It also blows hiring. I was eating lunch with the CTO on my interview loop, and he was pitching me hard on the company. He treated the waitress (who gave us perfect service) so poorly that I instantly knew I would never want to work for this guy. Thinking back to every profoundly bad manager I've ever had (not bad in terms of 'ends' but bad in terms of 'means'), they all correlated with crapping on anyone they encountered in the service sector.
Who are all these people who chronically mistreat the waitstaff? I've been to restaurants with hundreds of different people and I've never seen anyone act abusively towards the servers.
I know people who work in retail, and suck people exist. There are not a massive proportion of society buy even a bit of a percent is a lot of people overall. You would might that people out for a nice relaxing meal, or shopping in the middle of a holiday, would be pleasant to deal with: but you'd be wrong. I know a number of people in retail and I can tell you (through indirect experience) that the general public can be unrealistically demanding and completely unpleasant if their demands are not met, repeatedly, yesterday.
By way of an anecdotal example: I know someone whose father thinks there is nothing wrong with clicking his finders and yelling "BOY!" at a waiter to get their attention. Except in Italian places - there it would be "Luigi" rather "boy". I bet he consumes a lot of spit when he goes out for a meal...
For many reasons many people out there are dicks. I might well be one of them if I'm honest with myself, though not one of the worst by a long shot. And if you work in retail or catering you are likely to meet far more than your fair share of them. Remember: most workers in a shops or restaurants deal closely with far more members of the public in a day than most of us encounter closely enough to notice in a year.
I might look better were it not surrounded by other typos and even one place where I appear to have typed completely the wrong word (or partly rearranged a sentence and failed to finish making the new form make sense...).
Possibly it's a random local experience, possibly the bad attitude towards people delivering pizza is caused by bad service, or possibly visa versa, but: in my experience, pizza delivery people suck.
Nearly all waiters/waitresses I've ever come across in restaurants have been fine or better, and the people in my local Chinese and Indian takeaways are really, really friendly.
But Dominos and Pizza Hut drivers? Eugh, they're all (and by "all" I mean "all who work in the two shops near where I live) really grumpy and sometimes even rude. If I order a pizza, there's a 50% chance I'll have to actually concentrate on not yelling at them. I've twice felt the need to complain to the Dominos franchise owner about a driver, something I've never done in any other industry, not because I wanted to get back at the driver, but because the service was genuinely so poor that I felt they deserved to hear from me. For example, if someone orders a Pizza for delivery, the driver should try and deliver it, not just decide that ringing the bell is too much hassle and that it would be easier to leave the pizza outside the door getting cold.
Probably just a coincidence, but an interesting one.
Well, I for one, fancied myself "The Deliverator"... right up until life imitated art and I obtained a bullet hole in my car during a robbery attempt. Having no arachno-fiber weave of my own, I sought umm... safer employ.
Perhaps its only the crazies that can stay with the job for more than a short while.
In the town where I went to college, you could easily make 20$ an hour as a delivery driver. This not including tips. Because the town had a high rate of drivers having been killed in robbery attempts. I think it's safer to work as a lumberjack than as a pizza delivery boy.
Its an opportunity for those without much self esteem to exercise power over someone that can't fight back without significant loss. Only dumb people piss off the people handling your food, but there's a big overlap between these two groups.
it happens daily in china, it's the norm--it shows who's boss and if you don't do it, you ironically don't gain respect. maybe the angel investor lived in china for a long time? :)
this is an excellent anecdote, lucky the waitress f'd up.
