I’m in a Toxic Relationship With the Restaurant Industry. Help.
By: Austin Harvey
Tags: Covid 19, Mental Health, Jobs, Restaurant, Finance

When the clock struck twelve on January 1, 2020 I was in a bar with three of my closest friends playing JENGA, enjoying a Guinness. While 2019 had been a personally rough year, I was optimistic about the future. I planned to work harder at my personal projects, fix my financial situation, and finally get out of [REDACTED].

Obviously, that didn’t happen.

I don’t need to recap the events of the past seven months to you. Nor do I want to talk about the US response to the virus. For my thoughts on that, you can read this:

The one thing I will say is this: When the PA lockdown happened in March and the first waves of increased unemployment pay and stimulus checks rolled out, I was making more money than I ever had before.

I made more money shut up in my apartment than I did working 50-hour work weeks.

I want to be clear that this isn’t a criticism of [REDACTED], but rather a criticism of the restaurant industry as a whole. Restaurant employees are not required to receive minimum wage, so long as the tips they claim cover that difference in pay. Restaurant employees rarely receive benefits of any sort. No paid vacation, no dental/health/vision, no 401k. In most scenarios, if you have to take time off, you’re simply losing out on money.

This poses a great threat in the current climate. Restaurant workers, like many other essential employees, are in a high-risk low-reward situation. Have customers been kinder? Have tips been more generous? The short answer is no, they haven’t.

I worked Mother’s Day this year, during which we were still in the “Red Phase” of lockdown. It was a nightmare. Ticket times were nearly two hours. As the crowd outside grew more and more frustrated, they became less and less understanding. We were cussed out, screamed at, and threatened. Many people cancelled their orders. It was the first time I’d ever seen our kitchen managers simply have no clue what to do. Somehow, we managed it. Just down the street from us, Red Lobster had no choice but to send customers home without food.

I was disgusted by how little empathy people possessed.

According to Forbes, at the beginning of 2019 78% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck. I remembered a conversation I had with my manger back in March, where he said “servers aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. They’re living day to day.”

He perfectly articulated why it’s so difficult for restaurant employees to break away from this line of work. You never know how much money you’re going to make. If you don’t think you’ll have enough for rent, you pick up an extra shift. It’s hard to think about not leaving work with cash at the end of the day.

I’ve never had to make a budget. Not really, anyway. I’ve never had the experience of receiving two weeks worth of pay and having to make a plan for it to last me two more weeks. I go into work, and sometimes I leave with $100, other times with $30. You just never know.

Most times, the money is good enough or simply “too good” to justify going to another retail job, even if it might make you happier in the end. For a while, I considered quitting and working at a local bookstore, only to realize that $11 an hour wouldn’t pay my bills. The money, however, is never so good that there isn’t always something better lurking just around the corner. It’s just a matter of reaching out and taking it, if you’re willing to suffer through the adjustment period and take an initial financial hit.