I'm a server at the Olive Garden, which I think used to be a somewhat nice restaurant but is now in my opinion sort of 'faux-nice'. The atmosphere is nice enough and the servers wear ties, but the prices are reasonable enough to where you could take your family out and feed everyone pretty well without it getting too expensive. This does tend to attract some pretty low-class people, but overall the money isn't too bad and it's really not that hard of a job.
On Sundays, I usually work nights, partly because it's a longer shift and the Sunday night crowd tends to be really cool and laid back, but mostly I work Sunday night to avoid having to deal with the notoriously bad Sunday lunch crowd, built up mostly of church goers. Recently for whatever reason I got switched to Sunday lunches. I think yesterday was my 3rd Sunday lunch shift in a row.
I'll just say that there's a reason why no one likes waiting on the church crowd. As a Christian myself, it shames me to see how most of these church goers treat servers. The majority of them are cheap, impatient, a little smug, and often times borderline rude. This isn't to say that you don't run into plenty of this type of customer during the rest of the week, but when you wait on fifteen tables in a row of nicely dressed church goers who aren't too nice and tip you badly, you can't help but draw conclusions about those people.
If you're reading this and you're unfamiliar with general tipping ettiquette: 15% of the check is considered standard. 20% or so would be a good tip, and 10% usually indicates something was wrong with the service. A tip below 10% is considered an insult. Yesterday I got more than a few tips around and below the 10% range from people who had obviously just come from church. What is someone suppossed to feel about a group of people who are for the most part rude and insulting to them while preaching just the opposite?
I was talking to a friend of mine who I serve with who is also a Christian and I was telling him how embarrassed I was by the reputation that the church crowd/Christians have earned, and he said 'Yeah, if waiting on Christians was all I knew of them, all I would feel toward Christianity would be animosity'. A couple of weeks or so, on a Saturday night, another server was just getting started on waiting on a large party, and I overheard her say 'They seemed really nice, but then I saw them all praying over the meal, and I thought "oh, great" '. For a second I thought that was kind of unfair and started to say something, but then I realized that what she thought was probably not unfair, that Christians' reputation in this area has been justifiably earned, and that was really sobering.
I always want to tell these people that you are representing all of us Christians, and most importantly
you are representing Christ. We can all tell that you just came from church. The overwhelming majority of the people that I serve with are unsaved. They need to see something different about us as a group, and it pains me to realize that right now the difference that people see about us is that we suck. Realize that whether you like it or not, the people that you come in contact with are drawing conclusions about you and about all of us Christians based on how you treat the people you come in contact with. The restaurant that you go to after church is a mission field, and you'd be surprised how far just not being a jerk and leaving a few extra dollars will go.
