My thoughts; being stressed at Chilis

In the restaurant world there are multiple jobs one can apply for; host/busser, server, bartender, cook, and dishwasher. At Chilis’, hosts, servers, and bartenders make up the front of the house and coincidently each of these jobs has a rank. Host’s are the young employees who are not old enough to serve, servers have the knowledge the host’s have plus the server requirements, and the bartenders are expected to be fully competent in any situation that deals with the front of the house. One idealistic thought most people have is the idea that at a job there are opportunities to move up in the company. Moving up in a job reflects your commitment and dedication and is usually a positive achievement. At Chilis’, bartending is the highest up you can go before managing and should be worth a celebration. However, this promotion isn’t always what one thought it would be. The bartenders have a lot of inefficiencies to deal with which cause the following problems: over-stressed, no days off, school work getting put off, drink quality is at a low, dishes don’t get washed properly, failure to get shifts covered in emergencies, maintaining cleanliness, cash till short, poor customer care, etc.
Chilis’ Restaurant has one of the highest employee turnovers, mainly due to employee dissatisfaction with high stress and work schedule. The most noted area for leaving are the servers who have become bartenders and realize they can make more money and have less stress bartending at a different location. The problem at hand is that there are only five bartenders presently working at Chilis; two of which can only work one of the bar shifts a week; which leaves twelve shifts between three people. This means that when a bartender needs off, it’s almost impossible. The bartenders that work full time are constantly getting overtime which the company tries to avoid and the part-time bartenders are over exceeding the number of hours they can manage. Since there is lack of employment in the bar, on busy nights like Friday and Saturday there is only one bartender working when there should be at least two; this alone leads to a number of insufficiencies.

Being a restaurant bartender; monologue

The time is 4:00 p.m. and you hit the button to clock in, right away the morning bartender starts filling you in on the tables he/she has; what they’ve ordered and the drinks they have because the morning bartender wants to leave as soon as you get on and so they transfer their original tables to you. You do a quick overview of the prep list making sure there is enough to last the night and send the morning bartender on his/her way. You begin to make a round through the tables that you’ve taken over and have four drinks ordered along with an appetizer and a table of two’s food order; as you start towards the till to place the orders you realize two more groups had been sat in your lounge while you were making your rounds and quickly grab some silverware and menus to go greet each of the new tables because as soon as they sat down they began to look bothered because you hadn’t been to their table yet; so another four drinks are ordered. At this point you walk to the till with a list of three-four beers from the tap, a martini, a few blended drinks, and a number of food orders (a good memory is required for this job). Once the orders are placed, you get behind the bar to make the drinks as fast as possible because drinks are supposed to be out within three minutes of taking the order; as you’re shaking the martini, five tickets print up from the servers out on the floor and they come to the bar and begin to stare and wait impatiently for their drinks when you haven’t even started their drinks because you are trying to help your customers first. By the time you’ve taken care of everyone else, you run your drinks out and get swamped with everyone’s needs because they’ve been waiting for more than 5 minutes; food orders, more drink orders, new customers, menu questions, checks printed out, cards swipe and change obtained, Togo boxes, and more servers waiting for their drinks. You look at the clock and it’s only been a half an hour and all you can think of as you take a deep breath is, “What would they do if I just walked out?”