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Originally Posted by blankall
I think Earl's really mastered that model on a larger scale though. They got away with it initially, because it was a fun social atmosphere. Then they started taking away the fun aspects of the work. They took away our discounts. We received 50% off up to $10 (which is garbage as no decent menu items were under $10 at the time). They banned all back of house people from being in the restaurant in uniform. They stopped allowing us to be in the restaurant after or around closing.
I worked in several restaurants, and I never heard of them not giving the kitchen workers either free or heavily discounted food/drinks. These people work for barely much more than minimum wage.
Some of this may have been particular to my specific location, and there is a reason that location had a lot of difficulty finding staff....which also made things worse for the existing staff, as the restaurant was always short staffed.
I do know the general attitude towards profitability was coming from the top down. They basically had middle management staff - who weren't qualified in any way - who's job it was to squeeze profits out of the restaurant.
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A lot of that stuff does come down to the individual GM. That's completely the opposite of when I worked there. Going into the restaurant after work was not only allowed, it was encouraged. We'd each get a $100 a week gift card to use on food, but obviously we all just "forgot" to ring our food in and used the gift cards for alcohol after work instead. Of course at the time there was no way to track kegs, so we'd just have about 10 beers for free and collect thousands of dollars of gift cards to give away for birthdays and whatnot. Upper management turned a blind eye, then when I was upper management I'm proud to say I didn't give a #### what employees did as long as guests were happy.
Going down to train staff and open the new location in Miami was probably one of the best two weeks of my life. I think I slept 10 hours total