There is no “I” in “teamwork”

One thing that has become abundantly clear after working in both privately owned and corporate restaurants, is that the managers at corporate restaurants have taken the phrase “There is no “I” in “teamwork” and turned it into an art form……and the “m” does not stand for “manager.”

At a privately owned restaurant, if need be, a manager will actually pick up a tray of food and deliver it. Or, if you have a large table, and the food will not fit on one tray, they will carry the extra tray for you. Contrast that with a corporate restaurant, where in the same situation, a manager will spend more time than it takes to drop off a tray, yelling for one of the other peon servers to carry it. AND…..on the even rarer occasion, when said manager actually stoops so low as do manual labor and God forbid, have to carry a tray, they will then act as if you had forced them at gunpoint to clean dog shit off of your shoes. Then to really drive the point home, they start scheduling servers to act as “food runners”, meaning you will have to work an entire shift, just running trays of food to tables, making half the money you normally would on Friday or Saturday night, because you and your fellow servers are just too inadequate and probably should not even be allowed to live.

At a corporate restaurant, I remember a time when a manager had to get a box of bread out of the freezer, and decided to “write up” all the servers who had the bread station as their side work. After all, how silly we were, to think that taking care of the customer was the most important thing. We inconvenienced a manager, we must be punished. At a privately owned restaurant, the cooks take care of the bread. Imagine that!?!