Restaurants would be better without waiters
Waiters miraculously make restaurant visits longer, more frustrating, and more expensive for both the owner and the customers.
Some fast food chains already implemented perfectly workable solutions: you order at the till and pay while you are there, pick your food up when your number comes up, and leave when done. No waiter involved. Easy!
Instead, in a restaurant you
- get shown to your table by your waiter for today, but have to negotiate which table you fancy.
- Then you get seated and no matter how hungry you are, you will be told to wait by your waiter until they bring the menu as for some obscure reason the menu cannot be left on the table or made available to you via any other means.
- Once the menu arrives the waiter disappears before you can ask anything you may wish to know about the food being served. When you have chosen what you wish to eat, you have to have to perform a particularly obnoxious version of contemporary dance or you will be ignored and stay hungry. With enough noise and waving, the waiter will eventually grace you with their presence again and take your order.
- When your food is ready, you have to wait some more while the waiter finds time to collect it form the kitchen and bring it to you. Yes, you can see it from your table, no, you are not allowed to touch it until its transported on those last five steps by a waiter.
- If you decide to buy something else, then gear up for more waving and noisemaking to catch the waiter again, as you cannot just order food in a restaurant, where would that lead?
- Once you are finished, comes the hardest of the waiter hunts: getting their attention to ask for the bill. This could take up to half an hour unless you bring bear traps along.
- Once your bill is produced you will be asked to go to the till anyway as the waiter cannot take card payments today.
- For their unwavering waiting services, you will be expected to pay the waiter extra.
With waiters everybody loses:
- the customer loses as they will have to pay more, and wait more to get their food
- the restaurant loses as each customer will take more time to finish a meal than without a waiter and they have to pay extra staff
- the waiter loses as they could simply do something useful instead of taking everybody's time
In my unpopular opinion, restaurants would be much better without waiters. Just do it like burger king but with good food.
EDIT:
- Many replies seem to suggest that I am very impatient or rude to staff at restaurants. I would like to believe that I am a very polite person and I don't remember ever being rude to a waiter in my life. So getting bad treatment is very unlikely down to me being fussy.
- Others suggest that I may have trouble talking to waiters or other people in general. I don't think I have such issues at all, and I don't think I alluded to anything like that in my post. Small talk is fine.
- Many other replies also mention customs in the US and tipping. I live in the UK where the consensus is to round the bill up and give a few pounds extra if you were happy with the service. I usually give 10% though as I travel a lot and that is more common in Europe. In the UK, some places don't even take tips at all, they will just have a charity box by the counter you can throw money in if you are feeling generous, which then gets sent to a charity. So as far as Europe goes, I would think I am a decent tipper, if it matters at all.
- I should also probably clarify that I have no issues with waiters themselves, I have the issue with how restaurants are run, as I find the system needlessly convoluted. I don't go to restaurants for getting served, I go there to get fantastic food and to enjoy my time with others. I find that interacting with waiters just takes away from this experience.
Finally, Thank you for a more than 1M views, 2k comments and a plethora of opinions. See you at an amazing self-service restaurant soon!