Order up: Students serving their way through college
By Miranda Lorenc
The life of a server can be rewarding and stressful.
Waiting on tables, chatting with customers and serving food to multiple tables at once is a demanding job at times, but it can also be fun.
“I really enjoy being around people and helping people and making sure that they leave the restaurant happy,” said Kyle Draper, a senior in international business. “I don’t know, I like making people smile I guess. And I like food. I love being in a restaurant — the hustle and the bustle.”
And at the end of the day, most servers go home with only what their customers decided to pay them.
“Usually I get around 20 percent tips, which is what you want,” said Brittany Daniels, a senior in elementary education. “But there have been days where I’ve gone in and worked just as hard as I do any other day and come away with like $12 for a five-hour shift, and that sucks. That is the worst.”
According to the United States Department of Labor, the minimum wage for waiters and waitresses is $2.13 an hour. The primary source of income for servers come from the tips their customers leave them, which is usually between 15 and 20 percent of the cost of the meal.
“It depends on the week day and the week night, but I usually never make less than $9 an hour and sometimes it’ll be as high as $13-14,” Draper said.
Being paid in tips can act as a reflection of a waiter’s performance with their customers as well as provide motivation to make people happy, Draper said.
Daniels agreed.
“If I weren’t relying on the tips, then I might not care as much,” she said.
Each customer takes about one hour to come in, order, eat their food, pay and leave, Daniels said, so she tries to think of each tip as what each table viewed her service was worth for that one hour.
“Basically you’re not selling a product, you’re selling yourself, and what you get in return is like what people think you’re worth,” she said. “So if they don’t think you were worth five bucks, they’re not going to give you five bucks. And feeling like you’re not even worth five dollars is not a good way to feel.”
Those who do well in the service industry, Daniels said, are clean-cut, energetic, friendly and able to connect with the customers.
“You can usually find something in common with almost every person that you serve, as long as you like as them a question, like ‘Hey what are you doing?’ or “What’s your name?’ You can usually find a connection,” said Tyrnee Nakano, a sophomore in business administration.
Customers who help make that connection are friendly and can carry on a conversation are the fun ones, Nakano said.
A good customer also understands that the waiter is human — not a drink-refilling robot — and waiters make mistakes.
“You think the people just type in the order and the cooks make it and you bring it out,” Nakano said. “That’s not what happens at all. The waitresses are slicing lemons in the back, they’re doing parts of the cooking in the back. It’s a lot. It’s difficult.”
Daniels suggests customers always tip the server, even if the experience was unsatisfactory.
“If your service was really that bad, go talk to the manager and say like, ‘Look, this happened and I was really dissatisfied with my meal. I was really dissatisfied with my experience here.’ That way, the manager can take that server aside and be like, ‘Look, this is what you need to work on,’” she said.
Not everything is in the servers’ control, however, and problems that might arise might not always be the server’s fault, she said. The cooks might have made a mistake and the food came out wrong.
“It’s really unfair to punish them for your bad experience when they’re not in control of everything,” Daniels said. “So I would say in that situation you should still pay the server the full amount, maybe not give her anything extra. But tip her a reasonable amount and then tell their manager that you were dissatisfied and that they should talk to that server and get them to change.”
— miranda.lorenc@gmail.com
@miranda_lorenc