"No matter how many hours you worked, you always had 40 hours on your paycheck. Then they fired this guy and he went and reported it, that they weren't paying us any overtime...I don't know where you go to do this, but he did.

So at the next meeting the owner sits us all down and explains that he's cutting everyone's shifts because he was trying to work with us so that we could get more hours but now...So he completely flipped it around and made us the issue, like we had caused it all. Fuck you! What kind of morality is that?

And that's when I started stealing drinks from the bar."

--Waitress at a sushi place above 14th street

Stealing is a huge issue in the restaurant industry. You've got cash everywhere and often times little accountability. Of course, the person who gets away the most with the stealing is the owner. He's usually ripping off the government first off, and then he's taking what he can from his staff.

The most blatant example of IRS robbery occurs down in the Lower East side. Notice all those bars with the old-timey push button registers? Why do you think that is? Do you think it maybe has something to do with the fact that a register from the 1940's doesn't have a computerized record of how much was sold that night, or are you still believing that it's just an aesthetic issue, creating a special ambience while you suck down another $8 mojito?

And all this skeevy behavior on the owner's part has a trickle down effect, ensuring that everyone else starts stealing to try and shift the balance of injustice. Here's Roger talking about a waiter caught at his restaurant which sits south of NYU.

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There was a guy, this just happened last week. A guy who worked there since last winter, and we all kind of thought he was a little shady. He would always, like, want the best sections, and like...of course everybody does, but he was mean about it.

And he was always, "Well, I'm on the clock now, and I'm supposed to take over this table."

"Well, no! I want to keep this table and this section." It was just little things like that.

And some of the servers didn't really trust him very much.

Then we found out he would get ahold of the manager's card and he would start adding gratuity to, like, a lot of his tables. Like, there would be two people and he would add 22% gratuity. And he had this policy that if they speak a foreign language or have an accent, then he would grat them.

That's not fair. The whole thing about serving is that it all equals out. Sure. Some people will only tip you a dollar, some people will tip you 25%. Ya' know? It all evens out.

So he started doing that and our owner found out--started freaking out! Nobody can get the manager card now, and everybody was really mad at the waiter because now we can't grat any of our tables. And we can't void anything, or anything. Now it's a huge deal to get anything voided.

So people started to turn against him a little bit. Then last week...or maybe two weeks ago, our owner started to go through some of the old paperwork and he found out that this guy's tips were not matching up with what people had written on their credit card receipts. Basically, what this guy had been doing for several months is taking the tips from the credit cards and entering a dollar or two more onto it.

They started to go back and count how much, and the last I heard they were up to $900 that he had stolen. So the manager went down and pressed charges-well, he first fired him-then sat on it for a little while and thought, "He should go to jail."

So he was arrested and when he was at the police station, there was a call to owner and they asked, "Do you know a Ben, 'cause Ben knew what he was doing all along, and is a possible accomplice."

So the owner calls this other waiter Ben up--who was busy dong a film set that day--and starts freaking out on Ben. Completely paranoid that Ben was stealing, but it was all made up.

But if I knew he was stealing...Honestly, I might not have gone to the owner 'cause with servers, there's a lot of crap going on and we don't go tell on each other. But we wou;d have talked about it among ourselves and it would have gotten back to the owner. Everyone would have known.
7:13:07 AM     comment []