Happy to have hung up my waitress shoes

For years, whenever I got frustrated/fed up at work, I’d say, “I can always go back to waitressing.”

Even at the time, it wasn’t really true.

Did I really want to go back to working on my feet all day; dealing with a public that has gotten way more snarly, narcissistic, and demanding since I last laced up my white waitress shoes; hassling with cooks over messed up orders; smelling like grease; working ghastly hours; and having an unpredictable “revenue stream”?

Nah….

Even though I’ve now aged (and hefted) my way to a point in my life where I’m actually better suited to work as a Durgin-Park waitress than I was when I worked there (yikes) nearly four decades ago, I doubt I’ll ever don the apron again. (For non-Bostonians, Durgin traditionally had a reputation for surly old-gal waitresses.)

Still, waitressing – which I did throughout college and beyond – had its benefits. You never had to take your work home with you. There were always a lot of laughs. And, in those halcyon days before credit cards became ubiquitous, nobody paid full taxes on their earnings. (Typically, when you started a job, you’d ask what everyone else reported, and you went along with that number.)

Durgin-Park. Union Oyster House. Valle’s Steakhouse. Ted’s Big Boy.  Harvard Club of Boston. And that dreadful, basement place I worked in Government Center – the one where I had to wear the bright blue polyester sailor-collared mini-dress. The only good thing that ever happened there was getting to wait on Tommy Heinsohn. (For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the name of this place. My sister Kath thought it might have been called the Scollay Square something or other, and that the overall restaurant had something fishy in its name. She was on to something. It was the Old Scollay Pub, and was part of a larger restaurant called the Sea ‘n Surf. A tip of the sailor cap – which, blessedly, I did not have to wear while working there – to Kath.)

I actually believe that working as a waitress happens to be an excellent life experience. You learn to deal with unreasonable customers and unreasonable managers. You learn which customer complaints to take seriously. You learn how to resolve unpleasant situations and screw ups. You learn how to make honest recommendations, and how to point someone away from the day-old steam table scrod without getting yourself fired. You learn that it’s important to treat both the high (the hostess) and the low (the busboy) with dignity and respect, because no matter what level someone was at, it always paid to have them on your side. You learn just how much sautéed lobster you can pick off a plate under the hot light, waiting for pickup, before it will be noticeable to the customer that their plate has been picked off of. You learn to multitask. You learn to prioritize. You learn what goes in a mixed drink. (Before I was a waitress, I didn’t fully appreciate that there was a difference between soda water and tonic water. After serving a couple of Scotch  & Tonics, and Gin & Sodas, I figured it out.)

I am quite happy to have “done” waitressing, and actually feel kind of bad for the offspring of the affluent, who never have to take crappy jobs, but can always have mummy-daddy find cool and interesting internships for them.

Given how larded my c.v. is with waitressing, I was quite interested to see an article by Scott Kirsner on boston.com last week on a local (New Bedford) company, Objective Logistics, that has come out with a web-based app that ranks server performance,

Here's how it works: Objective Logistics' system, called MUSE, monitors a waiter's performance based on how well he sells. That can mean pushing the special of the day, selling bottles of wine with dinner, or encouraging big groups to order appetizers and desserts. (Eventually, the company also wants to integrate feedback from diners — after all, a waiter who foists sparkling water on a table that doesn't really want it might be driving away business.) The software grades wait staff performance on a curve: it's obviously a lot easier to gin up big checks on a Saturday night than it is Monday at 11 a.m.

Rankings are shown on a “leaderboard,” and optimized schedules (based on the projected yield for each waiter) are automatically created, with the high performers getting the plum assignments (nights, stations).  Poorly ranked waiters, theoretically, have the incentive to do better.

[CEO Philip] Beauregard says the software will be sold on an annual subscription basis. "We see it going beyond just restaurants, into places like hair salons, clothing stores, car dealerships, any kind of retail environment." The company is about half-way done raising a $1 million funding round, he says.

Hey, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before everyone and everything is wired  not just for privacy and data sucking, but to evaluate their productivity – especially in lower-end professions where measurement of the push-the-special variety may come more easily.

I’m certainly not against better performers being rewarded. And this system, theoretically, makes the process of doing so more objective. Still…

How does this account for a bad luck night, in which, through sheer ill fortune, or because the hostess deliberately stuck you with a bunch of dead-head parties, you end up with little to show for it? If you get three booths full of Mennonites seated on your station, you may not have much luck pushing expensive wine.

But the Objective Logistics guys, who appear to be a combination of geniuses - “a team of crack mathematicians and scholars from the Wharton School and INSEAD have run the regressions and performed the analyses”  -  and folks who understand the restaurant biz, have no doubt figured it all out. (Have I ever mentioned that, once I stopped being a waitress and went to b-school, my first job was – ta-da – running regressions? Bivariate, multivariate, time series, pooled. Why, when I was a girl, we even learned how to calculate a bivariate regression by hand. Not bad for a Durgin-Park waitress, no?)

And don’t bad waitresses and waiters – the ones who can’t make any money at it because their not personable or efficient enough – end up quitting or getting fired, anyway?

What I find distasteful in all this is the naked “revelation” that wait staff are sales people. Sure, this has always been the case. Even back in the good old days before everyone ate every meal out, we were sometimes asked to push the specials. And what waitron in her right mind wouldn’t want to encourage their tables to eat and drink more, so that the size of the tab – and, proportionately, the tip – would increase. Unless, of course, they felt that a party was going to stiff or near-stiff them, in which case the incentive is to get them out as soon as possible in hopes of landing some live ones.

Personally, I don’t want to be “sold” by my waiter.

Yes, I’m fine with them asking if I want an appetizer or another drink. But, basically, I don’t want there to be any obvious appearance, in any way, shape, or form that, when I’m seated in a restaurant, I’m being “sold” rather than catered to. In fact, in our two favorite restaurants, we’re usually given something: an appetizer they want us to try, a round on the house, dessert. This translates into a lot more loyalty and return trips than someone using the push-the-Merlot techniques which, on top of everything else it does, MUSE will spit out so that managers can coach their staff on how to push the Merlot.

If any restaurant I frequent is using the MUSE system, I don’t want to know about it.

I don’t want to worry that, if we order a bottle of prosecco instead of champagne, our waiter is going to get screwed on their evaluation and end up relegated to the worst shifts and the worst stations. There’s quite enough crap to deal with in life, without having to feel guilty about what not ordering the chocolate pudding cake is going to do to our server’s career. (Thanks but no thanks. I’m at the bottom of the leaderboard, you cheap, fake dieting hose-bag. I know you went home and ate Girl Scout cookies.)

In their own words,

Objective Logistics is gamifying the workplace... MUSE introduces a competitive environment that compels staff to self-motivate and actively upsell while achieving high customer service ratings. Through the use of game dynamics, performance-based scheduling, built-in rewards programs, labor optimization and data analytics MUSE allows managers and operators to focus on what drives their business, not what drives them crazy.

I am so glad that I got out of the workplace before it was gamified… (By the way, this is the first company I’ve seen in years that also touts AI. Maybe I haven’t been paying that much attention since all those AI gods failed in the late 1980’s.)

Like any good tech company, Objective Logistics aims to serve a higher purpose.

We believe that everyone has a job or general vocation to which they are best suited. Many of us spend our lives finding out which roles we don’t like, or where we don’t fit.

Okay, so far I’m down with this. (Maybe if I’d worked in a gamified workplace from the get go, I’d have been able to figure out what it is that I want to do when I grow up.)

Objective Logistics vision is to open up the world of specialization and expose the Labor Graph. We want everyone to know what they are good at, how they compare to their peers and how to get better. Round pegs, round holes. People that perform well and are rewarded accordingly in their jobs are proven to be the most content. We’d like everyone to be content…Gain insight into your work and become an all-star. We’ll help you get there.

Perhaps it is the establishments I frequent, but it’s my impression that, outside the very high-end restaurants (think the late, lamented Côte Basque in NYC), folks don’t consider waiting on tables as a life’s work. It’s a rent-payer while in school. It’s a stop-gap to get you out of your parents’ house. It’s the cost of pursuing your muse-muse as a writer, poet, actor, dancer, musician. Or it’s pretty much all you can do, because you need to support your family, there are no jobs in town, and you don’t have a particularly strong skill-set. (Come on: whose dream is it to work at an Olive Garden or TGIF?)

But maybe in the all service, only service economy, waiting will become a real and widespread career choice, highly competitive and desirable.

God help us.