Food service is a hard business to be in. There are many different types of cuisine that can be made and similarly, there are many types of situations to deal with. The lunch and dinner rushes are stressful, end of the night chores are a huge burden, on top of preparing food for customers and having to deal with mean customers. These are all situations your average food worker must deal with. Food workers are people, too.
Lunch and dinner rushes stress everyone out. I work at Subway, and on one particular day there were only two of us at work. Respectfully, that one Memorable Day it was as if the floodgates had opened. It was as if every person in the area wanted a sandwich right then and right there. My coworker and I had to balance making sandwiches and ringing people up in an orderly fashion. Which was an extremely stressful situation for my coworker and myself. Rushes during lunch and dinner are stressful, not only for customers - who have to wait for their food - but also for the workers themselves because they have to get the customer their food in a timely manner. Not only do food workers have to deal with the rush, they also have to do other chores to either prepare the store for the day or to close up the store.
Food workers have much more to do than actually prepare the food for customers. Working with food actually has way more to it that anyone would think. There’s the obvious: Washing dishes, taking out the trash and cleaning up the lobby area. But then there is the hard stuff; taking down the food preparation stations, cleaning any ovens and taking inventory. More recently at Subway, I have been learning how to close up the store. This involves a lot more cleaning than someone would think. It's very stressful when I have to close by myself (which, every time I do close, it's by myself), so when customers come in while I am in the middle of a chore, I'm less than pleased. The other night for example, I wasn't able to actually start closing chores till 9:40 p.m. and we close at 10:00 p.m. Long story short, I didn't leave the store until 10:45 at night. That's a whole 45 minutes longer I was required to stay to get everything done as the customers wouldn't stop coming in. Food workers have enough on their plates with chores and making food for customers, that to deal with a customer who is rude or mean just rubs sand in an open wound.
Customers are great - they are the reason food work exists. However, sometimes they can be really rude and inconsiderate. Consequently, this makes for an unhappy worker. Not only did someone just criticize the worker on something the customer (most likely) knows almost nothing about but they probably just made the food worker's day from an okay day to a horrible day. All because a customer was being rude or mean. I also work at Papa Murphy's and a good while ago we had this regular come in. We always mess up his order so his anger was justifiable, but his actions were not. We had messed his order (yet again) and he was beyond angry. He started yelling at the person on the register and threw his receipt at her. He made the poor girl cry from his fiery attitude. So being the shift leader, I made his pizza. Once I had finished it he gripped my arm really hard and reluctantly told me that he didn't mean to make her cry and that he was sorry. This ruined all of the employees' days at work that day.
In conclusion, food work is hard. But not impossible. There are many trials that come with food work such as the lunch and dinner rushes, the end of the night chores and mean customers. Food workers are people too, and deserve to be treated as such!
