I had once worked at a Bonchon in Maryland, the owner was too cheap to hire a manager for a 20k/day restaurant. Instead he had his three best servers run everything foh. He was never there because he was East’s Coasts Supplier for Tutti Frutti froyo. It sucked when we would get paid server pay to stay late at night to clean his floors that kill mops due to their sandpaper quality. Fried chicken grease and sand paper floors =3 dead mops and a need to deep clean once a week.
One of the employees was a server who wanted to be the restaurant manager, so the boss promised him he would give him the position after 3 months. The employee was a star, at his prior job he was culinary chef who wanted to settle down from that stressful lifestyle.
Guess what, we got nothing, instead one by one, our boss would put all of his frustrations on us passive aggressively. If there was a problem in the restaurant and he wasn’t there, we had to call him and play telephone with the customer. I never wanted to overstep my bounds because I was never given a manager salary. (Even though I basically handled the schedule, handled all the problems while serving, and even went down to a host because I was just given too much).
When I would try to step over I would get yelled at, when I wouldnt, I would basically be called stupid on the phone with the customer in front of me.
Eventually I was fed up after super bowl and Mother’s Day when our boss didn’t realize he didn’t know how to structure shit. And yelled at me after a order mix up happened in front of a customer.
Eventually he hired a QSR and a well known one too, promised the guy full time, then fired him a month after I left.
To this day he still uses servers and says they’re managers in training basically. He uses unwashed cloths for a greasy chicken restaurant because he is too cheap to pay for Cisco services for a high traffic restaurant. He uses the same cloth for years and each night they just leave them in bleach.
I should also mention that he hired a full Chinese staff who had been working 80+ hours in a new kitchen that sometimes had broken airflow, meaning all they lived in chicken grease. Of course they complained about their issues and even all protested for a raise because of the unreasonable work conditions. They got fired instead. Pretty sure most of them were getting paid under the table. He said they were being lazy.
Just so you know, this isn’t the worst boss I’ve had.