Don’t Bite The Less-Than-Minimum-Wage Hand That Feeds You

I was a waitress at an international breakfast restaurant once upon a time.

For a long time, we had a kids eat free deal once a week. An accompanying adult had to order an entrée, and then they got one kid’s meal free based on that. Because of this, a woman came in often with her very large family, including five to six kids.

Her kids were always stated as being under the age limit – we didn’t check, since no one wanted to deprive a kid of food, but her kids were clearly not all under ten as required.

In addition, she would order meals and try to substitute the components for non-similar things. For example, we had a side salad that came with a single, small piece of 99-cent garlic toast. She would say to give her an order of fries instead, worth about $5 more. Then she would also ask for the croutons, usually sprinkled on top of the salad, to be removed, and she wanted to receive several fried eggs instead. Again, a notable price difference. Dipping sauce for the chicken strips? Nah, substitute a bowl of $7 soup for that.

She would do this with every meal in their entire order, meaning that the kitchen got bogged down and everyone in the restaurant ended up waiting ten to twenty minutes longer for their food, while they fulfilled all the special requests.

The managers hated this, since they got paid absolute crap if they didn’t make their food efficiency bonuses. The bonuses helped offset their minimum wage (for sixty hours a week) salaries, so this caused them to miss their bonuses and work for less than minimum wage.

As most know, servers make about $2 an hour in the USA. The woman would tip either the change from rounding up to the next dollar or, if you were lucky, $2, on a three-digit tab, after taking up your full section for the entire rush so you couldn’t earn it from other tables. It wasn’t unusual to make less than $10 for your eight-hour shift when she (or another such customer) came in.

It was a significant burden to everyone else in the building that she was doing this weekly, but we assumed she didn’t have the financial resources and was just doing the best she could to feed her kids. We less-than-minimum wage restaurant workers, understood more than most being in a difficult spot, so we did our jobs and gave the best service we could and just saw it as donating to a good cause.

The managers, who cared only about their paychecks, saw their bonuses suffer. One night, upon seeing her come in, our manager stepped in and said that we had to get more realistic about the substitutions. No more changing out 99-cent garlic bread for $7 fries.

As her server, it fell to me to break the unwelcome news. She immediately countered, of course, saying she had done it lots of times before and why was I being a problem server? After a few sharp remarks about how some servers don’t appreciate customers properly and weren’t going to get a tip (my fifty cents on a $160 tab), she demanded a manager.

Having expected this, I said I was happy to in my calmest, most polite tone. The manager came out, and she started talking, and I started getting angry. First, she mentioned the substitutions.

Okay, fair enough.

But then, she started listing off how we had mistreated her. She’s had to wait to be seated (she never waited, she always walked right in and sat herself and her group without consulting us), her server had been rude and disrespectful (I had been nothing but polite and never had a complaint before or since).

She quoted things I’d supposedly said to her that were nowhere close, adding in insults to her, and insinuated it was because I was racist. Her drinks hadn’t been refilled (yes they had; in fact, I’d set pitchers of soda so she could refill without waiting if I was in the back working in her order), her server messed up her order (the kitchen had had to cook one or two dishes after the others but that’s room on the grill, no choice), just a litany of complaints about me, claiming everything under the sun had been wrong and my fault, with the obvious goal of getting her food free.

The manager, of course, caved to her demands, saying he would take off part of her bill and he was sorry the server hadn’t substituted what she asked. He didn’t mention the part where he had told me to do exactly that. He apologized for my “bad behavior” and agreed with her that she always ordered like that, and of course it was okay, and I had been out of line to treat her so badly and do everything she was claiming I had done.

So I’m sitting on the other side of the wall, fuming. I was angry at the manager (we often were; they didn’t care about the workers), but I was more angry that this woman, whom we had catered to for months, giving great service despite the fact that it was unpaid labor from people who could ill afford it.

As I listened to her and my manager agreeing about what poor service I had provided, I knew I had to keep calm, so I started reading her receipt that she had given back to me when she said she wasn’t paying and wanted a manager.

That’s when I noticed that I hadn’t included one of the meals on the ticket. I would end up having to pay for it myself, out of pocket (yes, that’s illegal, and no, I couldn’t afford a lawyer to sue for that, and I needed to keep my job).

I’m sure you can surmise what I did. While the manager was kissing up to her at my expense, I went and added the meal to the larger ticket in the computer system. If she hadn’t badmouthed me, I might have tried to claim it as my employee meal to help her out. After all, I was the one who forgot to put it on the tab, but then I couldn’t have eaten at all for that shift. I felt like it was karma. Take the time to make up complaints and lie to the manager? Give your server time to spot her mistake.

Printing out her new tab, he handed it back to her with a final apology and then went back into his office to hide from her (and me). They did that a lot rather than face us.

I stood behind the wall out of sight and listened to her running through her bill again. She had given me back the receipt before, so she didn’t have it to compare. Instead, she was going through all the meals to try and figure out why her ticket now cost MORE than it had before the discount.

It took her ten minutes to decide there wasn’t a problem she could complain about again and pay the bill. She paid with hundreds; she had quite a wad in her purse.

It was the first time I had ever had a way to react to an abusive customer, and she had lied extensively about me. It felt like I’d struck a blow for justice!