About 16.4 million Americans worked in the hospitality industry as of October 2018, according to numbers from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The industry employs restaurant servers, hotel housekeepers, concierges, bartenders, and much more. Despite that, there are still some pervasive myths about how the hospitality industry does (or in some cases, should) operate. Here are three myths worth correcting.
The customer is always right
The phrase “The customer is always right” was created more than 100 years ago by the founder of a London department store. It was originally intended to be a way of saying, “Hey, this place will give you good customer service.” Unfortunately, it’s led to a lot of entitled customers coming in and demanding outrageous things because they’ve been led to believe that “the customer is always right.”
For one thing, it often makes workers feel like they can’t do anything right because their supervisors will always back the customer rather than their employees. Managers who will stand up and tell a customer “You’re not acting right” or “We need you to leave” are few and far between. Managers fear that a customer will complain to the corporate office, and the the corporate office will discipline the manager somehow.
Treating customers with respect is important, but at some point, it has to be a two-way street. A customer can’t tell a waitress, “I like your hair; you should give it to me.” Hospitality workers are employees, not servants. They shouldn’t be expected to cater to every single whim a customer has just because of a saying that was formulated in 1909. A polite, reasonable request is much more likely to get the customer what they’re seeking.
Profit margins are high
In January 2016, the net profit margin for full-service restaurants stood at 6.1 percent. That may seem great, but it’s actually just about the 5 percent margin rate that experts say is necessary to grow your business. For fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, the margins are often lower. That means restaurant owners and managers have to be methodical with how they spend their money.
If a fast-casual restaurant needs plastic cutlery for to-go orders, they can’t just hop on down to the local grocery store and grab some boxes of cutlery. That would get super-expensive really fast. Instead, they have to order from wholesale restaurant suppliers like VEGA Direct to keep costs down.
If you’ve ever been in a restaurant during a weekday rush hour and wondered why there aren’t more employees, that’s probably because managers weren’t expecting a big crowd on a Wednesday. They know to schedule more people to work on Friday and Saturday nights because there are usually more couples and families going out those nights. But if a bus full of high school athletes comes into the restaurant on a Wednesday night, they may just have to wing it with the staffers who are on hand.
Tipping doesn’t matter
Tipping is not mandatory. The fancier an establishment, the more likely it is that tips are expected. In other words, a high-end steakhouse will expect diners to tip more often than a neighborhood coffee shop, and employees at a luxury hotel in Manhattan should expect tips to be more common than staffers at a Motel 6 in rural Kansas.
That said, tipping is a nice thing to do most of the time — many service industry employees rely on them for their paycheck. When you order pizza, there’s a delivery charge, but the delivery charge is not the same thing as a tip. Most or all of that charge usually goes back to the business. Working to deliver food or clean hotel rooms is harder than it looks. Most of us couldn’t do it for more than a few days without snapping. A tip is a quiet way to show that you appreciate the unseen work someone is doing on your behalf.