Five Reasons Why Bartending is Harder After You Finish College

Getting your college degree is a huge milestone, and you worked hard to accomplish it. So why does working in hospitality suck so much for new graduates?

For six years, I went to college full-time while bartending…full-time. It was brutal and harrowing, and certainly took a toll on my overall well-being. I was perpetually exhausted, I missed every big party/holiday/vacation with my friends, and was so constantly busy that healthy eating and exercise took a back seat to studying and writing papers. I watched the second half of my twenties disappear in the blink of an eye.

However, I recently finished grad school and got that magic “Do Not Bend” envelope in the mail with my masters degree. The next day, I strolled into my restaurant job wearing my newly-framed degree around my neck like Flavor Flav, ate onion rings off customers’ plates, rang in thirty raspberry mojitos on a fake ticket, deleted our OpenTable reservations for the next two months, changed the classical background music to “Highway to the Danger Zone” (on loop), and gave the general manger the finger as I exited with two trays of Halibut Oscar. After all, I’m a college grad now, and this industry is for losers! You can mail my last paycheck to my new address on Wall Street, suckas.

It’s time for you all to suck it.

That’s how it should have happened, anyway. In reality, I’m still slingin’ drinks night after night, almost as if nothing changed. Except that, strangely, bartending is way worse now that I have my degree. Here’s five reasons why bartending is harder after you finish college:

    1.  You’re (officially) smarter than your boss.

I’ve had remarkably stupid managers during my time in this business. I’ve had general managers – whom are master sommeliers with decades of experience – unable to compose a simple memo. I’ve seen successful restaurant owners send out weekly emails to guests with only two or three words spelled correctly. I once had the bar manager of an Irish pub tell me to walk around with a bottle of 99 Bananas schnapps and solicit every guest for five dollar shots. I’ve even had a chef explain that keeping ducks in cages with feeding tubes is “good for them”, because fois gras only comes from “happy ducks”. It’s harder to swallow all this when you have a degree as physical proof that you are smarter than the people ordering you around.

2.  You’re serving drinks to people who make twice as much money as you (and work half as hard).

Not too long ago, I had a four top of mid-40’s white guys in suits in my lounge. It was 2pm on a Tuesday, and they ordered vodka martinis (well, first they ordered beers we don’t have, then wine we don’t have, then vodkas we don’t have, because they were all way too busy to look at the menu I put in front of their faces and had asked them several times to read). It was clear that these masters of the universe had absolutely no more responsibilities for the day. Two rounds (and several frat-level misogynistic jokes) later, one of these idiots asked my opinion about the football team for the sports rival of my grad school. I explained that, since I went to a competing university, I didn’t care. They asked what I was getting my degree in (clearly expecting a response of “Associates in A/C Repair”); I responded that I was finishing up my MPA before getting my graduate certificate in Environmental Resource Management. After a brief silence, one of the douchebags actually raised his glass to me and said “and now you’re a bartender”.

Running the world makes us smile.

3.  You’re no longer surrounded by thousands of datable people your age. 

If Tinder was a physical place, it would be a college campus. Generally speaking, everyone is in the same age group, single (ish), drunk, and away from the rules and limitations of home. Throw on some coral shorts and Ray-bans, and you have a 99% chance of at least a few romantic encounters – even as a freshman. When you graduate, it becomes suddenly and shockingly apparent that world is now gone, and you will be forced to meet people from the same dating pool as everyone else (and we all know that public pools just aren’t as much fun as the Playboy grotto). Enjoy that fancy new diploma, because now you’re stuck dating either the hostess on Lithium or getting rejected by your suddenly-not-there-as-much bar regulars.

   4.  Student loans are coming due. 

Suddenly that weekend boys trip to Vancouver you paid for with student loans doesn’t seem like such a bright idea at 7.9% interest.

   5.  You catch yourself looking down on people who are just like you were. 

We’ve all had the friend who successfully quit smoking (for six months one time), who would jump all over you when you lit up, wouldn’t stop at the gas station before the party so you could grab a pack, and who after a couple beers would actually slap cigarettes out of your mouth. Of course, they loudly declared they did it was because “they care about you” and want to show you that it’s possible to quit, even if you hate them for it.

Screw that guy. I did hate him for it. And since a graduated, I catch myself acting like him all the time.

Most people start in the restaurant industry at an early age, a stage in your life when everything is in front of you. You’re 19 or 20 years old, taking a few community college classes here and there, and most of your time is spent planning the theme for the next pool party at your (shitty) apartment complex, flirting with coworkers, doing whippets in the walk-in cooler and publicly declaring how you will never get old. I know this because I was that guy and, in all honestly, that life ruled.

LIFE HAS NO CONSEQUENCES!! BEER ME!!

Eventually, I grew up a bit, got a plan together, and traded backyard barbecues for classes in Sociology and Humanities. I worked my ass off, making the conscious decision to give up a delightful life of youthful alcoholism (well, almost) for something that would get my ass out of this industry. The hospitality lifestyle is actually perfect for this strategy – you can go to class during the day, make enough money on the nights and weekends to pay for books and have a little fun, then get out into the Real World. Anyone still in the industry in their 30’s was just lazy, or stupid, or satisfied serving Endless Fries to tourists, or naive enough to get sucked into the dream vacuum that is restaurant management. Not me, man. Not this guy.

Now I’m 31 and still in the grind. Those 20 year olds running around my restaurant, so full of vitality (and stolen cocktails from service bar), so invincible, so happy – they just piss me off. I should feel paternalistic, giving them pointers on how to have fun and work hard simultaneously, how to make more money at work, how to have good study habits, how to set up your 30’s as the best decade of your life. But all I want to do is metaphorically slap the cigarettes out of their mouths, grab their shoulders and shake the optimism from their faces. I so often find myself angry at their juvenile behavior, their complaints about being “epically hungover”, their attempts to get a shift covered because they hadn’t started a paper that was due the next day. But I catch my hypocrisies, remind myself that’s exactly who I was, and that they will probably turn out ok like I did. I was no saint, I just made terrible decisions less often. It’s just like thinking all new music blows, the original Batman movies were best, and that 1996 was just, like, the best year ever. Those young servers slumping around my restaurant will feel the same after they graduate, and the world’s not going to be a better place if they get hypocritical and hate the fresh cohort behind them. But every shift I work post-graduation, I hate my young coworkers just a little bit more.

Especially when they don’t invite me to their pool parties.

Neil Ratliff is a fifteen-year veteran of the service industry and owner of RestWants.com. You can email him (please do!) at RestWants@gmail.com

Here’s a Tip: Stop Treating Rich Customers Like Rich Customers

Should we give better service to rich people?

Most service industry employees will react to that question in one of two ways. One group will claim that the premise is offensive – “I treat everyone the same!”, or “Of course not, how dare you!”. Equal service to everyone. As Americans, we are above differential or preferential treatment. The good tips and the bad tips balance out over time. I’m the fairest person I know.

The other group, the honest group, will shrug and say “of course it’s a good idea,” and wonder why one would even ask that question. We work for tips. Rich people order more expensive items, and more of them. Bigger tabs equal bigger tips. What’s the problem?

Think of it as a collection plate for the holiest of congregations – bartenders.

Both reactions are to be expected. We service industry cogs can wax poetic, rhyming cocktails as the World’s Last Bartender Poet, rattling off wine regions of Spain, serving ‘craft cocktails’ and ‘slow food’ to bloggers. Or we can just admit that we’re all basically prostituting our personalities, hamming it up with strangers we’ll only know for as long as it takes for them to throw down a sandwich. Hair stylists, bellboys, valet drivers, pizza drivers, taxi drivers – we all are ladies of the night, masking our contempt for the human race with fake charm and hollow enthusiasm for today’s Tuna Special. After all, time itself is a flat circle.

We all start off as Marty, but after a few years in the industry, we Rust.

The real question I’m asking, though, is whether we should give rich people better service. On a long enough timeline, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed optimists in the first group will eventually learn the ropes and begin to sell their soul for bigger tips; I don’t want anyone working the floor with me who isn’t there to make all the money they can. I’ve watched enough episodes of “LockUp” to know that if you want to survive, you get a hustle.

Speaking as a service-industry vet, I wonder if this game hurts us in the long run. I grew up working in cheap, casual-dining joints – homogenous, corporate feed-troughs that blitzed the airwaves with promises of full-course meals-for-two for less money than a 12-pack of respectable beer.  The majority of my guests didn’t have much money, and a Friday night at Shenanigan’s was a worldly treat for them. And you know what? They were pretty nice people, overall. And they (almost) always left at least 20%. Granted, twenty percent of a Turkey O’Toole sandwich barely keeps the heat on, but it got me through college.

Two years ago, I moved across the country from Florida to Seattle, WA (I’m just a big Ted Bundy fan I guess). My first week here I landed at a job at an upscale seafood restaurant in a primo downtown location. I went from never receiving an actual paycheck to making 10 bucks an hour just for clocking in. Our menu is expensive, our decor is fancy, and we have monogrammed china. In other words, our clientele has money. And guess what – rich people are different.

People will smoke anything in Seattle.

Let me be clear: not all rich people suck. Not by a long shot. Two of my favorite people in the world are an extremely wealthy, humble older couple that come into my restaurant every Sunday brunch. They give away more money to charity than I make in a year, and they earned every cent that they have. And, hey, can you guys out there say honestly that you wouldn’t hang out with Mark Cuban? My buddy met him once a basketball game, and described him perfectly: “Dude, he’s just like us, only with money.”

What I am saying is, since working in a fancy-schmancy joint, I can’t tell you how many times in the last two years I’ve been asked to describe in painstaking detail how every wine we pour tastes, only to have the guy interrupt me to order the cheapest house cabernet – and tip me a dollar for the privilege. Or how many times my intelligence is questioned out loud, like the time one woman wondered how I got into college (undergrad or my masters?) after I explained that our catfish was farm-raised, because, well, all the damn catfish in every restaurant is farm-raised, because that’s how we damn well get catfish.

They cannot be wrong, because how else would they rich? Like the time I told a jerkoff in a $2,000 suit at 6:05pm that happy hour ended at 6pm, and he screamed “This is BULLSHIT!” to my manager, who apologized for the both of us and bought the douche a plate of oysters. Or the epic blowhard attorney, the ambulance chaser with his face plastered over every Seattle billboard, who, in a coke-fueled fury at my bar, sent back a plate of scallops without tasting them because “we just wouldn’t understand how to cook them” after all. Or the delightful gentleman from Texas who argued for THREE HOURS at my bar that the Civil War was really the War of Northern Aggression. In all of these situations, I bit my tongue and managed a smile.

So the question is, are rich people simply more inclined to act this way, or do we in the service industry allow them to act this way? Even encourage them to act this way? Are we extra-polite, extra-accommodating, and extra tongue-swallowing because we think that’s what it takes to make the big bucks from the One Percent? (We haven’t even discussed whether rich people tip at a higher percentage than regular folks; the public generally believes that they actually tip less, and this topic will be covered in another blog post.). Are we reinforcing this behavior, even rewarding it? I never had so many adventures in douchebaggery when I was slinging side salads in chain-restaurant hell (and I didn’t deal with so many fake gluten allergies). Few people have the fritters to stroll into TGI Fridays and start acting a fool.

Well, maybe ONE guy. FULL THROTTLE!!

So my point is this: maybe sucking up to those whom we presume will tip us more money than others is a bad idea. Maybe it’s hurting us in the long run, aggregating into meta-douchery that harms everyone in the industry. The screaming, impatient d-bag who is given Apology Oysters tonight will have a Pavlovian response and attempt his doucheness in a different joint next week – and that’s not fair to our industry brethren. It’s like suddenly approaching a big fallen branch in a road: do you slam the brakes and carefully drive around, or do you get out and move the branch out of the way so no other unlucky schmucks plow into it? Maybe if we in the service industry collectively stop walking on eggshells around “VIPs”, we could rid ourselves of this genetic trait in one generation. It would take solidarity, and a bunch of really cool floor managers, but we could achieve it. It would be the Millenials’ gift to the world (since we’re obviously not going to fix the planet). Baby steps, people!

Now, one could certainly argue “Hey, you decided to work at a fancy place that caters to these people; go back to the corporate chain-gang if you don’t like it”. It’s a fair critique, but beside the point. I’m not doing anything wrong, they are, and we’re facilitating this behavior, and I think that does more harm than good long-term. Listen, I like my job, the hours are great, the money is great, I have great coworkers, and I have a lot of great regulars. But with the world becoming so stratified between the Haves and Have-Nots, shouldn’t places as universal and accessible as a bar or restaurant or coffee shop be neutral turf? Shouldn’t the sacred act of getting blackout schwasted and slamming a bacon burger be the great equalizer? That’s ‘Merica!

Fight Tipperism at home and abroad!

Neil Ratliff is a fifteen year veteran of the service industry and the owner of RestWants.com. You can email him at RestWants@gmail.com.

Get Some Rest: The Launch of RestWants

A worthy craft, indeed.

There’s a saying in Hollywood: “You can make a bad movie from a good script, but you can’t make a great movie with a bad script”. This logic applies to any business – in order for any project to succeed, it has to spring from a good idea. Anyone can crash and burn in business, no matter profound their “Eureka!” moment of entrepreneurial inspiration. But success is not normally realized until after navigating a treacherous ocean of obstacles – to have any real shot, be sure to command a worthy craft. That’s the thinking behind my start-up, RestWants.

 

Know what you don’t know.

I’ve worked in the restaurant industry for 15+ years, mostly serving tables or slinging drinks behind a bar (nearly 1 in 14 Americans currently do). Most of my colleagues can attest that, as far as serving or bartending goes, most things are pretty standard: the lingo , the hours, common practices – and especially the uniforms.

My “Eureka!” moment came after I spent an entire afternoon at the Northgate Mall in Seattle looking for work clothes. It hit me like a stack of cotton button-down oxford shirts (it was kind of a gentle and fluffy “Eureka!” moment): a one-stop shop for restaurant workers everywhere to get what they need to wear for work, without wasting an entire day at Walmart looking for slacks, which is about the most depressing activity there is.

So, I scraped together some funds, delved into a world about which I knew nothing, and haven’t looked back since. The site will be up this summer. This blog will document the process of getting it up and running, keep our customers informed of what’s going on behind the scenes, and remind me of the “good ‘ol times” when I still got 3-4 hours of sleep a night. Until then, I ask you to join me on one grad student’s quest to realize his dream – and then sell that dream to Amazon for stupid money the second that Jeff Bezos shoots me an email. Until then, We Have Your Shift Covered.