So I just recently started serving at a bar. I’m a college student who has served before in a full scale corporate restaurant and I consider myself pretty good at it. However, this experience has been very crazy and honestly kind of a punch to the ego. Usually when I go in to serve at a restaurant, I mostly serve and help with other duties whenever I can. However here I’m expected to serve, work ToGo and DoorDash and GrubHub, bus with no assistance, and do a portion of the hosting, run all of my food without assistance etc. Which is fine but I’m also expected to do all of it also within like seconds of it needing to be done. I simultaneously serve a 8-10 table section (some of which can be up to 8-9 people at a table). This was my second weekend working like ever. It’s stressful because in environments I’ve worked in before, this is about 4 peoples worth of work and I was barely making the money I would expect to see for one person. For this reason I have been looking at other serving jobs but now I’m questioning my abilities a bit. I would open some days and end up almost staying till close way past my out time to try and get the additional work done.
Yesterday they told me I’m too slow and I can’t serve anymore, they want me to take a demotion and become a full scale host (which they don’t have on weekends / most days so I’m assuming that’s what they want). I’m really bummed because all my customers seemed happy, I felt like I was really starting to hit the mark more frequently. I was also starting to help other servers a bit run their food etc. when asked and trying to find free time to benefit the team overall. They watched me from afar through my whole shift so it felt like taking a test with a professor standing over your shoulder. But they said I take too long to put in orders (I’m still not 100% familiar with the POS as I’ve literally probably worked there less than 10 days alone total) and to get to my food and said that the other servers are going to resent me if they have to keep helping me with little things and questions.
They said that I’m ultimately just not good for business because I’m going to slow the whole restaurant down trying to get a hang of everything. I understand where they’re coming from but it sucks because I actually felt like I was starting to do really good and just didn’t get much time to train / learn. I need to serve to make ends meet so I hope other places won’t feel this way about me. It was the most embarrassing convo of my life. If you serve in a setting like this, you’re a superhuman and I respect you sm.