When you’re in the business of serving up drinks to packs of cocky water buffalo, you have to put up with some serious bull. One cocktail waitress carried around a pen and paper and wrote down some of the most annoying and degrading things she and her brethren experience in the course of their duties.
One of the worst types is “Tricky McPlastic” who says he’ll be paying cash, but then after he gets his drink checks his wallet and decides to go with a credit card instead:
You may not know this, but I already paid the bar — in cash — for your drink. See, I’m allotted money at the beginning of the night with which I buy drinks from the bar, getting reimbursed by you. But I can’t tell you that because then I look like the difficult one. You just wasted five minutes of my life, asshole.
So be nice to them – these people control what’s going into your drink.
Why Your Cocktail Waitress Hates You [Phoenix New Times]
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Boy after reading that I really can’t stand the girl. Sounds like a total bitch who thinks she’s “better” than the job she has and by the sound of it, the vast majority of her patrons.
5 bucks she’s a lesbian.
10 bucks she’s a member of a militant Feminist group.
Yeah, those women who don’t want to be groped by random strangers are really no fun.
In what world do you live in where it’s not common knowledge that women in service positions are going to be harassed.
You’re a woman. Hustling alcoholic beverages. To drunk men who come to a bar looking to score a cheap floozy.
Are you seriously expecting to be treated like a perfect pretty little princess? Get over yourself and take off the rose colored glasses! Is it right what those drunk horny retards do? No, of course not. But if you’re not willing or at the very least EXPECTING to be groped, hit on, or eye’d up and down. Then you shouldn’t be a waitress in a bar.
No matter how much you think you deserve it, a cocktail waitress in a cheap bar will NEVER get the same respect as a Maitre’D in a five star restaurant.
If you take shitty jobs. EXPECT shitty customers.
Damn straight! How dare she complain about sexual harassment or assault just because she needs a job to pay for food and housing!
Well, you’re certainly a good example of the shitty customers she can expect to deal with.
Twenty bucks says you’re one of those dumbasses who thinks the definition of “lesbian” and “militant feminist” is “woman who dares object when I grab her ass.”
Re: Grabby Paws. Not just cocktail waitresses have to put up with this. When I was in college, I worked at a steak house (it was Golden Corral, actually) and we had to wear these stupid little western shirts and very short brown polyester skirts, with a kerchief in our hair. Once I was taking some plates across the dining room for someone and some fatass lech grabbed me and pulled me onto his lap. The people’s steaks nearly ended up on the floor!
I didn’t hit him, but I wanted to. When I think about it now I kind of wish I had!
This is kinda dumb.
It sounds like her complaints fall under two catagories:
a) She deals with people: People are a-holes to those whose job it is to “serve” them.
b) She deals with drunk people: Drunk people are a-holes to everyone.
Welcome to the world.
Too many rules. I’d rather quit drinking.
A lot of them are rants anyways. Sometimes you just have to walk a few times more than you’d like. Tough luck.
About dining and dashing. Aren’t there employment laws about garnishing wages in the US?! It’s just so blatantly unfair that the restaurant workers who often earn a paltry amount of money would get stuck paying for idiots who dodge their bills.
One of the biggest problems with serving is that people don’t fully understand how tipping actually works. My girlfriend is a server at an upscale restaurant (2nd busiest in town) for 3 years and made sure I know how the system really works.
At most restaurants in nearly every state in the US, servers are only paid a little over $2 per hour (Federal minimum for severs). Since their wage is so low, it generally over covers the taxes they pay on their tips, meaning that their tip income really is just about all they take home. Yes, the tip you and their other guests leave is pretty much your server’s only income. Most servers are only given a section of just a few tables, and guests are seated in rotations between each section. Depending on how busy the restaurant is, a server may only get a few tables a night. Keep in mind that most establishments that keep a healthy roster of servers will only let them work 4 or 5 hours a night, unless they’re pulling a double, further reducing the number of tables they get to serve.
Here’s the kicker: servers have to share their tips with the hostess, bartender, server assistants, buss boys, etc. At most places, this tipshare is determined as a percentage of the total check rather than how much the guest actually tipped. Therefore, if you leave a small enough tip (or no tip at all), the server can actually LOSE money for serving you. Also, if you leave without paying the full bill (or walk out on the bill), do you think the restaurant eats the cost? Wrong, the server has to pay for it. On a slow night, a single table walking out without paying can wipe out a server’s entire income for the night.
Finally, percentages for tips can be a hot button issue, but here’s something to think about. I’ve heard stories of families coming in and taking advantage of generous specials and drinking only water so that several people could eat for very little money, then leave around a 15% or 20% tip. Sounds pretty good. Problem is, they were eating so cheaply that 15% or 20% of the bill, after tipshare, ended up giving the server only a couple dollars as their pay for that hour-plus they were working hard to provide excellent service to their guests.
Most of these people work very hard to ensure you have an enjoyable dining experience. How much do you think their time and energy is worth? Just because you don’t like the tipping system is no excuse to screw your server.
It’s a little more complicated than this. Yes, tipped employees can be paid a base cash wage as low as $2.13/hr. That said, the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, period. If a tipped employee doesn’t earn enough in tips for the base wage + tips to meet or exceed $7.25/hr, the employer is actually supposed to make up the difference. Basically, everyone is supposed to gross at least $7.25/hr no matter what. Being a tipped employee doesn’t change that, nor does pooling tips. If your girlfriend ever gets a paycheck that’s less than $7.25/hr x hrs worked, her employer is violating federal labor law.
Making employees pay for losses to their employer is illegal in many states. This could be making a server pay for a dine&dash, or a cashier at a gas station pay for a drive-off. If your girlfriend’s employer is docking pay for this sort of thing I would highly recommend she call your state’s Department of Labor to see if it’s legal.
And again, $7.25/hr minimum wage still applies. Even if your GF works in state that allows for docking pay, and the employer follows the state rules for doing so, she is still entitled to minimum wage no matter what. Even if the employer can legally dock a server’s pay for a walkoff, it should never “wipe out a server’s entire income for the night.” Sure, if you earned great tips all night and left work for the day netting minimum wage because of a walkoff that would stink…but if someone is leaving a shift and being paid nothing it’s not ‘how the system works’ it’s a violation of the Fair Labor Relations Act.
It may be asking a lot to expect patrons of dining/drinking establishments to concern themselves with the financial structure of the service industry. Same goes for the demand side, i.e., when I go out, I don’t feel the need to explain to the staff what I had to do to get the money I’ll be spending or who I had to split it with first (taxes, child support, landlord, etc.). Frankly no one would care.
Your girlfriend is likely to find out (if she hasn’t already) that certain servers consistently do better on tips every shift than others, a fact totally unrelated to the prevailing industry wage or the tip-out. Their success, relative to other servers, has nothing to do with the internal rules and regs of the house. More probably, a good server’s gross (and net) will exceed a so-so server’s because he/she provides ‘better’ service according to the customer’s subjective expectations. Which brings us back to the original post. Servers who make good tips consistently treat customers well. This fact may have escaped the waitress who wrote the rant that got this post started.
You are there to serve me, not vice versa. Do not call me an asshat. I might pay with cash or a check or plastic. It is your job to serve me. If you do not like it perhaps you should go to college. I HATE snooty waitresses.
Do you treat all waitstaff as subhuman or just the ones who complain? If you act like an asshat, then you should be called one. Also, there are plenty of restaurant employees who went to college or are in college. Have you even looked at the economy lately?
“Then she should either move to France or switch careers.”
Yes, because cocktail waitresses
a.) make enough money to travel
and
b.) are working as a ‘career choice’
This is one bitter bitch. As a bartender, if I saw her treating customers the way she describes, in my bar, she would be fired. Undoubtedly, I would have already come to recognize her surly attitude, I would do her a favor and provide her with the opportunity to find a new line of work. Suck it up or get out you has been biatch
Why your customer hates you:
- when I try and get your attention because I’ve been waiting for ages and you turn away running when you see me,
- when I ask you for espresso with cold milk and you bring me some hot milk that had become cold,
- when I ask you what’s in the “sauce of the house” and you answer “different things”. Oh my gosh, really? I hadn’t thought.
- when the place is nearly empty and I ask for something, you go away and do whatever you want, but my order. (It happened once when I asked for a kiwi shake. I ended up asking if she had to go to New Zealand to buy the fruits).
- when I politely ask something specifically and you don’t listen and bring me whatever you had in mind at the moment, twice, and wonder why I don’t tip you.
- when you pet the horrible dog at the table close to me and left me wonder if you will wash your hands before bringing my order.
- when you look bored, annoyed and unfriendly and expect a big tip.
Kiwi fruits aren’t from NZ. Kiwi birds are. Also, the people. But not the fruit.
Im not a regular bar guy but you know when you meet up with someone just for that ONE beer? Sometimes that one beer was not enough and soon after begins to escalate into two more beers then three more and soon after you get a pitcher and it adds up when you decided to pay for your friends too all because of that first beer and only a 20 dollar bill you had when you first walked in with. Don’t forget the shots.
I’m sorry if I’m rude or you think i am, but if you have to ask if I’m paying cash and you don’t tell me why i need to pay you in cash by the end of the night then buzz off. Be glad i don’t try to be a complete ass and pay you in pennies or run out on the check. i get what the company is doing, making sure the girls get the money by the end of the night but hey, don’t forget you took the responsibility for it, not me.
This is why I don’t tip cocktail waitresses.
Because you’re one of the losers she’s talking about?
i’m at the point I want a minimum of interaction with my waitress or a strictly professional relationship. I order drink / you bring drink
I am not interested in building rapport. I am not interested in flirting with you. Both the bill and the tip will be paid on my card, because it works better for me. Sometimes you might be handed three different cards, because that works best for me and my two friends.
If I forget to ask for something and you have to make two trips. I’m not out to fuck you over, or ruin your day, or torment you, I just simply forgot.
And the end of the night you get 20%, unless you really helped out then you get more.
Then you can forget me just as easily as I have already forgotten you.
I have worked in bars my whole life and have NEVER heard of such an inane way of operating. It’s not the customer wasting your time, it’s the bar’s bizarre method of keeping track of tabs. If nothing else, it results in twice as many transactions for each customer.
This whole article is so very preposterous that I initially felt a need to go through each point and show how bad of a job she was going as a quality human being in (nearly) every situation listed there. But it’s all too much.
Frankly, she sounds bitter, and sounds like she’s mad that she’s a waitress still after all this time when she clearly thinks she’s better than the people she’s serving (an incorrect assumption, based on her skewed life perspective), and it all spilled over one day. As the general feeling seems to go… boo fuckin’ hoo.
Where’s the tall waitress? She doesn’t bitch as much.
I have no obligation to the waitress to pay in cash or any other payment method that she wants me to in. I will pay my bill with what i want.
I have no obiligation to wait for the waitress to come by and ask who wants drinks when i can go to the bar and just get one.
I dont care what my friend wants, I dont care if the waitress has to walk back and forth a dozen times. Its her job, its not my job to ask my buddy if he wants another drink, thats her job.
I wont flag a waitress if she didnt take too long to show up.
Table captin – screw you lady. If you dont want to take orders from a dozen people, then you should consider a new line of work. Its not my job to see what people want, thats your job.
I am not obligated to tip you a damn thing. A tip is something you earn. If you do not provide me with good service you wont get a tip period. If you provide me with good service i will tip you. If you have issues with that get a job that pays a salary or a wage.
“Ms. Mute” = customer who tells someone else at her table what she wants in order to relay it to you, the waitress. VS “Reluctant Table Captain” = person you appoint (by looking them “dead in the eye”) to speak for the table. If anyone wants anything, the order should come from this person.
Not sure how to avoid this situation….seems like one would create the other, and knowing which one is going to irritate the waitress requires a nice bit of mind-reading.
Also, “Mr. Moneybags,” Who doesn’t realize that you should tip more for an expensive drink, but should NOT tip less for water or cheap drinks. Again, not sure where the cut off is; as she says, $1 is the “industry standard” but she won’t expect that if you’re ordering $1.50 beers. How much should $0.00 water cost, and why, since water weighs the same as $1.50 beer and therefore should be tipped for, should a $15 drink come with a greater tip than the $1.50 beer that also weighs the same?
You don’t want to put up with the hassles of being a bar waitress (which apparently includes being called “waitress”), then find a new job. Until then, continue to put up with the drunk (SURPRISE, SOME OF THEM ARE DRUNK!) patrons who are in your “popular music venue/bar.”
Where does this lady work, Auschwitz? geesh I would hate to have her job.
All of these “why your [service person] hates you” is just a way for underpaid service workers to vent. Really are customers expected to understand the arcane rules these places have? Is it my fault you are underpaid? I’ve had to work really hard to get to where I am…so why should I give my hard earned money as mandatory tips to you just because you failed to achieve (for whatever reason)? I tip when the service is beyond the norm. If I get normal service, I sometimes don’t tip. You don’t like it, get another job. Or spit in my food. But should you pick the latter and I find out, be prepared to face the full penalty ‘cos I would most certainly be pressing charges.
“You just wasted five minutes of my life, asshole.”
this is why i dont feel sympathetic for you, you still got your money and guess what the day and age it is.