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Ask anything to someone who's worked in the food industry for over seven years. I've worked in small town mom n' pop, I've worked in corporate... Longest job I had lasted 5 years, shortest lasted 1 month. I've seen really good, I've seen really bad, and I've seen 95% health code violation. Been through bosses dying, seen the staff stealing bottles of hard liquor to hundreds of dollars out of the register, witnessed break room drug trades, happened across a drunk patron publicly urinating behind the restaurant... I've got stories, if nothing else.

My jobs have included:

>Busboy
>Hostess/Cashier
>Waitress/Bartender
>Cook (all levels, fry cook, prep cook, grill cook... Keep in mind I've been employed as a cook, not a chef.)

I'll bump the thread with stories, pictures if I have them.

>7 years

Wow what an achievement, good job son.

why the fuck would you do such shit jobs for 7 years?

3 was enough for me to get my life together and figure out it was complete shit job for felons and people that had to pay child support.


why the fuck is someone pissing and buying drugs so amazingly badass to you?

you sound like a straightedge faggot which makes your choice of profession even more confusing.

He sound like a dishwasher after one week of work, thinking they know everything about the industry.

7 years is nothing.

wow way to be an asshole. your life must be shiiiit hahaha. He said he's worked in corporate etc. and is just listing his experiences; probably not trying to brag...

If you think that any of this is "badass" or "bragging", I have to wonder if this is what you consider high class. Anyone with half a brain will know that these stories will deal with shitty people doing shitty things, and it will all suck.

Here's your free (You) for the day.

Anyway.

First story (1/?)

The second place I worked at, I was a cook/cashier. It was a gas station type place, and when I started there it was doing pretty well. It's kind of weird, because this gas station was in a small town where... Okay. Let me put it this way. The guy who owned it was Indian (duh) and the white trash in the town called him a "sandnigger". The level of intelligence is so low in this town that a majority of the population equates poo in loo's to sandniggers. When the guy first started working there, the place was vandalized all the time. Racial slurs pen'd in the bathroom, break-ins, but for some reason this guy stayed.

Which I guess was worth it, because when I was working there the guy was taking a profit of $2000 every Friday night.

So long story short, a new guy ended up taking over and ran the place into the ground. He never kept anything stocked, he didn't have the customer loyalty, and the place tanked after a couple of months. I came back the summer after a semester at college to just have a minimum wage job. There were two other guys working there that I knew, and they never showed up. My shift was supposed to be from 5.30am to 2pm, and usually I'd be there until 6pm. I had nothing else better to do, so I just kept making shit money and did whatever I wanted pretty much. No one came in, the place was dead.

Cont...

Personally I've been working in restaurants for 4 years and went through college which could figuratively be called a waste of time. But after all that i decided i wanted to cook food and open a restaurant. Shit jobs? Go back to /b/ while sitting in your cubicle working your salary slave job gaining 50 pounds you shmuck.

>feel free to ask me questions
>i won't respond to them
>just gonna post a bunch of really long shit no one will read instead

lol at this fucking line cook talking about being "high class" and how doing drugs is bad as he drags grease out back at 3am for $8/hr

i actually have time to work out and stay in shape now that im not in a kitchen 70 hours a week sweeting dick and drinking myself into a stupor until 5am every day

enjoy your stroke/heart attack by 50

sweating*

Can you not read, user? What do you have? ...Is it permanent?

But as far as question marks go... Fair enough. There's like one question that I didn't bother to answer, but fair enough.

>why the fuck would you do such shit jobs for 7 years?

The job market isn't that hot where I lived. It's pretty much these jobs or no jobs. I've moved since then, so I have more options, but I didn't have them at the time. Financial/family reasons.

>why the fuck is someone pissing and buying drugs so amazingly badass to you?

Words into mouth, user. What a cunt.

(2/?)

So business is in the shitter, and the guy decides, "I know what will save us!"

One of the things this guy was trying to do was get an authentic taco fast food abomination thing up and running. And it worked for about two weeks. For those two weeks, we were jam-packed with people. He had one Mexican cook (who was probably my favorite worker out of all of them, she actually showed up on time and did a damn good job)... And she was always overwhelmed. I live in redneck Texas-ville, everyone and their mother-cousin wanted tacos. It was often just me and her, she would be swamped in the kitchen and I would be doing all the front work while she was in the back. But she came in later than I did and left earlier, too, so I would be by myself doing all of the work for the majority of the day. I should have walked out and locked the door behind me, I know, but it was the only job in town and I needed SOME income. And, again, we only stayed like this for two weeks.

Fast forward about a month, I get an order for these shitty tacos. There's a little walk-in, and I haven't been in there for a while because I'm usually at the front and someone else takes care of that.

I open the door and the first thing that hits me is the smell of dead bodies. Instantly threw up on the floor, closed the door, cleaned up... Gathered self and went back in to see what the fuck was up.

(Word limit, cont...)

(3/3)

First thing I see is the new owner's watermelon. The pink flesh has turned black and white, and when I picked the container up to take it to the back sink, just the movement broke the "fruit" into little pieces. I don't... I don't know how that happens, but it was one of the less disturbing things in there.

In the fucking middle of this cooler is a huge puddle of blood. Not meat juice, blood. Red, coagulated blood in plain view. You can't fucking miss it, it's right there. I investigated a little further and found that there was a plastic shopping bag with raw, brown/grey steak just sitting open on the floor. Nothing appeared to be moldy, but I didn't touch the fuckin thing, so I don't know.

Aside from that, there's marinated chicken, pork, beef (all raw) sitting in either open or unsealed containers, dripping down onto loaves of bread underneath. Cheese is completely open, one half of it is yellow and the other half is white... Avocado flesh? Black. Onions? Mushy. Tomatoes? What tomatoes? Only thing I saw were green fuzzy lumps of mold sitting next to the... Well, the lettuce was good, at least.

I wasn't going to fucking serve this shit to people. I wasn't going to be responsible for someone getting food poisoning, and I wasn't going to touch that. I told the customers the kitchen was closed, didn't say why, and the next day I get a call from my 'boss' to come up there and talk. He wanted to know why I didn't cook anything, so I showed him the fridge as I had found it. Mother fucker didn't give a shit. The only thing he'd say was 'this part fine'.

With his bare hand, he picked up one of the grey steaks, cooked it, and served it in a taco without a second thought.

Health inspector shut them down a month after I left. Another worker and I found out he was skimming off our paychecks, too, but the Department of Labor is full of useless cunts who didn't give a shit. Quite frankly I don't really blame them.

lol another mcdonalds worker thread..fgt.

I have never worked at McDonald's. I've worked at Sonic, which is the wannabe McDonald's, and I've worked at Cracker Barrel.

Don't ever fucking work at Cracker Barrel. If you think everything else I say is a spewing shit fountain of shit, listen to me. Do NOT WORK THERE unless you plan to stay for 10 or so years. They treat their new employees like shit, especially the servers.

so the moral of the story is sandniggers selling tacos at gas stations should be avoided

no shit... everyone on Veeky Forums already knew that

I didn't think there had to be a moral, I just told a story.

Also, it wasn't a sandnigger. It was a poo in loo. Which... I mean it doesn't matter in this case, so whatever.

>busboy
>waitress
are u /trans/?

No, am fem. Just kind of thought 'busboy' was all-encompassing. You never really hear 'busgirl' as a term.

how about "busser" or "table busser"?

Busser would have probably been the smart decision, but I'm not really known for my smart decisions. Hence, all the shitty places I've worked at. It made... Decent money. Not good, not bad, just decent. Paid for a nice amount of college.

or table bitch / kitchen bitch its gender neutral and accurately portrays the job

hang in there user. i don't have any sources but it seems like successful restauranteurs started from the bottom and worked their way up

I like you.

Hehe, thanks for the encouragement, user. To be honest, I don't really want to go into it as a business. At least not right now, it is not a good time for new restaurants in the USA. I do a lot of home cooking, mostly Italian (I'm half Italian, half Russian) and I'm starting to try to make healthy recipes not taste like cardboard. Thyroid levels are a little wonky, so I've gotta eat as healthy as possible.

With that said, I know a little bit of what not to do if I do open up a restaurant. That little opening bit where I said the boss died was actually in the mom n' pop place I worked at for 5 years. The boss that died was the only thing holding that place together. It was a family owned joint, three siblings, and the remaining two were fucking fire and ice. One of the reasons it went under was because the front manager and the kitchen manager (younger brother and older sister, respectively) did NOT get along at all, and you could heard them screaming and cursing from across the restaurant. People would actually walk out because of it.

They had no management, they had no idea what they were doing, and they treated their employees like crap. The kitchen manager especially, she was on meds for her bipolar disorder and she bullied everyone. Few years of my working there she got breast cancer and survived it, and was even more of a miserable cunt than before. She would physically push and hit minors, and most of the people she hired were male drug addicts because she liked to flirt with them. Lady was about 60 years old, too.

Linebro here. Maybe you'll enjoy a story yourself

>be out back chilling when its slow and nothing to do
>shoot the shit with the chef from the restaurant next door
>Ay user, you didn't sit on that couch thats out here did you?"
>"Uhh, no, why"
>"Some homeless people were fuckin on it last night while we were closing...probably semen on it."
>tfw your restaurant closes earlier so you cant stay to watch homeless people get it on at 2am

Oh my god, lol. I feel like there's some sort of fucked up comrade-level understanding between people who have the trashiest jobs. The Sonic I used to work at actually had to ban an 80 year old lady because she was giving head to her 50 year old husband in the drive-through. Bitch wasn't even a gilf, she looked like a WoW trogg. She used to come into that mom n' pop place with this kid and they looked EXACTLY like Randall and Miss Finster from Recess. Like, there's no comparison, look at the picture of the cartoon characters and that's 100% what these two looked like.

>30 year difference
>doing kinky shit like that at that age

goddamn

Thats...love I guess?

As far as I know they're still married, and she isn't loaded or anything, so there must be some genuine affection there. Different strokes for different folks, after all.

She was one of the customers I actually looked forward to seeing. Not that she had a shining personality or anything, but that she always came into that bar with a color theme. She had hundreds of fake colored daisies she would put into her hair, some days it would be red, some days it would be orange... I mean she looked a fucking mess but at least she had personality.

>I'm totally aware this has derailed into a story thread instead of a question thread.

Let me answer my own questions about a few of the places I worked at, I realize how faggoty it is, but hey. We aren't exactly upstanding human beings in this thread, now, are we?

>Why don't I want to work at Cracker Barrel?

Sincerely, new employees are treated like dogshit. And if you only want to work, say, a couple months out of the year, you're screwed. It's not worth the time or the money unless you live next door to a Cracker Barrel. I was a waitress there, and I hear the cooks have it differently, but it's pretty much all bullshit. You have about three tables during rush hour, and no one makes any money unless they're there for 10 hours.

They have no problem keeping wait staff on the clock for $2 an hour rolling buckets of silverware until 2 in the morning. You can't do any side work until you are taken off the floor. They actually will give you a demerit for stocking sugar/salt/pepper, rolling silverware, sweeping, etc.. If you have tables.

Their process is outdated and bullshit. The wait staff is not supposed to communicate with the kitchen staff at ALL. There's supposed to be a QA there to handle the in-between, because, you know... It's so much easier for me to tell someone to tell the cook than for me to just tell them. If you need syrup for fucking pancakes you have to go through the QA.

(Word limit, cont...)

having worked in the kitchen for 3 years i think that the waitstaff should never talk to the kitchen. most of you bitches are certified retards.

So this is totally a Cracker Barrel hate thread now.

Moving right along.

>Tipping is bullshit.

To some extent I agree with you. I'm not going to get into this social justice tipping war, because I find it silly, but the wait staff does more than just bring out food. It's the 'first line of defense' for unhappy customers. I've waited on some real fucking pricks, I mean grown ass men who have CRIED because we were out of baked potatoes. If something is too cold/too hot, the wait staff is more often than not the person who hears and deals with the complaint. If they don't put on a shiny face, the boss gets pissed and they get fired. That's one of the biggest reasons waitresses/waiters exist, is to be damage control so the boss doesn't have to put up with it (especially with small places).

With that said, more often than not the people who complain won't tip, and why the hell should people who have a good experience tip to compensate for the other fucks? The idea is that you're tipping for a service, but in reality, the wait staff is doing more of a service to the owners/managers of the restaurant than the actual customers. And the owners need to compensate them for it, not the customers.

It's an outdated system. But don't let my opinion influence you, I've got absolutely no right to tell you what to do with your money.

I've worked both sides of the line, and I enjoy cooking more, but I get it. I've had waitresses pull me aside to explain an order and it works a hell of a lot better than the pass it along game.

Of course, this is really dependent on who you work with, where you work, the size and scale of your restaurant, etc... It works for some places, but not for CB.

I've been in the food industry for like 2 years...I hated every seconds of it. Its one of those jobs where you wont miss shit..at least to me...then again my personality never fit it so maybe thats a sign.

picture related because kitchen workers run on cigarettes and energy drinks...at least the ones that arent hardcore addicts

actually correction. so many hot waitresses...I will miss that

OP checkin back in

>picture related because kitchen workers run on cigarettes and energy drinks...at least the ones that arent hardcore addicts

Can confirm this to be true. I was the only kitchen worker at Sonic who didn't do either one, but most smoke.

I can't fucking stand the service industry on a whole, but I did like the Sonic I worked at for the people that worked there. There was like one cunt, but it was unanimously agreed that she was a cunt. But I made pretty good money towards when I was waitressing at that mom n' pop place, which was nice.

If you don't like the people you work with, though, it's an uphill battle to nowhere.