A frontal lobotomy, no bottle in front of me

I’m a big fan of the ten dollar lunch. By dinner time I’m either neck deep in a project or in too foul a mood to regard gastronomic endeavors as much of a pleasure. But lunch, now there’s a welcome respite from the old grind.

Unfortunately, the service here is so sub-standard that a ten dollar lunch isn’t a very good option. Got an hour and a half or so for lunch? Good luck. After two hours you’ll still be waiting for the menu to arrive. I don’t know what happens to waitresses who are too incompetent to ply their trade, where do they go next? Is there an industry somewhere that rewards inert stances and bovine, cud-chewing expressions? Perhaps these folks are seeking reincarnation as dairy cattle.

Last week my friends and I ventured out to graze for some lunch, at a spot I used to frequent often but where I doubt I’ll ever go again. Three tables had customers. Three waitresses loomed behind the counter, feet seemingly nailed in place, slack jaws chewing gum, dull eyes with that vacant, far away look generally favored by lobotomy patients. The customers were totally confounded. It would have been far faster, and more pleasurable, for us to run to the beach, snare some fish, and cook them up.

I’ve worked in restaurants, and in that sort of diner setting, a good waitress can cover six occupied tables. A turn-around time for lunch in such restaurants should be about 40 minutes per table.

By contrast, during this lunch, we had a one waitress for every occupied table, and it was totally impossible to order, eat, and get out of there within an hour and a half.

I couldn’t help but reflecting on the economics of paying those folks. Take
$3.05 per hour times three waitresses, and you’ve got $9.15 an hour right there. Add in the burden for hiring alien workers (housing, health insurance, medical exams, dealing with officialdom to get the work permits, etc.) and I figure you can throw in, say, two bucks an hour per worker in additional burdens. So we’re looking at a total of $15.15 per hour for three waitresses who can’t remotely handle serving the three occupied tables.

(Well, make that two. A couple of Japanese ladies eventually stormed out of the place in a funk).

The restaurant would have been far better paying just one competent waitress $10 per hour, and saving the other $5.15 per hour in labor costs. Assuming that waitress garnered $30 in tips per day, she’d be earning $110 for an eight hour day. I think that’s an opportunity that a lot of workers would like to have. Customers would have no doubt preferred that arrangement, too.

No, I’m sure not saying that we need some dingbat program to require paying waitresses ten bucks an hour. Government can’t make people more productive, it can only make them less productive.

There is a vacuum of competence here (as in most of the world) and I suspect that any worker with energy who bothers to take some initiative can exploit that void. Let the lazy people sit on the sidelines and complain; for the energetic looking for work, it’s time to print up your resumes and start talking to management.
Hopefully somebody will hire you, and send the lobotomy crowd packing.