Hey folks, I’ve never posted here before, but after reading comments for a few months, I’d like to chime in on what a restaurant manager’s life is like.
My qualifications: I started working restaurants in 1993, at the age of 15. I stuck with them. After time in the army, I went back to them as an assistant manager. In due course, I became a GM. All in all, I spent 24 years in restaurants, with 20 of those being in management. In 2020, I changed careers, and have never looked back.
A restaurant manager’s role is actually pretty difficult, especially if you care about your employees. You are set a salary, and that salary, at least in my case, broke down hourly to about $11.00 per over the course of my career. You work a minimum of 50 hours per week and, depending on the company, those hours can grow to exceed 100. You are constantly pressured from the top to hit numbers, numbers, and numbers. Lip service is paid to ‘retention’ and ‘culture’, but at the end of the day, the importance is heavily slanted towards service times, labor costs, food cost, price per ticket, customers per day part, etc.
If you care about your employees, you are constantly in the position of explaining why their hours were cut, or why they haven’t gotten the raise they wanted, or why being late 5 minutes is grounds for discipline ‘up to and including dismissal.’ It’s difficult to be perceived as caring when the goals from the top don’t really reflect the realities on the ground.
You run a fine line with staffing. You can’t schedule too many people (labor cost), but if one person calls out (no matter the reason), you are now very likely working 2 jobs at once. Oh, and if someone on the next shift calls out? Guess who covers for them? Yep, you. So, now your 9 hour day has magically become a 14-16 hour day. Oh, and someone called out on your day off? Guess what? Your 5 day week became a 6 day week. This is all on salary, which means that the math becomes less and less attractive when calculating $/hr.
After a while, you start to become jaded and cynical. That’s when you start responding to callouts with snarky remarks, or demands for doctor’s notes. It gets really fun if you have a family. Imagine having to tell your kid that you can’t make it to his ball game because someone he never met can’t come to work that day. You get to where you are tired, all the time. Your days off are pretty much relegated to sleep and trying to take care of whatever chores you have.
Oh, and days off? Weekends? Ha! Holidays? Right… Two consecutive days in a row? Pshaw. Those callouts keep coming, and you pretty much give up on having a life outside of work. Because numbers, numbers, numbers, you see.
Inevitably, burnout happens. No matter how much you try and care for your employees, you just stop giving a shit. You are always exhausted, your family can’t count on you, and you find yourself resenting employees for getting into a car wreck on their way to work. Because, no matter the severity of what happened to them, you are so… damned… TIRED.
So… what do you do at this point? Well, you have two options. You keep at it, having become a shadow of your former self (and possibly having a psychotic break- yes, I’ve seen that happen). Or, you quit. I chose to quit, though it took me twenty-four years to wise up.
So, to close, I just put this here because it seems like a lot of people don’t truly understand what it’s like to be a restaurant manager. They are people, and like any group of people, some are dicks. However, many are not; they’re just regular people put in an impossible position.