Five Finger Discount, June 16th

This post is based on actual events, but it is a work of fiction. It’s a three-part story. This is Chapter Two.

The next summer I was up for a new plan. I saw how much the servers pulled in at The Filling Station and I was anxious to earn. So with my solid hostess experience boldly on my resume, I applied for a job at Hooligans in my hometown of New City. I thought the hostess gig would catapult me right into a server spot, but I quickly learned from the application that they wanted actual waitressing experience. So I did what any ambitious college kid would do. I lied. I wrote that I picked up three shifts a week at a seasonal restaurant on campus called The Depot. And they wouldn’t be able to check my references because (sigh) the place was only open during the school year. (Sorry!) I got the job.

Savvy to the restaurant world, lingo and characters, I felt confident I could be a great server. I told them right off the bat that I had a day job so I could only do dinner shifts. (Another lie. This was starting to come naturally to me.) But I could work five or six evenings a week if they needed me. The lunch crowd was pretty lame, and I wanted to make some real cash during the busy dinner rush. They slotted me in immediately. Summer was pretty happening at Hooligans and they needed all the competent help they could hire.

Wardrobe was next. Servers were required to wear solid polo shirts in happy colors and any type of khaki bottom: shorts, pants or skirts. I ran right over to the Nanuet Mall and purchased six pair of khaki shorts and a rainbow of polo shirts. My white Reebok high tops would be working overtime. Already in the hole a few dollars I was anxious to begin.

Hooligans didn’t have a formal training program. Instead they paired the newbies with Careers. I was assigned to shadow a mini tornado of a woman named Bev. She was petite and perky with a high ponytail that bobbed when she walked. Bev could handle two stations at once if we got slammed at the door. She never wrote down an order and was lighting fast with drinks. She could also carry one of the large trays holding five entrées without breaking a sweat. Bev was the only server who never once broke a plate. She was basically the queen bee. So much so that everyone called her Bee instead of Bev. She didn’t stay late and drink after hours with the crew. She was strictly business and out. The managers depended on her and the guests requested her station.

I shadowed Bee for my first two shifts. She was friendly and efficient. She had the whole process down to a science. Greet and smile, offer a beverage and answer any questions, punch in drinks, retrieve drinks, take order. Checks should be printed and promptly delivered. (When a guest waits for a check the tip tends to plummet.) Be available. Sometimes flatware drops or more ketchup is needed. Nothing is worse than hot food getting cold, and you can’t find your server to bring you a new fork. Smile and say yes even if the guest is rude. Don’t hesitate to grab a manager to have him comp an item if your table isn’t fully satisfied.

She would circle her station before she hit the kitchen to retrieve a multitude of items at the same time. Table 107 needed extra napkins, 110 asked for another gin and tonic, and 112 asked for the check. She punched in the drink order first. While Nicky was making the drink she printed out the bill for 112 and grabbed a stack of napkins on her way to the service bar to retrieve the G&T. She was fluid, natural, and graceful. She didn’t just show me the ropes; she explained the short cuts, the kitchen layout, and the computer codes to type in orders. The path to success with the kitchen was to always offer them a cold drink—it was a sauna back there and they had no access to beverages, only food. It became sort of quid pro quo—you get me drinks, I make your food.

The kitchen had their favorites. If they didn’t like you, your food was cold, wrong or slow and your tips suffered. Most of them spoke some version of Spanish and English. But they all smiled at me, so I smiled back. I learned their names quickly. I was not going to let anyone screw up my cash flow and I was happy to make a few friends at the same time. Endorsed by Bee and a steady stream of “Pessi” with ice, I was in.

The kitchen hated Elliot. He was Career but a disaster. He was always losing the paper he wrote orders on, forgetting to ring in entrées then storming back to the kitchen to demand his food be made on the fly. He never had a pen for a guest to sign a check so he would shake down the other servers, and he hung out at the front chatting up the cute hostesses when his tables needed him. He once had an “incident” with the milk machine. Apparently it happened last year but the kitchen still talked about it. He accidentally knocked over the huge tower that housed the milk when he was doing his sidework and there was an epic spill. It took two dishwashers, a manager, one wet vac, a mop and two buckets to clean up the whole mess. He had since been called Lechero (milk man in Spanish) by the entire back line.

A whole bunch of newbies started the same week that I did. There was a sizable college contingency wanting to make extra cash and the summer was Hooligans’ busiest time. It seemed like easy money. There were about fifteen of us. Waitressing was fun but it was stressful and physically demanding. A dinner shift kept you moving non-stop for at least eight hours straight, and then there was a clean-up sheet with sidework after your tables all paid out. Sidework chores were restocking glassware, ketchup condensing, cleaning the milk tower, garbage to the curb out back, and resetting the stations. It was sort of like the job wheel in camp. Not everyone could hack it, regardless of the tips. Some servers got bogged down with order entry and would end up “in the weeds” totally backed up and scrambling around the kitchen.

We all hated the tea set up. It was a saucer with a beverage napkin, tea hottle with hot water, slice of lemon, spoon and a tea bag along with a separate saucer and teacup. None of those items were geographically adjacent to one another so a tea could take two full minutes of running around to prepare—a lifetime in the kitchen when your station was fully sat. Steffie had three tables in a row order tea. That was her last shift. Some servers just quit to get away from the demanding customers. Others made so little in tips that they bailed. After training, only ten newbies remained including my friend Tracey and me.

I learned the computer entry system pretty quickly and although unlike Bee I had to write down orders, I was starting to memorize the codes for the food. So instead of writing down a house salad with blue cheese dressing, I would write 110/14. A medium cooked burger was 200/2. The first number was the food item and the second was a food modifier. So we were able to type in no cheese, or extra dressing or well done. My order pad was just a scribble of numbers, but they all made sense to me.

At the restaurant, servers were entitled to one shift meal when we worked. At Hooligans we all ate together pre-shift because the nights were very long, and we would all go out after work drinking. I loved the fries with an enormous vat of their homemade ranch dressing to dip, and the chicken quesadilla also became a favorite. Tracey and I would occasionally gorge on the breadsticks and they also took a swim in the ranch. Bee told me they used to have an item on the menu called Irish Nachos. It was loaded nachos with layered cheese, salsa, sour cream, japs, and chili, but instead of using tortilla chips as the base they used those spectacular skinny fries. Even though it was scrapped from the menu, if you asked the kitchen nicely, they’d make it. Sodas and a smile worked wonders for Lechero’s haters. (This photo courtesy of allrecipies.com)

At Hooligans we carried our own bank. This meant that we had to make change from our own pockets, ring in credit cards ourselves, and be able to cash out at the end of the night. The manager would print out a tally of our total owed and after we paid in, he would give us our credit card tips in cash that we would combine with the cash we had already collected.

As servers, we had to get a variety of items ourselves. House salads and all dressings were to the right of the expediter station (Right X) where all the food came up through the windows and sat under heated lights. Fries and breadsticks were in warmers to the left (Left X). There was a huge walk-in freezer way in the back near the dishwasher station. We only hit the walk-in to grab birthday cakes. We had to stream all non-alcoholic beverages ourselves from the soda gun and visit the service bar to pick up all alcohol.

Once I knew the routine, work was fun, the tips were amazing, and the shifts flew by. And, when our friends came in, we five-finger discounted them all with the stuff we knew we could grab ourselves without having to ring anything into the system. So it was free fries, breadsticks, salads, ranch, and lots and lots of birthday cakes that summer. (Twitter showcasing The Simpson’s Four Finger Discount below.)

Every time we delivered a cake, the whole waitstaff would band together around the table and sing the Hooligans Happy Happy Birthday song. It was a riot every time, it riled up the staff and the whole restaurant usually sang along. It improved our mood and more importantly our tips.

A month in, the computer system was buggy and for the opening of dinner Tuesday, we were not able to ring in sodas. The 900 key was broken. So for that single hour, we were told that sodas were on the house. So we wrote that message on our checks. Because of the way the system worked, we were able to print out as many check copies as we needed or wanted. And we would add our names, or a smiley face or a message to personalize the experience for our tables. These checks were never collected or saved since a new copy could always be printed again if necessary. By the end of the dinner rush, the 900 key was fixed and it was business as usual.

That is until Gary, a slimy unshaven Career, had a brilliantly greedy idea. We were hanging at Right X waiting on two separate fry orders when he told me his plan. He was going to start stealing soda. How could you steal soda? And why? They were only $1 a pop. I was not a goody-two shoes, but I never considered becoming an actual thief. Ok, clarification, just the ice cream last summer. Then I started to think… I stole those sundaes last summer from The Filling Station and lied on my application about prior waitress experience here. I helped myself to birthday cakes, breadsticks, and fries for all of my friends. Perhaps all of these infractions groomed me for my next step?

“So you don’t charge them for sodas, right?” he says. “And then when you hand them the check and you see they are paying in cash, you say ‘Oh! I forgot to ring in those sodas!’ So it’s $1 a piece and you tack that onto the bill. So let’s say the table had three sodas and two refills. That’s $5. You write that at the bottom and re-total the check. The check you write on and throw away. So the dude pays you in cash, and you keep the soda money as tip money. And you just made five extra bucks. With a station of six tables that turn four times in a night, you can make an extra hundred bucks just in soda. Or more.” No shit.

Gary already told Bee. I told Tracey. Tracey told Steve and Steve told Maya from the lunch crew. By mid-July, most of the waitstaff had racked up a few extra dollars. Management knew nothing. They were aware that a few six packs of steaks had disappeared from the walk-in and from time to time, half-drunk bottles of Absolut miraculously vanished from the bar. They printed out a food list at the end of the night to see what dishes moved and tracked alcohol consumption, but sodas were not on their radar after the computer glitch. They weren’t even listed on the nightly printout after the 900 key went nuts.

For the month of August, not one single soda was keyed into the Hooligans system. We estimated that the summer scam cost the restaurant well over $400,000. By the time one of the servers leaked details to the weekend general manager, all the college students were heading back to school. All ten of us escaped the early morning management meeting where lives were threatened and National was furious. Big wigs from the Midwest were flown in to weed out the thieves and fire some of the staff. Not many were left to purge. Gary and Bee claimed they had no knowledge of the scheme and were left alone. Lechero was thought to be the ringleader and was promptly fired.

On my last shift, we hosted a big party to celebrate my friend Tracey’s birthday with Irish Nachos gifted from the kitchen staff, a five-finger discounted cake from the walk-in, a loud and boisterous version of the birthday song from all the servers, and bottomless sodas for everyone.