Customers Suck: The Singles’ Group
Howdy to folks popping over from Waiter Rant. My blog isn’t strictly about restauranting, but a fair amount of the posts are. ‘Cause, you know, I basically live at The Restaurant Where I Work(TM), so I can’t help a large part of the posts being about that. They let me come home once in awhile to visit my husband and pets.
Right.
And now, on to the bitchin’.
Large groups suck. Even the really nice groups are a pain in the ass. It’s a lot of work for the servers and cooks, and since The Owners won’t let us charge an automatic gratuity on group bills, it’s a crap shoot for the servers whether they make decent money or not.
My restaurant has two rooms, the front dining room, and the back dining room. (They’re actually side-by-side, but that’s what we call ‘em.) The rooms are separated. The front DR is smoking and non-smoking (they still allow that in Michigan, for the time being), and the back DR is all non-smoking. The front DR is all booths, and the back DR is a combo, some booths, but mostly tables. Because of the tables, groups are handled almost exclusively in the back DR. We can re-arrange the tables to suit, make one big table, whatever. Groups go back there.
Mostly, groups will call to make a reservation, and we love that. Knowing ahead of time that thirty people are coming in at 6pm makes life a lot easier. I can have extra servers available, extra cooks available, and so forth. We can have the table pre-set, so that when the group shows up, they’re sitting immediately down, with waters and menus, and various accoutrements already laid out. It makes life so much easier for everyone involved, and the service will be better for the group, because we were ready for them.
Many times, though, groups will just wander aimlessly in. That is so annoying, because we know that one of these twenty, thirty, fifty, or whatever people had a damn cellphone, and could have called. Even ten or fifteen minutes notice will make life easier for both us, and the group. The more warning we have, the better the experience is going to be for the group, so it’s really in their best interest to call ahead. Many of them don’t, anyways, and then have the nerve to get pissy when they have to wait for a table, or wait for food, or wait for a server, and so forth.
Besides all that, I’m frequently running short-staffed. We aren’t one of these fancy corporate places, with ten servers and five cooks on any given night. In fact, if you come in later on in the evening, chances are that the entire staff is comprised of me, a server, a cook, and a dishwasher. One server. One cook. Me and a dishwasher. My restaurant seats 255 people, I think. Rest assured, any night you walk in, my staff and I are busting ass and giving 110%, and that probably isn’t enough. If we’re already busy, and I’ve only got a couple of servers, and into this you drop an unexpected table of thirty . . . well, you can see why we get so pissy about walk-in groups. They can just fuck a whole night up.
We also have a subset of groups who have what we call a “standing reservation”. I know that on Sunday night at 7:30pm, the Baptist Church group, anywhere from 10 to 50 of them, will be in.
One particular standing reservation is for Tuesday night at 9:30pm, about 30 or 40 people. This is Jamie’s “Singles’ Group”.
Now, about 9pm, we usually close the back DR for the night, so we can clean it. Depends on business — sometimes later, sometimes earlier, and we might let a customer or two in after we close it, if they’re disabled or ask nicely enough. We always try to have that room cleaned and shut down before we actually close, because that shaves half an hour to forty-five minutes off our closing time, which saves labor cost and gets us all home earlier. That makes us happy, and The Boss happy. Everybody’s happy, except the customers, who never want into that room until I’ve closed it, I swear.
Taking this Singles’ Group at 9:30 means that I’ve had to hold that room open later, which means we don’t get to clean it until later, and so on. Also, by 9pm, I’m down to one server, which makes working that group a hell of a hustle. Sometimes I can manage to keep an extra server over, but not always. So, this group is something of an imposition on us — not that I’d ever tell them that, them being customers and all, but the fact of the matter is that they’re a bit of a pain in the ass, timing-wise. But, there’s thirty or forty of them, they tip — not well, but not badly — and they buy dinners, so it’s worth the hassle.
Or, it was.
About a month, month and a half ago, the group shows up with only four or five people, and one of them is a gal who is bawling her eyes out. Jamie inquires, and it turns out that the whole group got into a huge argument at their card game that night. Much drama and many hurt feelings later, and only five of them bothered to come for dinner. This continues for a month. We’re getting four, maybe five or six of them, sometimes only three of them. Two weeks ago, only three showed up, and finally realized that they were having us hold this room for just them every week. They told Jamie they would call ahead if there were going to be more, so we’d know to set up a whole table and save the room, and so on. The week after that, no one showed up at all, and no one called.
This week, Jamie and I didn’t bother to keep the room open, or set a table, or any of that. For five or six people, most of whom smoke anyways, they can sit up front with the rest of the plebeians, and we can take care of them like a regular table, no need for fireworks. I close the room and clean it. Chairs all up, lights out, floor wet, everything.
Of course, thirty of them showed up. No call-ahead, nothing.
The first one in, a woman, came up to me at cash, and said, “You’ve got this room closed for us, right?”
Confused, I say, “Who? No, it’s closed for the night.” Then it dawns on me. Shit, it’s the damned Singles’ Group!
“What do you mean, it’s closed for the night?” The woman snaps. “We come in every Tuesday! There’s a bunch of us!”
I explain, I apologize, so on. Hardly anyone has been coming in, no one at all came in last week, we thought the group had broken up and wouldn’t be in anymore, and even if they did, there’s only been four or five for the last month, and that’ll fit out front, we’re really sorry. I tell her that if she’ll wait just a moment, I can go set up a table for them.
She huffs and snaps and bitches. Well! If they’re going to be an imposition, if we don’t want them, etc, they’ll go elsewhere. I say, “Not at all! We just didn’t think you all would be in, after so long. I’ll go set up a table right now!”
So, at light speed, I get the chairs down and get a table together. In five minutes or less, the dishwasher and I have a table together, waters, silverware, the whole nine yards. (Meanwhile, Jamie’s running her ass off with ten tables out front. We were a bit busy. Not a lot, but some.) Just as I’m setting out menus, one of the guys in the group sticks their head into the back room, and asks if that table’s for them.
“Yep it is.” I answer, smiling. “Come on in!”
Four people troup in.
My smile falters just a hair. “Are the rest still showing up?” I note that the bitchy woman I had talked to first is not amongst the group.
“Nope.” Says the guy. “They all went home. Just us.”
“But . . . there was a woman in here, said there were a bunch of you. I said I’d set up a table.”
“She came back and said you didn’t want us, so we should leave. I think most of them went home after that.”
I stutter, flabbergasted. “But I told her I’d set up a table! I said it would only be a minute!”
The guy shrugs. “We might get a couple more.”
I was hanging on to my smile with gritted teeth, seeing red. I give them menus, tell them Jamie will be right with them. I was furious. This woman has made me out to the bitch in the situation, when it was a simple matter of miscommunication and a faulty assumption on our part, that I had busted my ass to rectify. And the twat went out and sent everyone home, after I threw my room back together for them and all that, and now we have to wait for four people, and then redo the whole damn room. I was working damned hard not to let it show, but I was livid. (I found out later from Jamie that the bitchy woman wasn’t even a regular in the group — she was new, and hardly ever showed up anyways!)
Meanwhile, Jamie has had to take food out. The group of four wait about one minute for Jessie to get to them, and then get up and walk out (through the line at cash, and more tables waiting to get in, so it’s not like they couldn’t see we were busy or anything).
So now, I have completely fucked up my back DR for nothing.
I wanted to kill people. Seriously. Now, I was being friendly and nice about the whole situation. I wasn’t glaring and yelling, I was smiling and whatnot. Granted, I was pretty exhausted that day (haven’t been getting a lot of sleep, due to circumstances beyond my control — new puppy = no sleep), so I wasn’t my usual perky self, but I wasn’t being a bitch about the situation to them or anything. I was trying to accommodate them and fix the situation.
There comes a point where a customer is costing me more money, by holding the room open, making my labor costs higher because it takes longer to close the restaurant, and costing me business out front, because my one waitress is tied up dealing with them. It costs me money, it costs her money, and for a group of five, it just isn’t worth it.
If these were really nice customers, who tipped really well and treated us really well, then it might be worth it to us to deal with them. But they aren’t. They’re assholes who make a mess. Ladies and gentlemen, there is a reason why these people are single, and that’s because they’re a bunch of socially retarded pigs. As an example, many of them smoke, and since the back DR is non-smoking, they come up to the counter to smoke. If I don’t have ashtrays on the counter for them, they ash on the floor and the counter, and put their smokes out on the floor, like it’s nothing. Like it’s something everyone does. Several of them are quite rude to Jamie and I. Not all of them, but a handful are total assholes. And, they’re often half-drunk when they show up, because they drink at their card game.
So, after all that, considering the dwindling attendance, the hassle, and the assholery we faced tonight, I canceled their standing reservation. We don’t need that kind of pain-in-the-ass.
Groups suck.
