenty of more poor fuckers out there just DYING for a job. And they’ll replace you in a heartbeat. “Well that can’t happen working for a corporation” you say. “I am bestowed inalienable rights working for a corporation! I’ll sue and get big money!” Yeah, right. Corporations are just as evil, if not more so. When you sign your paperwork and come on board a corporate run place, you are signing most of your rights away. Did your boss grab your ass? You can’t sue because you chose to sign those rights away to an arbitrator. Chop a finger off on a meat slicer? Better not go to a hospital if you smoke weed. They drug test you while giving you the stitches. Don’t like your boss? He can let you go in Nevada for no reason. It’s called “Right to work”. When I worked for Golden Corral as an Assistant Back of the House Manager (ABHM), we were required to put together a report for the regional review and take notes on upcoming roll outs (new products). What they failed to tell us was that they put a powder on all the doorknobs. This was an exercise in cross contamination. So at the end of the meeting, they shut off all the lights, and brought out a black light. And we could see where everyone had picked their asses and dicks when no one was looking. And we had each shook each other’s hands. After we had lunch. Crafty fucking devils. All of those were grounds for termination. So just remember that if you think that you’re smart, you’ve trusted someone who was planning to fuck you over to get ahead.

I cite myself as the primary source in addition to Huffington Post.

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