That Tablet On The Table At Your Favorite Restaurant Is Hurting Your Waiter (buzzfeed.com) 360
In data-hungry, tech-happy chain restaurants, customers are rating their servers using tabletop tablets, not realizing those ratings can put jobs at risk, an investigation by BuzzFeed News has found. From the report: When the Smokey Bones restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, where Nicole Bishop waits tables introduced Ziosk tabletop tablets, she wasn't too worried about them. Ziosks are designed to increase restaurant efficiency by allowing customers to order drinks, appetizers, and desserts, and pay their bill from the table without talking to a server. But, as Bishop soon discovered, they also prompt customers to take a satisfaction survey at the end of every meal, the results of which are turned into a score that's used to evaluate the server's performance. One day not long after the Ziosks appeared, Bishop found that her work schedules had been cut short in half, a change she estimated would cost her between $200 and $400 a week. The report documents stories of several other waiters, all of whom have been affected by the tablet. It adds: Ziosk tablets sit atop dining tables at more than 4,500 restaurants across the United States -- including most Chili's and Olive Gardens, and many TGI Friday's and Red Robins. Competitor E La Carte's PrestoPrime tablets are in more than 1,800 restaurants, including most Applebee's. Tens of thousands of servers are being evaluated based on a tech-driven, data-oriented customer feedback system many say is both inaccurate and unfair. And few of the customers holding the reins are even aware their responses have any impact on how much servers earn.
How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that the ratings will be used to evaluate their wait person?
I really hate those things, personally. And I don't like to be forced to provide survey information before I am allowed to pay my bill. Especially knowing that the impact of that rating is potentially going to be a lot more significant than a small or large tip. As a result, you'd just about have to curse me out and throw my food at me to get anything less than a perfect rating.
A bad day for a wait person might result in a poor tip. It should not result in loss of hours or job. Unless it is truly chronic. In which case, even the proverbial Chotchkie's manager ought to be able to diagnose and correct the problem...
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
The ones at the local Pizza Uno are in the workflow, and are not optimal to complete the transaction.
And I did read the article. It appears it doesn't take much to get cut.
I think that this bit really sums it up:
“It makes very literal the idea that the customer is always right, to the complete disregard of the worker.”
Petty and entitled customers get to play god with the servers jobs. But worse, they get to do it anonymously. They don't have to face the person or their boss - just click a button and quietly stick the dagger in someone's back. If someone really has a problem, they should have to go to the manager, and not be given this coward's weapon.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Customer Is Key (Score:2)
Petty and entitled customers get to play god with the servers jobs. But worse, they get to do it anonymously. They don't have to face the person or their boss - just click a button and quietly stick the dagger in someone's back. If someone really has a problem, they should have to go to the manager, and not be given this coward's weapon.
You've got a couple of factors coming into play. "Cowards" isn't really relevant, since the restaurant goal almost anywhere good is great customer service, and by making confrontation a prerequisite to feedback you are just blocking negative (and positive) feedback that would let you optimize for great customer service.
Any competent restaurant wants to be providing great service because competent restaurants calculate the lifetime value of their average customer, and it's really high. (Because customers com
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You're right. It's basically a master/slave relationship.
You, the customer, are the master. The slave must do whatever you want (ever wonder why sexual harassment of female waitstaff is so high).
Time to eliminate tipping so waitstaff won't have to prostitute themselves to earn a living. Just pay them a decent wage.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually agree with this.
What I don't agree is the ability of what amounts to AC's having this level of control.
Don't like the service? Don't tip.
Really don't like the service? Talk to the manager.
But because the waiter scowled at your screaming, snot nose kid when he poured his coffee all over the the waiter's pants and you and your kids are entitled to better and so you gave him a 1 and got his hours cut is not right. And if you don't think that happens on a regular basis, then perhaps you'd share some of what you are smoking.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS^^
So much THIS!!!
Nothing motivates a server like a good tip.
I remember this from MY waiting and bartending days....and I also remember to try to keep up MY end of the arrangement and be a cheerful, happy and friendly customer.
It's amazing what being nice, and tipping decently will do for you if you become a regular somewhere.
I'm the one getting a bit more attention and better drinks and food and service than you, perhaps just because of this.
Give it a try, especially if you are a regular somewhere.
Hell, I like to call out my bartenders and waiters by name when I can, before their ever looking for a name tag......I mean, you know how good it makes YOU feel when someone remembers your name?
Its all about people and people skills folks....and the bottom line on top of that.....they work for tips.
It can be quite lucrative.
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Wrong.
It isn't 100%--because some customers are self-important, snobbish, or cheap--but in the aggregate, it is an excellent mechanism for getting good service. Anyone who works in business or industry understands this. It's the same as year-end bonuses or profit-sharing. "If you do a good job, there will be a bonus a
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"If you do a good job, there will be a bonus at the end."
Using that statement to induce good performance is based ENTIRELY on "regular customer" status. I.e., if you've worked for this employer for one month and never seen what his bonus looks like, you'll not have as much incentive as someone who has been there ten years and knows the bonus history has been really good. Tipping, for transient customers, cannot be the cause of good service because there is no history to predict what the tip will be. It could be zip, it could be great.
I could tell you with 70% accuracy if a table would be good tippers before they even sat down. After taking their order, that would jump up to 95%.
So you base your service not
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You appear to significantly misunderstand how service in the F&B industry works
"If you do a good job, there will be a bonus at the end."
Using that statement to induce good performance is based ENTIRELY on "regular customer" status.
No. Not at all. A server with any experience (and/or common sense) goes into a job armed with quite a bit of information about what sort of tips to expect.
I.e., if you've worked for this employer for one month and never seen what his bonus looks like, you'll not have as much incentive as someone who has been there ten years and knows the bonus history has been really good. Tipping, for transient customers, cannot be the cause of good service because there is no history to predict what the tip will be. It could be zip, it could be great.
Only if you're completely ignorant of the restaurant's menu, clientele, and reputation; don't understand the local economy; and have neglected to ask the manager, owner, and/or other servers what the average tips are.
One of the very first questions any applicant asks is "
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If the waiter checks back shortly after delivering the food, the waiter will be interrupting my eating and likely interrupting my conversation. This is the kind of service I specifically DON'T want.
Yup.
When I started out as a waiter I was instructed to do just this (ask whether everything is in order a couple minutes after bringing the plates) and maybe for a mediocre restaurant that's actually a good idea. But you shouldn't go to mediocre restaurants, or at least not go there and then complain about it.
In a good restaurant they are confident that they didn't forget anything and that the food is good. However, they will actually keep an eye on the table, and if they spot something is wrong (guests are
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So much THIS!!! Nothing motivates a server like a good tip.
Tipping is structurally unable to achieve the kind of service which I want - which is a waiter who doesn't interrupt me while I'm eating or talking to ask if everything is okay.
Also, there is such a strong social pressure to give a certain %tip in the US, that tipping doesn't really give off a strong message about serving quality anymore. They should really just pay the waiting staff a decent wage (and increase the price of the food/drinks by whatever % needed), and then I will give a tip iff I like the service.
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God help the waiter who, when wandering by, absentmindedly wonders if Linux would be destroyed by hacker assaults the way Windows was, were it to become similarly popular and thus the focus of attacker attention, giving the lie to the slashdot denizen belief that it is inherently much more secure, when it just hasn't been pounded on round the clock by a thousand motivated hackers in corrupt countries.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Ratings are relative. For those complaining their hours were cut due to poor ratings, there are others (unheard from here) who saw an increase in hours because they had better ratings.
Win-win. Customers get better service, waitstaff gets rewarded based on the quality of their work.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a result, you'd just about have to curse me out and throw my food at me to get anything less than a perfect rating.
A big problem with any numeric survey is that we don't give the same rating for the same performance. My default rating is 3 out of 5 for "average". Your default is a perfect 5 for "I hope you don't lose your job". The next guy might default to 4, or even 1 for "you have to earn it".
Surveys that are tied to wages or job retention should be binary and allow for comments. "Were you satisfied with your server?" "If no, please explain." That's enough.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless there's some kind of systemic bias --- in what kind of customers someone gets (e.g. ratings are poorer at night)--- it should average out and you should be able to use an average of different customers' types of ratings to compare employees. I agree yes or no questions, and long form "please explain" have value *also* in teasing apart what the customer experience is actually like.
consumer-satisfaction reinforcement ritual (Score:2)
Psychopaths tend toward grandiosity, and tend to give out only 1s and 5s.
Normal people familiar with ride sharing mostly give out 4s and 5s, because even a 3 is considered somewhat of an insult or a slag or a snub.
Which is exactly how Uber wants this to play out: every non-psychopathic customer browbeaten into giving out nothing but 4s and 5s after every trip as a form of a consumer-satisfaction reinforcement ritual.
It's also a scheme to trivialize your customers.
I'd be happy to cast judgement on their impl
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This is exactly correct. The main reason for "if not, why?" is that many problems with servers are really problems with the restaurant. In probably 90% of the cases where I've been unsatisfied with my restaurant experience it's not the fault of the waiter, but rather issues that are beyond their control. The most common is short staffing that forces the waiter to have more tables than they can possibly handle effectively.
The problem is that while folks like me understand that, most don't. So if the meal
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If you're trying to obtain a relative measure of customer satisfaction (e.g. do customers like waiter A or waiter B more?), then it's a valid measure as long as your sample size (number of customer surveys per waiter) is large enough that these individual deviations in rate scaling average out. Ratings at sites like IMDB and Netflix have to deal with the same problem.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been told many times that on those surveys "management considers anything less than an 8 [out of 10] a fail"
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I've been told many times that on those surveys "management considers anything less than an 8 [out of 10] a fail"
Then the problem is with the management for overvaluing a survey that is non-uniformly sampled, based on a small sample size that results in large confidence intervals, with statistical aggregation based on non-standardized data, and that doesn't collect corresponding data to tease out factors (e.g., maybe low scores are correlated with time of day, amount of purchase, etc.).
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I always take the survey to give the waiters all 5s. I'm neutral about those things, the biggest thing I like is the fact that I can punch out, swipe my card, and be out without having to wait for the check and card to be returned. Of course, the downside, it is another camera, screen with flashing crap on it, and a microphone in your face, and $DEITY knows what is done with the audio/video footage those devices get.
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Re:How can people not know... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, customers aren't told what the scores really mean:
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the way these surveys have been used for a while now. I know people who used to work at GameStop and the same applied to them. Anything less than a perfect score didn't count for anything positive.
It's a purposeful misunderstanding of how statistics work and only used to squeeze working people harder everyday. The management only want a single number to understand things when the world doesn't even come close to working like that. Nuance is lost because it's hard to manage through it. By making it a literal pass/fail, black or white situation you've suddenly gained the ability to fire people on a whim if business has a slight downturn. Keep the churn going, there's always another 18 year old kid looking for after school money.
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It's a purposeful misunderstanding of how statistics work and only used to squeeze working people harder every day.
FTFY.
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How can people not know... (Score:5, Insightful)
A bad day for a wait person might result in a poor tip. It should not result in loss of hours or job. Unless it is truly chronic. In which case, even the proverbial Chotchkie's manager ought to be able to diagnose and correct the problem...
A bad day is one thing. But consistent poor performance compared to other servers is another.
Ziosks scam you out of money (Score:4, Insightful)
I really hate those things, personally.
So do I, but for a completely different reason than you. Those little fucking devices are an absolute scam. At many restaurants they are programmed to add a $1.99 charge onto your bill for playing games if you interact with them in any way at all.
We don't go to the restaurants chains that uses those things very often, but the first time I saw one a few years back we ended up with a charge on our bill. I was 99% sure our kids had not actually played any games on them, but I couldn't be certain. I complained to the waitress and she removed the charge. Then last year we saw them in a restaurant on vacation. This time I was 100% positive...I never let the kids lay a finger on it. However, I did interact with it myself...I simply browsed through the menus on it, but absolutely did not launch a single app. End result....$1.99 charge on my bill. Again I asked and the waitress happily had the charge removed from the bill.
Then I went home and read up on it, wondering if something weird had just happened to me (maybe someone interacted with it after the last customer and it simply attributed it to me as the next customer in the booth). It turns out countless people have this happen continuously, and it's simply a scam they're running. Any interaction with the screen results in a charge on your bill. Not all locations are programmed to operate this way, but many are. And of course, the waitresses understand this and are always happy to remove the charge when you ask. But how many people simply pay their bill without checking it over, or figure "oh, I guess the kids used that game...I'll just pay for it then", or even people who realize the charge isn't right but are too embarrassed to bring it up for fear of looking cheap in front of their date/friends/coworkers. I really wonder how much money ziosk and the associated restaurants have scammed from those people.
So now if I ever find one at my table, the hostess takes it before I sit down.
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The other (and frequently more common) reason are
Regulatory requirements -- especially true in highly regulated industries like financial services or medicine. Although almost every business has regulatory needs from trucking to manufacturing.
Competitive pressure -- our competitor has a cooler widget and we are losing customers so we need one too.
Cost saving might be the third or fourth reason.
Welcome to the Future (Score:2)
In theory (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's all part of a move for more higher up execs to micromanage people they never even see, taking more and more discretion from the manager on the ground.
Evaluation at that distance with any hint of qualitative evaluation with nuance is impossible, so pretty dumb surveys seeking to quantify everything happen without any ability to, for example, recognize that one survey taker is a dick, or that another is uselessly polite, or recognize that the larger context is at fault (e.g. if a restaurant refuses to hi
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Yeah. Haven't personally seen these surveys, but just from experience, if I'm not satisfied with service at a restaurant, it's typically because they're understaffed and the waiters (and sometimes the kitchen) can't effectively manage all the customers. Sure, better waiters might handle this better, but adding staff would be the better solution.
it's a fact of population evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
When the cost of labor gets too high, people will find a way to replace it. You're not going to find these ipads in places where it costs only $1 an hour to have a waiter.
With higher standards of living and wages (and people's unwillingness to work for less) comes the pressure to replace the people. Countries get old and rich, and want higher pay. Technology provides a way to get around that. It happens. Whether you have the iPad or not, they're going to find a way to reduce the number of waiters needed. The iPad is just a messenger.
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Why would someone want to wait on tables? Why would someone want to drive an Uber or work part-time at Walmart? These and many other gigs are low pay, high stress and Big Brother is always watching. If a waitperson gets fired, he/she should celebrate and look for something better.
Uneducated people have few options, of course. All the more reason to enroll in their community college which is designed to match students with real jobs in the local area. These schools are often free to low income people and the
Electronics at the table (Score:2)
Call me old fashioned, but we don't allow electronics at the dinner table. When we see those things, they are immediately removed to a chair or the floor.
I guess the places I go to (Score:4, Informative)
are either too high end or too low end.
I have never seen a tablet in a restaurant, diner, dive, or food truck.
Re:I guess the places I go to (Score:4, Insightful)
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I see tablets at food trucks all the time. Most of the ones here take Square or some other tablet-based-pos payment.
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All of the food trucks here are overpriced. Whether they cater to hipsters or only take cash. But, turning away business because people weren't carrying the 10 fucking dollars it costs for a couple of tacos seems daft.
Most of them park up near bars and breweries that don't serve food. So most people are too drunk/hungry to care about the prices.
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I wasn't being sarcastic. I was being honest -- I always carry cash. I actually *like* the idea of making more money off of card users instead of sitting back and being screwed by the card companies.
Credit card companies and banksters can drop dead and go to Hell. Anything that encourages people to use cash and keep their freedom/privacy is a good thing.
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Yep. I wish we could get editors who would not just blithely copy click-bait headlines.
That Tablet On The Table At Your Favorite Restaurant Is Hurting Your Waiter ....In data-hungry, tech-happy chain restaurants...
Like you, I've never seen a tablet at a restaurant. But then again, I don't go to chain restaurants.
How god damn hard would it be to just write an honest headline like, "Waiters at restaurants using tablets for ordering hurt by diner ratings." or "Waiters rated by diners electronically see hours cut".
Waiters should walk (Score:2)
I was at a restaurant yesterday and the manager was desperate because they were short staffed and no one would come in.
Payback is a bitch. If you get a reputation for screwing your workers, you may not have any.
That said, businesses have a valid interest in knowing if the waiters are angering customers.
But they really, really, REALLY need to do a reality check and slide into these new systems slowly or they could find themselves without employees.
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Restaurants to avoid? (Score:4, Informative)
Chili's = fake bland Tex-Mex food.
Olive Garden = fake greasy Italian food.
TGIF = diner food without the charm.
Red Robin = cookie-cutter burger chain.
Are those tablets used in any restaurant that's actually worth going to? Can you even use them if you're paying good, old-fashioned, cold, hard cash? I feel sorry for anyone who lives in places where "casual dining" is the only option.
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for some families, in some places, a night out at one of those places you named for mom and dad while grandma watches Jr is a big deal, its not 5 star dining but for a lot of folks its a nice night out for not a ton of money. Maybe im not hip and modern but those folks deserve a decent experience too, not a tablet nightmare.
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Those people are morons. Every city and town has independent restaurants that serve actual food for less money than those crappy chains.
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The tablet or the metric? (Score:3)
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Maybe in this age where pettiness and entitlement often seems to be the norm, especially when one can be petty and entitled in an anonymous manner, it should be a bit harder to complain and directly impact someone else's livelihood.
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Fuck, that is not even worth even touching it, much less filling it out.
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It gets worse (Score:2)
Management at some places post up the sexually-harassing comments with 5-stars, according to some of the stories circulating about this. Smokey Bones BBQ is named as one place in TFA.
This is really just a device meant to A. make it easy for HR drones to fire people for very little reason and B. to serve advertisements to people while they eat.
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This is not news (Score:2)
This sounds like the start of a patent argument. We've been doing this forever. We evaluate performance of employees and then adjust their hours and pay or terminate employment based on those evaluations. Comment cards from the customers influence that evaluation How does "collect evaluations via computer" make this a new and novel concept?
QUICK, PATENT IT!!!
Also, if this is Hunger Games, I expect the customers to start rating one another at some point and get banned from the restaurant as a result. Wh
I dont eat at those places (Score:2)
If i am handed a tablet to order and pay, I leave immediately. At one place where I went once, it was so distracting that it drove me crazy. Give me a paper menu and a good waiter, if I cant have that ill just save money and eat at home. Its not an age thing either...I'm a freaking millennial...
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adding some detail, it was playing video the whole time and there was no way to turn off the screen and because of the odd way the stand was made I couldn't face the screen away and the table was too small to lay it face down with food on the table.
Meh (Score:3)
I honestly don't see this as a bad thing. Much like a lot of cops started complaining in the age of ubiquitous cell phone videos - this is just technology keeping people honest and identifying things servers had previously been getting away with.
There may be a slightly shaky start, but in general after a reasonable baseline is established the better waiters will indeed be differentiated from the no-so-good ones via feedback.
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This is at chains of 'family style' restaurants.
The good wait staff are identified because they quit and get jobs where the tips are better. The 'no-so-good ones' are the ones still working there.
Are tips lower as well with tablets? (Score:3)
Re:Are tips lower as well with tablets? (Score:5, Insightful)
If a server doesn't bring me my bill and run my credit card, or if they don't actually take my full order (I order some / all of my meal on the tablet), should I tip the amount that I would normally tip at a full service place? Personally I tip less when I have to run my own credit card. Also be aware that many of the tablets calculate the tip on the total bill (including the tax), where historically you don't tip on tax.
Tip culture is out of control. There are places they seem to expect tips now for picking food up at a counter. For pete's sake, I don't tip at the deli or grocery store. Why should I tip you?
These surveys rarely make sense! (Score:2)
It reminds me of the AWFUL ones you get from car dealerships. They ask you to rate your sales advisor or serviceperson from 1 to 10 on a number of things, and then they get penalized by corporate if they score anything less than perfect 10's.
What happens is people just fill in a 10 for everything, regardless of what they think, if they find out how it all works and they don't want to punish the people they worked with. Everyone else is honest and can almost never fill it all out as a 10, since it's rare the
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As much as I hate this sort of thing, that's an issue with management, not with the survey or delivery mechanism. Place blame where it should lie. And if you're an employee, why would you put up with management that incompetent?
why is this here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when is slashdot against meritocracy and user/client/customer feedback. Is there any monitoring of what kind of tripe can be posted?
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When said feedback is used to keep the boot firmly on the employees neck. After the third time it was mentioned to me that anything less than perfect scores are considered a failure, I stopped taking them.
My 4 out of 5 "good" rating should be used as an opportunity to reward someone for a good job. Not doing so is a ploy to keep wages low.
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I don't see how it can be an honest appraisal of a server when they have been reduced to a skivvy: "computer says table 10, seat 4 wants a Cherry Coke; check for table 7; clear table 12 and join to table 8".
The computer is more highly regarded than them, and God help them if they aren't all smiles and fawning effusiveness during their brief interactions with the customers as they perform their menial job of doing what a machine tells them to do.
I used to like Smokey Bones too.... (Score:2)
I'm not big on chain restaurants on the whole. Usually, I think they're good for providing a consistent, adequate dining experience -- but rarely one you think of as excellent.
Smokey Bones used to have a location over in Illinois when I lived in St. Louis, though - and it was worth the drive for us. Always served really good BBQ compared to a lot of the overpriced "mom and pop" BBQ joints in the area that thought more of themselves than they were worth. And at least in the St. Louis area, the other BBQ chai
Isn't there a rule or something that would cover.. (Score:2)
I vaguely remember this from my stat class 15 years ago.
Something about people being more likely to comment on something bad than good so it could skew your data
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While its true people are more likely to comment if the comment is bad, they are also more likely to leave and never come back than leave a negative comment. Which means that the business doesn't know why people stop coming.
Tip Culture needs to Go (Score:5, Interesting)
I travel to the UK occasionally and have to remind myself that gratuities are not a thing (and in some cases seen as a rude gesture) the theory being that the people who tend bar or serve food are paid adequately enough that they don't need any extra.
Here in Canada its generally accepted that you tip your server (most Interac machines even have built in tip percentiles) this is factored into the system, I read the other day that many systems also only let servers keep a portion of the tip they get and the rest goes into a pool for all servers. At this point I don't understand the system at all, pay people to work a difficult job that absolutely requires you to be "nice" to every asshole that walks off the street to ensure you get a gratuity so you can make a halfway decent wage. This is almost like haggling the bill (which I have seen in Europe oddly enough) the expectation is that my service was satisfactory enough for me to allow this person to work at a livable wage.
I think the problem compounds for chain restaurants that may be off the beaten trail, so if you happen to work at a heavily trafficked location you are gonna do pretty well but if you work at a low traffic location you might barely be scraping by despite getting an hourly wage - that's management sticking it to the servers for something they have little control over.
I dunno, to me the whole system sucks and should just go away. Pay servers a decent wage and throw tipping out the window.
hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's also a management issue, when anything less than a 5/5 or 10/10 is considered a "fail".
TERRIBLE TREND (Score:4, Interesting)
When I take my family out to eat I expect everybody to interact. That's part of why I'm taking them all out to begin with, that shit aint cheap.
I always move the stupid thing to another table before we sit down. Sometimes, the waitstaff will switch it back to my table after accepting our orders, like they are doing me a favor. It's funny, they always point it at the youngest person at my table, who is automatically going to search it for games, find them, and beg for the 2 bucks or whatever to play them instead of spend time with us on this expensive outing.
I get that some people like them. They appeal to young people. yadda yadda.
I wish they would ask if I wanted one. "OK! Table for 6, tablet or non?"
Hate (Score:2)
I abhor those damn things. The last thing I need is a tablet on my table when I sit in a restaurant. If I have a problem with staff I talk to the manager. When I am especially pleased with staff I talk to the manager. That's civilization. That damn tablet is impersonal bullshit. What are they, a fucking McDonalds? I went to Olive Garden with my wife a while back (she liked it and I ate there because I love her) and the first thing I did was put the thing on a shelf next to my table. My waitress went to brin
Isn't it hurting everyone equally? (Score:3)
If the tablet is the problem, shouldn't it be "hurting" all waiters in a restaurant equally? The article says that waiters are getting bad shifts because of less-than-perfect scores. If the tablets and the survey were the problems, all waiters would have equally depressed results. So it must be that some are consistently getting worse results than others, so maybe some are actually worse than others. Just a theory.
Yes, I agree that management is using the surveys wrong. Many of the example questions have very little to do with the quality of the server, and the idea that any score less than perfect is "bad" is ludicrous. Those are management issues, not technology issues. Leave the poor little tablet out of this. But still, it seems that the entire waitstaff under any given management is going to be affected equally by these external factors. The absolute scores may be meaningless, but a server's score relative to other servers should be a fairly accurate indication of which serves are preferred by customers.
The only thing that Ziosk is good for (Score:2)
Is so that I don't have to hunt down the server when I want the check, and again when I'm ready to pay.
Oops... There's one other thing they're good for... they have the menu's allergy info.
Other than that, I ignore the damned thing, and try to put it somewhere off the table (I prefer to have the table space).
Chili's & Olive Garden (Score:2)
The real purpose of th
Worst article ever (Score:2)
This is the poorly-written flamebait article that blames technology for a non-technology problem.
The article interviews the people who lost shifts because they got poor reviews. But there's no interview of the people who got extra shifts because they were getting good reviews! Later, the author of the article blames the rating system when a waitress who works at a breastaurant [wikipedia.org] gets positive feedback about her boobs. Stop blaming the tablet for human behavior. The statistics in the article is awful too.
NPS (Score:2)
Are such "innovations" driven by buyer or seller? (Score:2)
Stories like this are appearing at a seemingly exponential rise: tech replaces person, or business uses tech to interact with customers. One by one this or that industry latches onto another computerized front end device that is supposed to give the customer a better experience, or else give the proprietor more information or a streamlined operation.
Pardon my naivete or else cynicism, but many times I cannot see the real value in these services. For instance, have restaurant owners adopted these menu-pad
Fun for me (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Somehow ... that topic never comes up with wait staff when I go to restaurants.
What I hate is when they act like my fake friend and actually sit down at the table.
I want professional service. When I reach for my glass, it should never be empty.
If I start polite small talk then make polite small talk briefly but don't try to start it yourself.
"I hope you have a nice day/enjoy your meal/whatever" plays better than "Have a nice day, enjoy your meal whatever." One is your hope and the other is a command from
Re: (Score:2)
Breastaurants (Score:2)
Unless it's at some Breastaurant.
Then, fake or not, have a seat.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a class thing. Waiters are traditionally supposed to act like serving staff. Keep your drink full and deliver your food with minimal visibility and maximum efficiency, and, like any good servant, give every appearance of not only reading your mind, but doing so 5 minutes before you think you want something so it appears like magic.
Some people are made uncomfortable by that. They want a waiter who's their peer and buddy, not their staff. It's a class thing.
When it hurts the restaurant is when they m
Re: (Score:3)
Yes.
Some people are very comfortable with the idea that others are lessor than they are and some are not. Not trying to be snarky, but that's the truth.
Had a friend with a pretty good business going who was involved in a patent lawsuit. They hired some fancy Beverly Hills attorney who was supposed to be the best. They were at a dinner at some nice place in Beverly Hills when, after dinner was over, his wife started collecting up the dishes and making neat piles for the waiter to take away. The attorney made
Re: (Score:3)
Yes.
Some people are very comfortable with the idea that others are lessor than they are and some are not. Not trying to be snarky, but that's the truth.
Had a friend with a pretty good business going who was involved in a patent lawsuit. They hired some fancy Beverly Hills attorney who was supposed to be the best. They were at a dinner at some nice place in Beverly Hills when, after dinner was over, his wife started collecting up the dishes and making neat piles for the waiter to take away. The attorney made a point of saying, "they have people for that".
If you have ever thought or uttered those words, you should consider partaking in some very deep self reflection.
You are incorrect. Some managers would fire waitstaff if they saw a customer stacking dishes.
For one, it IS the waitstaff's job to collect dishes. (Actually, technically it's the barback's.) For two, it sends the wrong message to the other diners in the restaurant. Thirdly, it sends a message to the waitstaff (intended or not) that the diner doesn't think that they are competent. Finally, if the diner has time to stack dishes, is means the waitstaff were not watching her closely enough.
It's like when y
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Unaware ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently you have never worked in a survey-based environment. On surveys, when rating someone 1 through 10, only 10 is acceptable to management. 1 through 9 is failure.
Aye. At the car dealership where I work, 9 is the same as zero on customer satisfaction surveys. Further, less than an 85% average score cuts your commission for all further sales until the average goes up. With an average of 10-12 new car sales per month (less than half of which fill out the surveys) one middling score can cut my income for several months.
The company has the system well rigged.