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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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