The Anchor

Today was Friday, and I sold less than $300 in product over lunch. A bleak anti-climax & a heinous waste of five cups of coffee. Why did it happen? Snow. The curse of the server, scourge of the restaurant world; bad weather makes people stay inside. If your restaurant does delivery, I don’t need to tell you that a good rain storm or even the slightest hint of snowfall can whip any kitchen into a total flurry of crossfire & activity, but the dining room will always suffer for anything but a mid-temperature overcast summer day.

When lunch sales are off, it’s a good idea to offer the close. Whoever’s closing tonight usually has to do it every night, and it’s never a far leap from a bad lunch to volunteering second or third cut. Restaurant workers will always read far too much into a lunch, but the bottom line is that even under the harshest conditions, most restaurants will pull off fifteen hundred dollars total for the day & everyone involved. That money has to go to somebody; if you let it be known that you’re willing to put the time in, they’ll let you. Provided that your supervisor isn’t overly anal and your closer is disenchanted at the idea of a long, lonely night, odds are you can get that person to cut their losses and make up for some lost time.

The thing about closing is this: the only thing you have to gamble is your time. It doesn’t cost you anything tangible to be there. You are accumulating money just by leaning against a counter in wait station, so if your lunch sales were sub-par, don’t just throw your hands up and leave! Servers are notorious for bailing immediately after their first whiff of a slow night, so capitalize! Don’t fear the close. The close is long, the close is hard, and it will always mean enduring endless jabbering around eight or eight thirty, which makes it extremely unattractive. My experience is that everyone gets along fine until it’s time for somebody to leave. As the closer, you don’t need to haggle for cut rights, but it’s your job to assign duties. This is good for two reasons:

The people who made the most money get to do the most work, and the right people are rarely in the position to make this happen. Also, you can establish yourself as a fair & firm server now, and they’re far less likely to try getting something over on you another night, specifically those when the situation is reversed. No soap opera or youthful, spirited whining match could ever match the heavy political fahrenheit inherent in any restaurant, most especially those with an exclusively male or female serving staff. I’ve seen GMs throw their hands in the air and tell an entire squabbling mob of servers to ‘just work it out amongst yourselves’ before fading into darkness to the echoing sounds of evil laughter, pale blue eyes gleaming from our walk-in and lasciviously rubbing hand over hand while the mob degenerated into an all-out frenzy.

Stand tall above this crowd on slow nights. Let the animals sort themselves out and plug along with your tables, because while they’re all struggling for supremacy you’re mopping up what little sales there are. If only two hundred dollars moves through the store after eight o’clock, that’s a bad night indeed & completely not worth sitting on two servers for. But if you’re the only one on the floor, it’s the difference between sixty dollars and eighty. As a human being, it’s not worth three hours. But as a server, banking their tips and living (scarcely) off of paychecks, if you put it in your head to follow this script for snowy days, you might find yourself off to Tahiti a little sooner than you thought.