The interview for the day is completed; I turn off the tape recorder and gather up my notes. My mother rearranges a few things— paper napkins, salt and pepper shakers, some letters_—on the cluttered table. “You know,” she muses, folding the napkins, “you learn a lot as a waitress. You work like hell. But you [...]
The social dynamics of the service encounter affect the tip, a critical economic consideration, given that the base pay in most restaurants is terribly low. The wage structure forces a reliance on gratuity, so the successful waitress soon learns how to play the dynamics to maximize her income. There is actually a fair-sized social-psychological literature [...]
Remembering orders, being vigilante and regulating the flow of work all play out in an emotional field. “Eating is the most intimate act,” writes Lin Rolens, “we are encouraged to perform in public.” And Dorothy Sue Cobble, who has studied waitress unions, observes that waitresses “are responding to hungers of many kinds.” This emotional field [...]
The waitress’s response is shaped by various kinds of knowledge of the restaurant: knowledge of the menu, of preparation times, of the layout of the place. Included here is a knowledge of emotional dynamics, both a folk psychology about dining out and the characteristics of particular customers. My mother, twenty years after retirement, can recount [...]
look straight ahead to where you’re going to take your food. You can’t just look completely to the side, carrying all those plates— you could lose your sense of balance. As you’re going out of the kitchen, you more or less take little glances to the side. This vigilance—from a stationary point or while in [...]
