Avdat

In which I call for a fair service movement

I made some good tips the other night. A $9 tip on an $18 bill, and a $40 tip on a $150 bill (nice! Thank you Russian-immigrant-sounding family!) But the server in the next-door section went home with just $25. Stiffed twice. And on a Saturday night!

It's a maddening aspect of the hospitality industry. Bad service will earn you a bad tip every time, but good service won't necessarily earn you a good tip.

I've blogged about tipping before, and Kyle's comment made real sense to me:

A couple years back, I told my dad that I don't consider the tip a payment for quality of service; I merely consider it part of the bill, part of my calculation for how much something will cost when I look at a price on the menu. Thus, no matter what the quality of service, my tip remains about the same (usually the nearest round number above fifteen percent). My dad, who is notoriously cheap (though he's been better since two sons had waiting jobs), was flabbergasted, but I think this is really the only attitude one can have if one wants to work for a Christian sense of social justice given the unfortunate realities of waiter pay in this country.

A "Christian sense of social justice" has spurred a whole lot of people to shell out a few more dollars for clothing that's not manufactured in sweat shops, or coffee that came from a farmer who was paid a fair price for his crop. Where's the justice for waiters and waitresses? In most states, we only make $2.13 per hour. If you're only tipping 10%, you're stealing the server's labor. We need a Fair Service movement to match the Fair Trade movement.

I can imagine service so wretched that a small tip is justified. There are some sketchy people in the hospitality industry, and on rare occasions, you might draw the seriously hung over waiter or the racist waitress whose service deserves a mere $2.13. Just remember that a lot of things can go wrong in a restaurant, and many of them might not be the server's fault. Stiffing the server often punishes an innocent party.

In the meantime, Mr. and Mrs. Casual Dining Customer, let me be so bold as to encourage you to be better guests by not committing the following gaffes (all of which either I or my co-workers have had to deal with):

1. For God's sake, sit where the host wants you to sit. It ain't for grins 'n' giggles that she's led you to that table. It may well be that the other table you think is so great is in a section whose server is totally in the weeds. Sit there, and expect to wait a while to be greeted. Even longer to get your food and drinks.
2. Don't try to order food and talk on your cell phone at the same time.
3. Don't order stuff that's not on the menu and take umbrage when it's not what you expected. For instance, I serve in a casual dining chain, not a Tiki bar. If you order a zombie, we'll give it our best shot, but casual dining in Richmond ain't lounging on the beach at Key West. Also, we ain't a fish camp. We don't do hush puppies. And another thing; don't ask for steamed spinach when it's not on the menu; complain that said steamed spinach doesn't amount to much (it wilts, you know, when you steam it!) and then when I bring out a Popeye-sized pile of steamed spinach, look at me with offended disbelief and say, "That's a lot of spinach, don't you think?" I won't say it, but I will think, "OK, Goldilocks, next time I'll bring out a scale from the kitchen and get the portion just right."
4. Don't think that coming into the restaurant for your to-go order absolves you from tipping. Especially if you drive a black BMW. I bring you the food just the same, and even if I make a tad more per hour for to-go service, I ask you, "What job on earth would you do for $4.00 per hour? Stop stealing from me!"

For extra credit: you parents of small children, resist the urge to feed them saltine crackers you've collected from the salad bar. The crumbs go everywhere, and when they mix with the condensation from the glasses, the stuff sets up like concrete. It's a mess to clean up. But props to you for being one of the better tipping demographics.

You have a right to be pessimistic

In the spirit of "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," you can't help but wonder if the 21st century isn't shaping up to be a repeat of the 14th.

At least, you can't help but wonder that if you have a blog and are all too willing to pontificate about stuff you don't know much about, exploiting the (slight) advantage in knowledge that you have about the Middle Ages over (some of) your readers.

But I digress.

So western Europe had a great run from the 11th through the 13th centuries. The Vikings settled down. Not too many famines. Hamlets became towns, and towns became cities. Kings flexed their muscles way off in the Holy Land.

And then in the 14th century there were so many more people in Europe that all those hungry mouths overtook the good weather and the new, improved farming implements. And then weather got bad, and people starved. And then the Black Death came.

Now this is a cautionary tale. Even many of us who are smart enough to decry the liberal myth of progress operate, if at an unconscious level, under the assumption that things really will get better, eventually. The economy will bounce back. It always has in the past.

But I wonder if these last 200 years haven't been modernity's version of the High Middle Ages, and while it's been a nice run, it's definitely run its course. So global warming = the Great Famine of 1315-17, and the Black Death = I dunno, an asteroid?

Comeback kid?

Why was I wondering out loud about a Marxist comeback in a class titled The History Reformed Thought in America? Well, the professor was reading from Cornell West, who was lamenting that the American theological landscape is populated by so many Lilliputians. There are the ones who just want to read and re-read and regurgitate Barth, and then there are the Liberationists whose theology is oh-so-thin. Yes, Cornell West said that.

Which got me to thinking about the strongly Liberationist bent of my MDiv education. I couldn't see it at the time, but Liberation Theology in 1993 was a dead man walking. I mean, the Wall had come down, and with it the Marxist analysis that under-girded Liberation Theology. History wasn't hurtling toward a showdown between labor and management that would yield a worker's paradise. History had ended well short of that prophesied event, and we'd been bequeathed a realized eschatology of  401k investments in tech stocks.

But in the seminaries nobody noticed. So we read a lot of theology that castigated consumerism, and longed for the American Empire to get her comeuppance. Oh, how they longed to gloat with the heavenly hosts over the whore of Babylon's fall!

Are they gloating now? With global capitalism collapsing, will the Liberation theologians get to say, See, I told you so? Will Marx get a fresh hearing, especially in those second world nations who've made so many advances over the past two decades, only to see their gains evaporate in a haze of greedy, dishonest, unregulated speculation?

My professor says No. Except for sub-Saharan Africa and South America the rest of the world is so economically enmeshed with the dysfunctional U.S. financial system that gloating is the farthest thing from anyone's mind. "Everyone's" hoping and praying that we can get our fiscal house in order, lest we take down with us hundreds of millioons of people who've clawed their way out of absolute poverty. In other words, so many people are in bed with the Whore of Babylon, both Christian and pagan alike, that the theologically responsible reply is to mourn with the merchants and seafaring men, rather than sing, Burn, baby burn.

So what say you? What's the appropriate lens through which one might evaluate the global depression and what's the appropriate Christian response?

Stimulating

This Washington Post article outlines liberal concerns about Obama's stimulus package. Some fear is that the plan isn't bold enough. There is relatively little money for mass transit and green energy vis a vis the tax cuts.

I'm not that troubled by this. Obama ran his campaign like it was a marathon, not a sprint. There was a lot of panic along the way, as Hillary dug into Obama's lead with the 3:00 AM ad, and in September when the Republicans went wild over Sarah Palin. Obama seemed slow to respond. But his pace was just right. In that WaPo article his officials argue that there will be other chances to put the economy on a greener, healthier, long term footing. I expect he's right. For all the hype about the first hundred days, the Presidency is a marathon too, especially when trying to dig oneself out of the crater in which we find ourselves.

The Republicans have attacked the plan around the edges--the Medicaid money for family planning,re-doing the sod on the National Mall--but the bulk of the plan is aid to states and infrastructure repair. This is stuff that simply has to be done. You can't let interstate highway bridges just keep on collapsing like that one in the Twin Cities. And I don't think you can tighten Medicaid eligibility requirements right when literally tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs and their insurance on a daily basis. It's a completely cynical posture, to say that you're against wasteful government spending, and then force the states--whom your small government, federalist vision ostensibly lauds--to do the dirty work for you by scrubbing the Medicaid rolls, laying off teachers and closing prisons.

They're betting that it's 1993, and the country is still basking in the afterglow of its Reagan-inspired rightward lurch. I think that the country is experiencing a serious hangover from our Second Gilded Age, and is open to a firmer hand on the wheel. At least these party line votes will give voters a clear idea whom to blame and praise next time around.

Know fear

We're in a credit crunch, a recession, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, blah, blah, blah.

See, I know all these things intellectually, but since I'm not laid-off or stuck with a home that won't sell, I don't know them in a visceral way.

Well, I finally read something that boiled it all down into terms I can understand, and this is it.  If I weren't a Christian and more or less forbidden to give myself over totally to panic, I'd say, Now's a good time to panic.

Aiding and abetting

At The Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten In Before where I wait tables, the computer is God, omniscient and providential. It knows your tip percentage. It knows how many pricey add-ons your guests order--appetizers, cocktails, desserts. It knows what the guests who fill out the online surveys think about you.

From this data the computer generates a score which determines how often your section is seated per round. This sets up the age-old battle between merit and seniority. Veteran servers resent it when a new employee gets seated more than they do just because they're more highly rated.

More interesting is that it recasts the waiter's role as a salesperson. Some of my co-workers simply cannot stand being put in the position of pushing "food that's going to be thrown away to people who don't need it," as another server said to me.

We do throw away a shocking amount of food. Half-eaten burgers, piles of french fries, half-melted ice cream running around a nibbled on piece of chocolate cake--it all goes into a 50 gallon trash can that we fill every shift. Interestingly, I've never had to pitch a half-drunk bottle of beer!

It's also quite true that people don't need all this food. Americans are fat, fat, fat people. So fat that a lot of them simply cannot fit into our booths. My opinion is that if your man boobs and your gut are pressing up and down on the table, performing a kind of human mammogram on our furniture, then rather than glaring at me, you should go home and eat celery sticks for dinner.

The co-worker I mentioned earlier vowed she'd have to work the rest of her life for the Peace Corps to atone for working in such an environment. I replied that we all have a lot to atone for, just living in this country.

For me it raises the issue of individual responsibility in the face of structural sin. I am reminded of Phillip Hallie's book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, about the Huguenot pastor and pacifist, Andre Trocme, whose congregation and village saved 3,000 Jewish children from being murdered during World War II. Though a pacifist, Trocme served in the French military in the 1920s, and if I'm remembering the story correctly, declared his reservations about violence to his commanding officer while they were in the field in north Africa. His commander acidly responded that out here, it was too late to take an exception to violence, from which Trocme concluded that peacemaking's most important season was peace time. If one waits until hostilities have broken out in order to take a stand against violence, then one has waited too long.

What this has to do with my situation is that if you take your stand against American excess at the point of waiting tables in a casual dining eatery, you've waited too long. I do need the money, so I do talk up the appetizers. I also offer them a to-go box, and hope that they don't store up additional wrath for them and me by declining.

The Peace Corps is a great calling, but I hope that my co-worker, who is preparing for a career in the medical field, finds a way to serve here as well and educate people about good health, and not just treat them for the damage they've done to themselves by saddling up to buffet lines year after year.

But are people teachable? It is good to quote Thomas Jefferson when dumping a plate of soggy, uneaten salad into a trash can: "If God is just, I tremble for my country."

Maximizng our casual dining experience

I'm going to try to get my blogging mojo back by doing a few short posts on my life as a waiter at A Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten In Before. This post is a naked appeal on behalf of my serving brethren for more tips. In Virginia, servers make $2.13 per hour plus tips. Notice that the base rate is considerably lower than the minimum wage. In fact, if my visualization of a number line is at all accurate, it's closer to zero than the minimum wage. So please, be a generous tipper.

It's actually easier on your brain to tip generously. Say you have a $35.00 bill. Ten percent is $3.50 (just move the decimal). Twenty percent is twice that: $7.00. But if you were trying to do 15%, you'd have to take half of $3.50 (What is that? Half of $3 plus half of fifty cents, added to the original $3.50?) See how complicated that is? So do us all a favor and leave a twenty percent tip.

Now you, Gentle Reader, are naturally wondering, What should I do if the service is bad? Well, Gentle Reader, why was the service bad? Was your food late? Was it cold? Perhaps this was your server's fault because he left it to rot in the kitchen window. But it might have been the cook's fault because he came to work stoned as a bat, or because she was too busy yelling at stupid waiters who don't know what they're doing. Leaving a small tip won't punish the cook.

So here's what you do, provided that the service has been good otherwise. You ask to speak to the manager. In this economy the manager is under extraordinary pressure to maintain a good customer base. He or she will probably throw in a free dessert or make some other gesture to mollify your understandable rage at having to wait to chow down on that Southwestern Chicken or whatever. The manager will find out who's to blame and address it. And you leave a nice tip. Then there's no collateral damage.

One last thing. If you come with a coupon, tip on the gross, not the net bill. We servers have to tip out the bussers based on sales, not on tips. The other day I waited on some cheapskate who had a $38.00 bill and a $30.00 gift card. He left me a ten dollar bill to cover the difference, plus the tip. He probably thought that a two buck tip on an eight dollar bill was mighty big of him, but I did the work of a $38.00 bill, not an $8.00 bill, and I had to tip out on $38.00, not $8.00.

Now, dig in!

Stuff

You are in a fix, Gentle Reader.  You've been snapping toys together all day; they don't work; the kids are bored stiff, and you're having to peel them off the wall. You're starting to wish that you could go into work tomorrow, but you've already taken it for vacation, and no way is your spouse going to let you get off that easy. No, your parents are coming tomorrow, and you will not be allowed to abandon the bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh to them.

You need a distraction, but the blogosphere is shut down.  Nothing's a-Twittering. Is there a better time for Yours Truly to come out of blogging hibernation?  I ask you.

So here's some random observations:

• You've gotta admire President Bush's cat-like reflexes when that reporter threw a shoe at him. I know that boxing is a sport in the NC Senior Games. Texas too? I think we've found an avocation for the soon-to-be ex-President. The Secret Service might have misgivings, but I think if you put the man in the ring it'd be hard to land a punch on him.
• I didn't go to church last night, and I don't feel a bit guilty about it. At that Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before where I wait tables I closed Tuesday and opened Christmas Eve. And Mrs. Avdat waited up for me Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  We were beat. And seeing's how I've not only attended but led 14 Christmas Eve services in a row, I felt not the slightest sense of slacking off.
• I'm enjoying being a lay person. Sundays are completely different. Worship is worshipful. In some part this is due to our autistic son being in a good place right now, able to endure everything but the sermon, during which we excuse ourselves and wander about the church for a while. Certainly it has a lot to do with sitting with my family, actually praying instead of leading the congregation in prayer, actually listening for God's Word rather than proclaiming it, and so forth. My afternoon naps are pleasant, not at all like the near-drowning-in-my-own-drool sleep brought on by post-sermonic regret, and exhaustion.
• Why am I so relaxed? I think that, in part, it's due to the fact that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. If you aren't doing what you're supposed to be doing, life is hard, even if you're tolerably good at what you're doing, and well-compensated for it.
• In part, it's due to the fact that being a pastor is an extremely stressful undertaking. 46 Sundays per year (4 off for vacation, 2 for ConEd) for 14 years makes at least 644 opportunities for deciding whether to please God or please man. Odysseus only had to sail between the Scylla and the Charybdis once. Ministers have to thread that needle week after week after week. It's a terrible burden, the true weight of which I'm only now aware of having borne for so long. And there are men and women out there who have borne it much longer and continue to do so.
• Here's an interesting plea for outside intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The nature of the corner that the Israelis have painted themselves into is a choice between a perpetual low-grade war against the Palestinians under their authority and civil war within the Jewish state. Barring the sudden emergence of a Lincoln or Sadat on the Israeli political scene, it will take significant American and international pressure on the Israelis to do the right thing for the wrong reason, i.e., not so that the sons of Abraham and Ishmael can live together in perfect harmony, but because the Israeli economy cannot stand the inevitable black eye of having to put down another active intifada.
• A lousy idea to boost the economy: a national sales tax holiday. I've already blogged about the strange allure of what amounts to a 6-8% off sale, although I can't seem to find the link to it. Given that we're in this jam in part because we've been riding a paper profit/conspicuous consumption feedback loop, you'd think that we need a better plan than "Buy stuff you don't need with money you don't have."
• Isn't it great that John McCain isn't going to be President? Can you imagine tacking this economy with a freeze on discretionary spending and a new round of tax cuts for the masters of the universe who threw sand into the gears of the global financial system?

P.S. I have nothing to say about the Rick Warren flap because I never can think of anything substantive to say about symbolic issues.

Your dose of uninformed economic analysis

We own a Honda and a Toyota, so I have a hard time feeling sorry for the Big Three.  If they'd been building better cars they wouldn't be going to Washington hat in hand. 

And they could have.  The reason why Southwest Airlines is profitable today is that in 2003, with a war in Iraq on deck, the CEO said, "Golly!  Middle East turmoil might make Jet fuel costly!"  So he signed long term contracts and locked in low fuel prices.

I assume that the executives at Ford, Chrysler and GM read the same newspapers as that genius at Southwest.  They could have built a Prius.  And I would have bought one from them.  But they didn't.  They pretended that Global Warming and unstable oil supplies weren't problems.  And now they're paying for it.

The TARP legislation I was leery of has been de facto gutted.  The government won't buy bad debt, but they will buy equity stakes in banks to ensure liquidity.  Well, if the Big Three are too big to fail, just like the investment banks, I say, Treat them the same as we're treating the banks.  Nationalize them.  And put the new Secretary of Energy on their boards and force the blinkered leadership at those companies to engage in reality-based R&D.

wassup

Who knew that Dookie was a day-trader?

It's been a long eight years.

HT.