So last year I worked at a lesser-known chain restaurant, I hated it so much I only lasted about a month. But around Halloween, they told us it was “gift card season” and had a whole big meeting about it. Basically, we were having a bunch of promotions to sell gift cards over the next few months and each day when we came in, we had to learn about the new promotions of the day and then “encourage” all of our tables to buy gift cards.
I thought this was really stupid. For one thing, buying gift cards from restaurants doesn't seem like a super common thing to me, unless it's as a gift and in that case, people usually know they want to get them. Also, I don't even like up-selling, so I didn't want to go up to all my tables and try to get them to spend money they weren't planning to spend.
To make it worse, they tracked each servers gift card sells, so they would confront any server that had low or no gift card sells. On one of my last days, a manager was threatening to fire another server for not selling gift cards.
There were so many other things wrong with this place. The hours were unbelievably long, especially for a student. The manager team was abusive to servers. After every one of my shifts, I would go home and cry. One night I had a horrible panic attack the day before my shift and my boyfriend put his foot down and was like ok ya, you're not going back to that place. So the next morning I texted them and told them I quit. Not super professional but I knew I couldn't handle even one more shift, nevermind two weeks.