oregon_labor_commissioner_file.html

http://www.nrn.com:80/article/executive-chef-salaries-rise-line-cook-pay-falls?utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Tips@...&utm_content=NRN-News-NRNam%20Weekly%20Wrap-07/09/10&utm_campaign=July%209,%202010%20-%20Weekly%20Wrap

Executive chef salaries rise, line cook pay falls

July 6, 2010 | By Bret Thorn

Executive chefs and pastry chefs saw significant increases in salaries last year, while sous chefs and hourly line cooks took a hit in pay, according to the annual salary survey by StarChefs.com.

The survey of nearly 1,400 restaurant workers also found that male executive chefs made about 19 percent more than female executive chefs. White executive chefs made about 4 percent more than Asian executive chefs, 7 percent more than Hispanic-Latino executive chefs, and 31 percent more than African American executive chefs, the survey showed.

Executive chefs made an average salary of $79,402 last year, an increase of 6.1 percent from the previous year. Pastry chefs’ salaries rose an average of 5.7 percent to $48,861. Line cooks’ wages fell 2.6 percent to a national average of $29,662, and sous chefs’ average annual pay fell 4.4 percent to $42,266.

Pay for chef-owners remained basically flat year to year, up just 0.6 percent to an average of $85,179, the survey showed. Chefs de cuisine saw an average 1.9 percent bump in pay to $57,417.

The survey also found that executive chefs and pastry chefs make more at country clubs and other private facilities than those working at independent restaurants or in hotels and catering companies. Chefs de cuisine and sous chefs do better at hotels and catering companies.

Executive chefs at private clubs average an annual salary of $91,860, while at stand-alone restaurants they make an average of $71,063.

Similarly, pastry chefs make $61,167 at clubs compared to $47,491 at stand-alone establishments.

Chefs de cuisine average a salary of $65,171 at hotels and catering facilities compared to $56,868 at stand-alone restaurants, and sous chefs make $47,681 at hotels and catering companies and $38,560 at stand-alones.

Comparing the states of California, Florida, Massachusetts and New York, StarChefs.com said executive chefs and sous chefs did the best in New York, chefs de cuisine made more money in Massachusetts than in the other states — and significantly more than in Florida, where the average pay was $49,300 compared to $67,938 in Massachusetts — and pastry chefs were best off in Florida. The web site also observed that sous chefs in California reported average pay of $4,000 less than they did last year.

See full results of the 2010 Salary Survey.

Contact Bret Thorn at bthorn@....

#4184

From: "Giuseppe" <gdecarlo@...>
Date: Sat Jul 10, 2010 1:06 am
Subject: Re: [WaitersWorld] Executive chef salaries rise, line cook pay falls (NRN 7/6/10)

gdecarlo@...

Hi Giuseppe here, there is a thing, called knowledge, the more you know and how well you use it, the more you are worth and you are more in demand and are worth more money, no we are not all equal, some work harder and are better then others, this is your answer, you are paid what you are worth. Your solution is learn more, work harder, have pride in what you do, when you have this qualities and produce excellent products, apply for a higher paid position, opportunities are there if you are prepared to show your talent. A lot of people will tell you that they are talented, but only in their mind. = lower wages. Giuseppe

From: Mr Paul C. Paz

Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2010 10:36 AM

To: Waiter News ; Waiters Yahoo Egroup ; WaitersWorld Google ; WaitersWorld Yahoo Egroup

Subject: [WaitersWorld] Executive chef salaries rise, line cook pay falls (NRN 7/6/10)

Executive chef salaries rise, line cook pay falls
July 6, 2010 | By Bret Thorn
http://www.nrn.com:80/article/executive-chef-salaries-rise-line-cook-pay-falls?utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Tips@...&utm_content=NRN-News-NRNam%20Weekly%20Wrap-07/09/10&utm_campaign=July%209,%202010%20-%20Weekly%20Wrap
Executive chefs and pastry chefs saw significant increases in salaries last year, while sous chefs and hourly line cooks took a hit in pay, according to the annual salary survey by StarChefs.com.
The survey of nearly 1,400 restaurant workers also found that male executive chefs made about 19 percent more than female executive chefs. White executive chefs made about 4 percent more than Asian executive chefs, 7 percent more than Hispanic-Latino executive chefs, and 31 percent more than African American executive chefs, the survey showed.
Executive chefs made an average salary of $79,402 last year, an increase of 6.1 percent from the previous year. Pastry chefs’ salaries rose an average of 5.7 percent to $48,861. Line cooks’ wages fell 2.6 percent to a national average of $29,662, and sous chefs’ average annual pay fell 4.4 percent to $42,266.
Pay for chef-owners remained basically flat year to year, up just 0.6 percent to an average of $85,179, the survey showed. Chefs de cuisine saw an average 1.9 percent bump in pay to $57,417.
The survey also found that executive chefs and pastry chefs make more at country clubs and other private facilities than those working at independent restaurants or in hotels and catering companies. Chefs de cuisine and sous chefs do better at hotels and catering companies.
Executive chefs at private clubs average an annual salary of $91,860, while at stand-alone restaurants they make an average of $71,063.
Similarly, pastry chefs make $61,167 at clubs compared to $47,491 at stand-alone establishments.
Chefs de cuisine average a salary of $65,171 at hotels and catering facilities compared to $56,868 at stand-alone restaurants, and sous chefs make $47,681 at hotels and catering companies and $38,560 at stand-alones.
Comparing the states of California, Florida, Massachusetts and New York, StarChefs.com said executive chefs and sous chefs did the best in New York, chefs de cuisine made more money in Massachusetts than in the other states — and significantly more than in Florida, where the average pay was $49,300 compared to $67,938 in Massachusetts — and pastry chefs were best off in Florida. The web site also observed that sous chefs in California reported average pay of $4,000 less than they did last year.
See full results of the 2010 Salary Survey.
Contact Bret Thorn at bthorn@....

Read more: http://www.nrn.com/article/executive-chef-salaries-rise-line-cook-pay-falls?utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Tips@...&utm_content=NRN-News-NRNam%20Weekly%20Wrap-07/09/10&utm_campaign=July%209,%202010%20-%20Weekly%20Wrap#ixzz0tEGpABtz

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

#4185

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sun Jul 11, 2010 1:32 pm
Subject: 2010 Waiters Race - YouTube Videos (Bastille Day - Portland, OR 7/10/10)

waitersworld

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vUNIS5kRHE

This old waiter actually was in the race! Very fun and can't wait for next year!

In the meantime, Make It Fun... Make It Easy... Make Some Money !!! TM

Sincerely,

Paul C. Paz
WaitersWorld
503.524.0788

www.WaitersWorld.com
Dedicated exclusively to those aspiring to gain personal, professional, and financial success utilizing superior customer service-sales skills.

FaceBook http://www.facebook.com/pages/WaitersWorld-Paul-C-Paz/255848664097?ref=ts
Twitter http://twitter.com/WaitersWorld

Live Waiter-Cam: 2nd full lap of 2010 Waiters Race �

Bastille Day (Portland, OR 7.10.10)

Waiter-Cam: Pre-race interview with race officials �

Waiter Race on Bastille Day (Portland, OR 7.10.10.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWu4uWjDS-A

Waiter-Cam: The Trays �

Waiter Race on Bastille Day (Portland, OR 7.10.10)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkNX2BpyLgs

Waiter-Cam: Pre-race jitters �

Waiter Race on Bastille Day (Portland, OR 7.10.10)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9s74nZMXzc

Waiter-Cam: The starting gate �

Waiter Race on Bastille Day (Portland, OR 7.10.10)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7nOqh1NF7c

#4186

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Tue Jul 13, 2010 10:41 pm
Subject: WHAT KIDS WANT FROM WAITER SERVICE

waitersworld

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DsHy-ms-0LuM&h=58c060hwZDM66mnAoSXvtmudHPg

WHAT KIDS WANT FROM WAITER SERVICE... Arden was interviewed at the 2010 Bastille Day celebration in Portland, OR 7/10/10. She waved me down as she recognised me from Waiter Race. She offers some simple thoughts on what she sees missing from waiter service. (Filmed with permission from Arden;s father who was sitting right next to her.)

SEE THE VIDEO BELOW:

#4187

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Jul 14, 2010 4:27 am
Subject: PBS documentary 'Breakfast Special' features Portland restaurants

waitersworld

http://www.oregonlive.com/movies/index.ssf/2010/07/pbs_documentary_breakfast_spec.html

PBS documentary 'Breakfast Special' features Portland restaurants Tin Shed Garden Cafe and Helser's On Alberta - Monday, July 12, 2010

For some people, there's no better reason to rise and shine than the prospect of digging into a great breakfast. And "Breakfast Special," a new one-hour PBS documentary that debuts Wednesday on OPB, celebrates restaurants that specialize in the first meal of the day, including two Portland places known for hearty a.m. fare: Helser's On Alberta, and Tin Shed Garden Cafe.

In the Portland segments of the show, diners talk about how a lot of people here don't attend church regularly, but treat Sunday brunch as a sort of religion. How else to explain the willingness to wait up to an hour for a plate of Tin Shed's biscuits with rosemary-mushroom gravy or Helser's buttermilk pancakes?

While "Breakfast Special" could have highlighted any number of Portland breakfast spots, producer Rick Sebak is led to these two Northeast Alberta Street spots by Paul Gerald, the author of the indispensable book "Breakfast in Bridgetown: The Definitive Guide to Portland's Favorite Meal" and a corresponding blog. Gerald notes how the arrival of Tin Shed and Helser's helped transform a stretch of street, which at one point was known for having the highest number of drive-by shootings in the city, into one of the city's hippest neighborhoods.

But the documentary doesn't linger long on the idea of German pancakes acting as a catalyst for gentrification. Instead, most of the footage is of unnamed diners waxing rhapsodic over what makes the two restaurants such gems. At Tin Shed, diners note how self-service coffee helps makes the long waits for a table a lot less punishing, and how the patio and garden tables are so dog-friendly that there's a special menu just for four-legged guests. It's not all love, however. One diner notes that her husband finds Tin Shed expensive, pretentious and not worth the wait. "He's at home," she says dismissively.

'Breakfast Special'

When: Airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday

Where: KOPB (10/PBS)

Local restaurants included: Tin Shed Garden Cafe, 1438 N.E. Alberta St., 503-288-6966; Helser’s On Alberta, 1538 N.E. Alberta St., 503-281-1477

At Helser's, the cameras get close in on the kitchen's signature Scotch eggs, classic pub grub in Great Britain that gets the royal treatment here: Hard-boiled eggs are wrapped in sausage, then breaded with panko crumbs and fried, served alongside potato pancakes doused in horseradish cream. Owner Alex Helser notes that dishes like this, or the eggs Benedicts made with homemade crumpets, are more complicated than what's served at many breakfast places, but it's those fine details that turn customers into regulars.

Restaurants elsewhere get their share of time, too, showing that loving breakfast crosses many cultures. There's a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown that specializes in rice porridge, a soupy rice dish that's dressed up with all manner of egg, meat and spice. And there's a Cuban restaurant in St. Augustine, Fla., that whips up tropical omelets, and serves dessert like homemade flan at breakfast time.

Perhaps the most unique place featured in "Breakfast Special" is a rural New York restaurant called Cartwright's Maple Tree Inn, which is only open two months out of the year when fresh maple syrup is flowing from the owners' trees. Customers line up outside in freezing temperatures for all-you-can-eat stacks of buckwheat pancakes, many boasting about how often they come here during the brief time it's open. The best seats are at the counter, where you watch a line cook fill a griddle with 36 plate-sized buckwheat pancakes at a time, flipping them like a speed demon before loading them onto plates. This is breakfast that's equal parts precision and art.

#4188

From: "SYBIL MARIE" <sybilpresley@...>
Date: Mon Jul 26, 2010 4:51 pm
Subject: Be Kind To Food Servers Month

sybilpresley...

I am Sybil Presley and I am a lifetime waitress.
I created the Be Kind To Food Servers month. To elevate the status of waiters
and waitresses and to  establish a positive relationship between the food
servers and the dining public.
     Congresman Steve Cohen is helping me to get this special month nationally
recognized through Congress.
     I am asking businesses,organizations,associations,network groups and
individuals to send me an email stating their support of the
Be Kind To Food Servers Month. Send your comments to sybilpresley@...
Your comments will be forwarded to
Congressman Cohen.

#4189

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Tue Aug 3, 2010 1:54 am
Subject: The Next Food Network Star is now casting Season 7!

waitersworld

The Next Food Network Star is now casting Season 7!

To Whom It May Concern,

I am a casting assistant for The Next Food Network Star, Food Network's hugely successful culinary reality series. We are currently casting for the 2011 season and would like to inform you and your colleagues that we are holding Open Casting Calls across the Country!

We are looking for people who are full of life, passionate about cooking, and knowledgeable about food to meet us in person at our open casting call. Please help us spread the word to any chef, home cook, caterer or culinary enthusiast who might be interested in becoming the host of his or her own cooking show on Food Network!

WHERE WE'LL BE:

ATLANTA: Monday, August 9th from 10am - 3pm at the W Midtown Atlanta

Email: nfns7atlanta@...

LOS ANGELES: Tuesday, August 10th from 10am - 3pm at the Marriott

Burbank Airport

Email: nfns7la@...

NEW ORLEANS: Monday, August 16th from 10am - 3pm at the W New Orleans

Email: nfns7neworleans@...

DENVER: Sunday, August 22nd from 10am - 3pm at the Magnolia Hotel Denver

Email: nfns7denver@...

NYC: Monday, August 30th from 10am - 3pm at Sutton Place

Email: nfns7nyc@...

PHILADELPHIA: Tuesday, August 31st from 10am - 3pm at the Loews

Philadelphia

Email: nfns7philly@...

NASHVILLE: Monday, September 13th from 10am - 3pm at the Hutton Hotel

Email: nfns7nashville@...

CLEVELAND: Monday, September 20th from 10am - 3pm at the Hyatt at The

Arcade

Email: nfns7cleveland@...

Check out www.nfns7casting.com for more information, including how to submit a video!

I've attached a flyer to this email with more details about our casting event. If you have any questions or require further information, please feel free to contact me. Thank you for your time and assistance.

Sincerely,

Lindsey Mckitterick

Casting Assistant

office: 212-975-5043

mckitterickl@...

The Next Food Network Star is now casting Season 7!

Calling all chefs, line cooks, home cooks, caterers and culinary enthusiasts!

Do you have what it takes to host your own show on Food Network?

What we are looking for:

Strong culinary skills

Personality that pops

Passion for cooking

Extensive food knowledge

Lots of energy and enthusiasm

If you–or someone you know–has what it takes, we want to hear from you!

WHERE WE’LL BE:

We will be holding open calls in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Denver, New York City, Philadelphia, Nashville and Cleveland.

If you can’t make it to an open call, you can still apply.

Check out www.nfns7casting.com for more information!

If you have any questions, please contact us as nfns7casting@...

Please read the Rules & Eligibility Requirements (found on the “Rules and Eligibility” page) before applying.

Applicants must (a) be a US citizen or permanent legal resident with the unrestricted ability to work in the U.S. and (b) be at least 21 years of age.

If you plan to attend an open call, you MUST download an application (see the “Application” page) and bring it–completed–along with two recent photos of yourself.

#4190

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Mon Aug 23, 2010 4:02 pm
Subject: Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?

waitersworld

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=all

What Is It About 20-Somethings?

ROW 1, left to right: Annie Ling, Jen Davis, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Elizabeth Weinberg. ROW 2: Dru Donovan (1,2,4); Marvin Orellana (3). ROW 3: David Wright, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Jen Davis, Annie Ling.

By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

Published: August 18, 2010

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Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?

Readers’ Comments

Share your thoughts about this article on the Motherlode blog.

Annie Ling

This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

The whole idea of milestones, of course, is something of an anachronism; it implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially secure.

Even if some traditional milestones are never reached, one thing is clear: Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than ever. But why? That’s the subject of lively debate among policy makers and academics. To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to.

JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.” He says what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young. Similar changes at the turn of the 21st century have laid the groundwork for another new stage, Arnett says, between the age of 18 and the late 20s. Among the cultural changes he points to that have led to “emerging adulthood” are the need for more education to survive in an information-based economy; fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.

Just as adolescence has its particular psychological profile, Arnett says, so does emerging adulthood: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.” A few of these, especially identity exploration, are part of adolescence too, but they take on new depth and urgency in the 20s. The stakes are higher when people are approaching the age when options tend to close off and lifelong commitments must be made. Arnett calls it “the age 30 deadline.”

The issue of whether emerging adulthood is a new stage is being debated most forcefully among scholars, in particular psychologists and sociologists. But its resolution has broader implications. Just look at what happened for teenagers. It took some effort, a century ago, for psychologists to make the case that adolescence was a new developmental stage. Once that happened, social institutions were forced to adapt: education, health care, social services and the law all changed to address the particular needs of 12- to 18-year-olds. An understanding of the developmental profile of adolescence led, for instance, to the creation of junior high schools in the early 1900s, separating seventh and eighth graders from the younger children in what used to be called primary school. And it led to the recognition that teenagers between 14 and 18, even though they were legally minors, were mature enough to make their own choice of legal guardian in the event of their parents’ deaths. If emerging adulthood is an analogous stage, analogous changes are in the wings.

But what would it look like to extend some of the special status of adolescents to young people in their 20s? Our uncertainty about this question is reflected in our scattershot approach to markers of adulthood. People can vote at 18, but in some states they don’t age out of foster care until 21. They can join the military at 18, but they can’t drink until 21. They can drive at 16, but they can’t rent a car until 25 without some hefty surcharges. If they are full-time students, the Internal Revenue Service considers them dependents until 24; those without health insurance will soon be able to stay on their parents’ plans even if they’re not in school until age 26, or up to 30 in some states. Parents have no access to their child’s college records if the child is over 18, but parents’ income is taken into account when the child applies for financial aid up to age 24. We seem unable to agree when someone is old enough to take on adult responsibilities. But we’re pretty sure it’s not simply a matter of age.

If society decides to protect these young people or treat them differently from fully grown adults, how can we do this without becoming all the things that grown children resist — controlling, moralizing, paternalistic? Young people spend their lives lumped into age-related clusters — that’s the basis of K-12 schooling — but as they move through their 20s, they diverge. Some 25-year-olds are married homeowners with good jobs and a couple of kids; others are still living with their parents and working at transient jobs, or not working at all. Does that mean we extend some of the protections and special status of adolescence to all people in their 20s? To some of them? Which ones? Decisions like this matter, because failing to protect and support vulnerable young people can lead them down the wrong path at a critical moment, the one that can determine all subsequent paths. But overprotecting and oversupporting them can sometimes make matters worse, turning the “changing timetable of adulthood” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The more profound question behind the scholarly intrigue is the one that really captivates parents: whether the prolongation of this unsettled time of life is a good thing or a bad thing. With life spans stretching into the ninth decade, is it better for young people to experiment in their 20s before making choices they’ll have to live with for more than half a century? Or is adulthood now so malleable, with marriage and employment options constantly being reassessed, that young people would be better off just getting started on something, or else they’ll never catch up, consigned to remain always a few steps behind the early bloomers? Is emerging adulthood a rich and varied period for self-discovery, as Arnett says it is? Or is it just another term for self-indulgence?

THE DISCOVERY OF adolescence is generally dated to 1904, with the publication of the massive study “Adolescence,” by G. Stanley Hall, a prominent psychologist and first president of the American Psychological Association. Hall attributed the new stage to social changes at the turn of the 20th century. Child-labor laws kept children under 16 out of the work force, and universal education laws kept them in secondary school, thus prolonging the period of dependence — a dependence that allowed them to address psychological tasks they might have ignored when they took on adult roles straight out of childhood. Hall, the first president of Clark University — the same place, interestingly enough, where Arnett now teaches — described adolescence as a time of “storm and stress,” filled with emotional upheaval, sorrow and rebelliousness. He cited the “curve of despondency” that “starts at 11, rises steadily and rapidly till 15 . . . then falls steadily till 23,” and described other characteristics of adolescence, including an increase in sensation seeking, greater susceptibility to media influences (which in 1904 mostly meant “flash literature” and “penny dreadfuls”) and overreliance on peer relationships. Hall’s book was flawed, but it marked the beginning of the scientific study of adolescence and helped lead to its eventual acceptance as a distinct stage with its own challenges, behaviors and biological profile.

In the 1990s, Arnett began to suspect that something similar was taking place with young people in their late teens and early 20s. He was teaching human development and family studies at the University of Missouri, studying college-age students, both at the university and in the community around Columbia, Mo. He asked them questions about their lives and their expectations like, “Do you feel you have reached adulthood?”

“I was in my early- to mid-30s myself, and I remember thinking, They’re not a thing like me,” Arnett told me when we met last spring in Worcester. “I realized that there was something special going on.” The young people he spoke to weren’t experiencing the upending physical changes that accompany adolescence, but as an age cohort they did seem to have a psychological makeup different from that of people just a little bit younger or a little bit older. This was not how most psychologists were thinking about development at the time, when the eight-stage model of the psychologist Erik Erikson was in vogue. Erikson, one of the first to focus on psychological development past childhood, divided adulthood into three stages — young (roughly ages 20 to 45), middle (about ages 45 to 65) and late (all the rest) — and defined them by the challenges that individuals in a particular stage encounter and must resolve before moving on to the next stage. In young adulthood, according to his model, the primary psychological challenge is “intimacy versus isolation,” by which Erikson meant deciding whether to commit to a lifelong intimate relationship and choosing the person to commit to.

But Arnett said “young adulthood” was too broad a term to apply to a 25-year span that included both him and his college students. The 20s are something different from the 30s and 40s, he remembered thinking. And while he agreed that the struggle for intimacy was one task of this period, he said there were other critical tasks as well.

Arnett and I were discussing the evolution of his thinking over lunch at BABA Sushi, a quiet restaurant near his office where he goes so often he knows the sushi chefs by name. He is 53, very tall and wiry, with clipped steel-gray hair and ice-blue eyes, an intense, serious man. He describes himself as a late bloomer, a onetime emerging adult before anyone had given it a name. After graduating from Michigan State University in 1980, he spent two years playing guitar in bars and restaurants and experimented with girlfriends, drugs and general recklessness before going for his doctorate in developmental psychology at the University of Virginia. By 1986 he had his first academic job at Oglethorpe University, a small college in Atlanta. There he met his wife, Lene Jensen, the school’s smartest psych major, who stunned Arnett when she came to his office one day in 1989, shortly after she graduated, and asked him out on a date. Jensen earned a doctorate in psychology, too, and she also teaches at Clark. She and Arnett have 10-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.

Arnett spent time at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago before moving to the University of Missouri in 1992, beginning his study of young men and women in the college town of Columbia, gradually broadening his sample to include New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco. He deliberately included working-class young people as well as those who were well off, those who had never gone to college as well as those who were still in school, those who were supporting themselves as well as those whose bills were being paid by their parents. A little more than half of his sample was white, 18 percent African-American, 16 percent Asian-American and 14 percent Latino.

More than 300 interviews and 250 survey responses persuaded Arnett that he was onto something new. This was the era of the Gen X slacker, but Arnett felt that his findings applied beyond one generation. He wrote them up in 2000 in American Psychologist, the first time he laid out his theory of “emerging adulthood.” According to Google Scholar, which keeps track of such things, the article has been cited in professional books and journals roughly 1,700 times. This makes it, in the world of academia, practically viral. At the very least, the citations indicate that Arnett had come up with a useful term for describing a particular cohort; at best, that he offered a whole new way of thinking about them.

DURING THE PERIOD he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life, less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes in, he says; they have not yet tempered their idealistic visions of what awaits. “The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating, about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty, a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence — beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.

Some scientists would argue that this ambivalence reflects what is going on in the brain, which is also both grown-up and not-quite-grown-up. Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty, but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about 10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right were the car-rental companies.”

When the N.I.M.H. study began in 1991, Giedd said he and his colleagues expected to stop when the subjects turned 16. “We figured that by 16 their bodies were pretty big physically,” he said. But every time the children returned, their brains were found still to be changing. The scientists extended the end date of the study to age 18, then 20, then 22. The subjects’ brains were still changing even then. Tellingly, the most significant changes took place in the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, the regions involved in emotional control and higher-order cognitive function.

As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used. By cutting off unused pathways, the brain eventually settles into a structure that’s most efficient for the owner of that brain, creating well-worn grooves for the pathways that person uses most. Synaptic pruning intensifies after rapid brain-cell proliferation during childhood and again in the period that encompasses adolescence and the 20s. It is the mechanism of “use it or lose it”: the brains we have are shaped largely in response to the demands made of them.

We have come to accept the idea that environmental influences in the first three years of life have long-term consequences for cognition, emotional control, attention and the like. Is it time to place a similar emphasis, with hopes for a similar outcome, on enriching the cognitive environment of people in their 20s?

N.I.M.H. scientists also found a time lag between the growth of the limbic system, where emotions originate, and of the prefrontal cortex, which manages those emotions. The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years. Giedd said it is logical to suppose — and for now, neuroscientists have to make a lot of logical suppositions — that when the limbic system is fully active but the cortex is still being built, emotions might outweigh rationality. “The prefrontal part is the part that allows you to control your impulses, come up with a long-range strategy, answer the question ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ ” he told me. “That weighing of the future keeps changing into the 20s and 30s.”

Among study subjects who enrolled as children, M.R.I. scans have been done so far only to age 25, so scientists have to make another logical supposition about what happens to the brain in the late 20s, the 30s and beyond. Is it possible that the brain just keeps changing and pruning, for years and years? “Guessing from the shape of the growth curves we have,” Giedd’s colleague Philip Shaw wrote in an e-mail message, “it does seem that much of the gray matter,” where synaptic pruning takes place, “seems to have completed its most dramatic structural change” by age 25. For white matter, where insulation that helps impulses travel faster continues to form, “it does look as if the curves are still going up, suggesting continued growth” after age 25, he wrote, though at a slower rate than before.

None of this is new, of course; the brains of young people have always been works in progress, even when we didn’t have sophisticated scanning machinery to chart it precisely. Why, then, is the youthful brain only now arising as an explanation for why people in their 20s are seeming a bit unfinished? Maybe there’s an analogy to be found in the hierarchy of needs, a theory put forth in the 1940s by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow, people can pursue more elevated goals only after their basic needs of food, shelter and sex have been met. What if the brain has its own hierarchy of needs? When people are forced to adopt adult responsibilities early, maybe they just do what they have to do, whether or not their brains are ready. Maybe it’s only now, when young people are allowed to forestall adult obligations without fear of public censure, that the rate of societal maturation can finally fall into better sync with the maturation of the brain.

Cultural expectations might also reinforce the delay. The “changing timetable for adulthood” has, in many ways, become internalized by 20-somethings and their parents alike. Today young people don’t expect to marry until their late 20s, don’t expect to start a family until their 30s, don’t expect to be on track for a rewarding career until much later than their parents were. So they make decisions about their futures that reflect this wider time horizon. Many of them would not be ready to take on the trappings of adulthood any earlier even if the opportunity arose; they haven’t braced themselves for it.

Nor do parents expect their children to grow up right away — and they might not even want them to. Parents might regret having themselves jumped into marriage or a career and hope for more considered choices for their children. Or they might want to hold on to a reassuring connection with their children as the kids leave home. If they were “helicopter parents” — a term that describes heavily invested parents who hover over their children, swooping down to take charge and solve problems at a moment’s notice — they might keep hovering and problem-solving long past the time when their children should be solving problems on their own. This might, in a strange way, be part of what keeps their grown children in the limbo between adolescence and adulthood. It can be hard sometimes to tease out to what extent a child doesn’t quite want to grow up and to what extent a parent doesn’t quite want to let go.

IT IS A BIG DEAL IN developmental psychology to declare the existence of a new stage of life, and Arnett has devoted the past 10 years to making his case. Shortly after his American Psychologist article appeared in 2000, he and Jennifer Lynn Tanner, a developmental psychologist at Rutgers University, convened the first conference of what they later called the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood. It was held in 2003 at Harvard with an attendance of 75; there have been three more since then, and last year’s conference, in Atlanta, had more than 270 attendees. In 2004 Arnett published a book, “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties,” which is still in print and selling well. In 2006 he and Tanner published an edited volume, “Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century,” aimed at professionals and academics. Arnett’s college textbook, “Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach,” has been in print since 2000 and is now in its fourth edition. Next year he says he hopes to publish another book, this one for the parents of 20-somethings.

If all Arnett’s talk about emerging adulthood sounds vaguely familiar . . . well, it should. Forty years ago, an article appeared in The American Scholar that declared “a new stage of life” for the period between adolescence and young adulthood. This was 1970, when the oldest members of the baby boom generation — the parents of today’s 20-somethings — were 24. Young people of the day “can’t seem to ‘settle down,’ ” wrote the Yale psychologist Kenneth Keniston. He called the new stage of life “youth.”

Keniston’s description of “youth” presages Arnett’s description of “emerging adulthood” a generation later. In the late ’60s, Keniston wrote that there was “a growing minority of post-adolescents [who] have not settled the questions whose answers once defined adulthood: questions of relationship to the existing society, questions of vocation, questions of social role and lifestyle.” Whereas once, such aimlessness was seen only in the “unusually creative or unusually disturbed,” he wrote, it was becoming more common and more ordinary in the baby boomers of 1970. Among the salient characteristics of “youth,” Keniston wrote, were “pervasive ambivalence toward self and society,” “the feeling of absolute freedom, of living in a world of pure possibilities” and “the enormous value placed upon change, transformation and movement” — all characteristics that Arnett now ascribes to “emerging adults.”

Arnett readily acknowledges his debt to Keniston; he mentions him in almost everything he has written about emerging adulthood. But he considers the ’60s a unique moment, when young people were rebellious and alienated in a way they’ve never been before or since. And Keniston’s views never quite took off, Arnett says, because “youth” wasn’t a very good name for it. He has called the label “ambiguous and confusing,” not nearly as catchy as his own “emerging adulthood.”

For whatever reason Keniston’s terminology faded away, it’s revealing to read his old article and hear echoes of what’s going on with kids today. He was describing the parents of today’s young people when they themselves were young — and amazingly, they weren’t all that different from their own children now. Keniston’s article seems a lovely demonstration of the eternal cycle of life, the perennial conflict between the generations, the gradual resolution of those conflicts. It’s reassuring, actually, to think of it as recursive, to imagine that there must always be a cohort of 20-somethings who take their time settling down, just as there must always be a cohort of 50-somethings who worry about it.

KENISTON CALLED IT youth, Arnett calls it emerging adulthood; whatever it’s called, the delayed transition has been observed for years. But it can be in fullest flower only when the young person has some other, nontraditional means of support — which would seem to make the delay something of a luxury item. That’s the impression you get reading Arnett’s case histories in his books and articles, or the essays in “20 Something Manifesto,” an anthology edited by a Los Angeles writer named Christine Hassler. “It’s somewhat terrifying,” writes a 25-year-old named Jennifer, “to think about all the things I’m supposed to be doing in order to ‘get somewhere’ successful: ‘Follow your passions, live your dreams, take risks, network with the right people, find mentors, be financially responsible, volunteer, work, think about or go to grad school, fall in love and maintain personal well-being, mental health and nutrition.’ When is there time to just be and enjoy?” Adds a 24-year-old from Virginia: “There is pressure to make decisions that will form the foundation for the rest of your life in your 20s. It’s almost as if having a range of limited options would be easier.”

While the complaints of these young people are heartfelt, they are also the complaints of the privileged. Julie, a 23-year-old New Yorker and contributor to “20 Something Manifesto,” is apparently aware of this. She was coddled her whole life, treated to French horn lessons and summer camp, told she could do anything. “It is a double-edged sword,” she writes, “because on the one hand I am so blessed with my experiences and endless options, but on the other hand, I still feel like a child. I feel like my job isn’t real because I am not where my parents were at my age. Walking home, in the shoes my father bought me, I still feel I have yet to grow up.”

Despite these impressions, Arnett insists that emerging adulthood is not limited to young persons of privilege and that it is not simply a period of self-indulgence. He takes pains in “Emerging Adulthood” to describe some case histories of young men and women from hard-luck backgrounds who use the self-focus and identity exploration of their 20s to transform their lives.

One of these is the case history of Nicole, a 25-year-old African-American who grew up in a housing project in Oakland, Calif. At age 6, Nicole, the eldest, was forced to take control of the household after her mother’s mental collapse. By 8, she was sweeping stores and baby-sitting for money to help keep her three siblings fed and housed. “I made a couple bucks and helped my mother out, helped my family out,” she told Arnett. She managed to graduate from high school, but with low grades, and got a job as a receptionist at a dermatology clinic. She moved into her own apartment, took night classes at community college and started to excel. “I needed to experience living out of my mother’s home in order to study,” she said.

In his book, Arnett presents Nicole as a symbol of all the young people from impoverished backgrounds for whom “emerging adulthood represents an opportunity — maybe a last opportunity — to turn one’s life around.” This is the stage where someone like Nicole can escape an abusive or dysfunctional family and finally pursue her own dreams. Nicole’s dreams are powerful — one course away from an associate degree, she plans to go on for a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in psychology — but she has not really left her family behind; few people do. She is still supporting her mother and siblings, which is why she works full time even though her progress through school would be quicker if she found a part-time job. Is it only a grim pessimist like me who sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is supposed to be having?

Of course, Nicole’s case is not representative of society as a whole. And many parents — including those who can’t really afford it — continue to help their kids financially long past the time they expected to. Two years ago Karen Fingerman, a developmental psychologist at Purdue University, asked parents of grown children whether they provided significant assistance to their sons or daughters. Assistance included giving their children money or help with everyday tasks (practical assistance) as well as advice, companionship and an attentive ear. Eighty-six percent said they had provided advice in the previous month; less than half had done so in 1988. Two out of three parents had given a son or daughter practical assistance in the previous month; in 1988, only one in three had.

Fingerman took solace in her findings; she said it showed that parents stay connected to their grown children, and she suspects that both parties get something out of it. The survey questions, after all, referred not only to dispensing money but also to offering advice, comfort and friendship. And another of Fingerman’s studies suggests that parents’ sense of well-being depends largely on how close they are to their grown children and how their children are faring — objective support for the adage that you’re only as happy as your unhappiest child. But the expectation that young men and women won’t quite be able to make ends meet on their own, and that parents should be the ones to help bridge the gap, places a terrible burden on parents who might be worrying about their own job security, trying to care for their aging parents or grieving as their retirement plans become more and more of a pipe dream.

This dependence on Mom and Dad also means that during the 20s the rift between rich and poor becomes entrenched. According to data gathered by the Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a research consortium supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, American parents give an average of 10 percent of their income to their 18- to 21-year-old children. This percentage is basically the same no matter the family’s total income, meaning that upper-class kids tend to get more than working-class ones. And wealthier kids have other, less obvious, advantages. When they go to four-year colleges or universities, they get supervised dormitory housing, health care and alumni networks not available at community colleges. And they often get a leg up on their careers by using parents’ contacts to help land an entry-level job — or by using parents as a financial backup when they want to take an interesting internship that doesn’t pay.

“You get on a pathway, and pathways have momentum,” Jennifer Lynn Tanner of Rutgers told me. “In emerging adulthood, if you spend this time exploring and you get yourself on a pathway that really fits you, then there’s going to be this snowball effect of finding the right fit, the right partner, the right job, the right place to live. The less you have at first, the less you’re going to get this positive effect compounded over time. You’re not going to have the same acceleration.”

EVEN ARNETT ADMITS that not every young person goes through a period of “emerging adulthood.” It’s rare in the developing world, he says, where people have to grow up fast, and it’s often skipped in the industrialized world by the people who marry early, by teenage mothers forced to grow up, by young men or women who go straight from high school to whatever job is available without a chance to dabble until they find the perfect fit. Indeed, the majority of humankind would seem to not go through it at all. The fact that emerging adulthood is not universal is one of the strongest arguments against Arnett’s claim that it is a new developmental stage. If emerging adulthood is so important, why is it even possible to skip it?

“The core idea of classical stage theory is that all people — underscore ‘all’ — pass through a series of qualitatively different periods in an invariant and universal sequence in stages that can’t be skipped or reordered,” Richard Lerner, Bergstrom chairman in applied developmental science at Tufts University, told me. Lerner is a close personal friend of Arnett’s; he and his wife, Jacqueline, who is also a psychologist, live 20 miles from Worcester, and they have dinner with Arnett and his wife on a regular basis.

“I think the world of Jeff Arnett,” Lerner said. “I think he is a smart, passionate person who is doing great work — not only a smart and productive scholar, but one of the nicest people I ever met in my life.”

No matter how much he likes and admires Arnett, however, Lerner says his friend has ignored some of the basic tenets of developmental psychology. According to classical stage theory, he told me, “you must develop what you’re supposed to develop when you’re supposed to develop it or you’ll never adequately develop it.”

When I asked Arnett what happens to people who don’t have an emerging adulthood, he said it wasn’t necessarily a big deal. They might face its developmental tasks — identity exploration, self-focus, experimentation in love, work and worldview — at a later time, maybe as a midlife crisis, or they might never face them at all, he said. It depends partly on why they missed emerging adulthood in the first place, whether it was by circumstance or by choice.

No, said Lerner, that’s not the way it works. To qualify as a developmental stage, emerging adulthood must be both universal and essential. “If you don’t develop a skill at the right stage, you’ll be working the rest of your life to develop it when you should be moving on,” he said. “The rest of your development will be unfavorably altered.” The fact that Arnett can be so casual about the heterogeneity of emerging adulthood and its existence in some cultures but not in others — indeed, even in some people but not in their neighbors or friends — is what undermines, for many scholars, his insistence that it’s a new life stage.

Why does it matter? Because if the delay in achieving adulthood is just a temporary aberration caused by passing social mores and economic gloom, it’s something to struggle through for now, maybe feeling a little sorry for the young people who had the misfortune to come of age in a recession. But if it’s a true life stage, we need to start rethinking our definition of normal development and to create systems of education, health care and social supports that take the new stage into account.

The Network on Transitions to Adulthood has been issuing reports about young people since it was formed in 1999 and often ends up recommending more support for 20-somethings. But more of what, exactly? There aren’t institutions set up to serve people in this specific age range; social services from a developmental perspective tend to disappear after adolescence. But it’s possible to envision some that might address the restlessness and mobility that Arnett says are typical at this stage and that might make the experimentation of “emerging adulthood” available to more young people. How about expanding programs like City Year, in which 17- to 24-year-olds from diverse backgrounds spend a year mentoring inner-city children in exchange for a stipend, health insurance, child care, cellphone service and a $5,350 education award? Or a federal program in which a government-sponsored savings account is created for every newborn, to be cashed in at age 21 to support a year’s worth of travel, education or volunteer work — a version of the “baby bonds” program that Hillary Clinton mentioned during her 2008 primary campaign? Maybe we can encourage a kind of socially sanctioned “rumspringa,” the temporary moratorium from social responsibilities some Amish offer their young people to allow them to experiment before settling down. It requires only a bit of ingenuity — as well as some societal forbearance and financial commitment — to think of ways to expand some of the programs that now work so well for the elite, like the Fulbright fellowship or the Peace Corps, to make the chance for temporary service and self-examination available to a wider range of young people.

A century ago, it was helpful to start thinking of adolescents as engaged in the work of growing up rather than as merely lazy or rebellious. Only then could society recognize that the educational, medical, mental-health and social-service needs of this group were unique and that investing in them would have a payoff in the future. Twenty-somethings are engaged in work, too, even if it looks as if they are aimless or failing to pull their weight, Arnett says. But it’s a reflection of our collective attitude toward this period that we devote so few resources to keeping them solvent and granting them some measure of security.

THE KIND OF SERVICES that might be created if emerging adulthood is accepted as a life stage can be seen during a visit to Yellowbrick, a residential program in Evanston, Ill., that calls itself the only psychiatric treatment facility for emerging adults. “Emerging adults really do have unique developmental tasks to focus on,” said Jesse Viner, Yellowbrick’s executive medical director. Viner started Yellowbrick in 2005, when he was working in a group psychiatric practice in Chicago and saw the need for a different way to treat this cohort. He is a soft-spoken man who looks like an accountant and sounds like a New Age prophet, peppering his conversation with phrases like “helping to empower their agency.”

“Agency” is a tricky concept when parents are paying the full cost of Yellowbrick’s comprehensive residential program, which comes to $21,000 a month and is not always covered by insurance. Staff members are aware of the paradox of encouraging a child to separate from Mommy and Daddy when it’s on their dime. They address it with a concept they call connected autonomy, which they define as knowing when to stand alone and when to accept help.

Patients come to Yellowbrick with a variety of problems: substance abuse, eating disorders, depression, anxiety or one of the more severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that tend to appear in the late teens or early 20s. The demands of imminent independence can worsen mental-health problems or can create new ones for people who have managed up to that point to perform all the expected roles — son or daughter, boyfriend or girlfriend, student, teammate, friend — but get lost when schooling ends and expected roles disappear. That’s what happened to one patient who had done well at a top Ivy League college until the last class of the last semester of his last year, when he finished his final paper and could not bring himself to turn it in.

The Yellowbrick philosophy is that young people must meet these challenges without coddling or rescue. Up to 16 patients at a time are housed in the Yellowbrick residence, a four-story apartment building Viner owns. They live in the apartments — which are large, sunny and lavishly furnished — in groups of three or four, with staff members always on hand to teach the basics of shopping, cooking, cleaning, scheduling, making commitments and showing up.

Viner let me sit in on daily clinical rounds, scheduled that day for C., a young woman who had been at Yellowbrick for three months. Rounds are like the world’s most grueling job interview: the patient sits in front alongside her clinician “advocate,” and a dozen or so staff members are arrayed on couches and armchairs around the room, firing questions. C. seemed nervous but pleased with herself, frequently flashing a huge white smile. She is 22, tall and skinny, and she wore tiny denim shorts and a big T-shirt and vest. She started to fall apart during her junior year at college, plagued by binge drinking and anorexia, and in her first weeks at Yellowbrick her alcohol abuse continued. Most psychiatric facilities would have kicked her out after the first relapse, said Dale Monroe-Cook, Yellowbrick’s vice president of clinical operations. “We’re doing the opposite: we want the behavior to unfold, and we want to be there in that critical moment, to work with that behavior and help the emerging adult transition to greater independence.”

The Yellowbrick staff let C. face her demons and decide how to deal with them. After five relapses, C. asked the staff to take away her ID so she couldn’t buy alcohol. Eventually she decided to start going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

At her rounds in June, C. was able to report that she had been alcohol-free for 30 days. Jesse Viner’s wife, Laura Viner, who is a psychologist on staff, started to clap for her, but no one else joined in. “We’re on eggshells here,” Gary Zurawski, a clinical social worker specializing in substance abuse, confessed to C. “We don’t know if we should congratulate you too much.” The staff was sensitive about taking away the young woman’s motivation to improve her life for her own sake, not for the sake of getting praise from someone else.

C. took the discussion about the applause in stride and told the staff she had more good news: in two days she was going to graduate. On time.

THE 20S ARE LIKE the stem cell of human development, the pluripotent moment when any of several outcomes is possible. Decisions and actions during this time have lasting ramifications. The 20s are when most people accumulate almost all of their formal education; when most people meet their future spouses and the friends they will keep; when most people start on the careers that they will stay with for many years. This is when adventures, experiments, travels, relationships are embarked on with an abandon that probably will not happen again.

Does that mean it’s a good thing to let 20-somethings meander — or even to encourage them to meander — before they settle down? That’s the question that plagues so many of their parents. It’s easy to see the advantages to the delay. There is time enough for adulthood and its attendant obligations; maybe if kids take longer to choose their mates and their careers, they’ll make fewer mistakes and live happier lives. But it’s just as easy to see the drawbacks. As the settling-down sputters along for the “emerging adults,” things can get precarious for the rest of us. Parents are helping pay bills they never counted on paying, and social institutions are missing out on young people contributing to productivity and growth. Of course, the recession complicates things, and even if every 20-something were ready to skip the “emerging” moratorium and act like a grown-up, there wouldn’t necessarily be jobs for them all. So we’re caught in a weird moment, unsure whether to allow young people to keep exploring and questioning or to cut them off and tell them just to find something, anything, to put food on the table and get on with their lives.

Arnett would like to see us choose a middle course. “To be a young American today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.” If it really works that way, if this longer road to adulthood really leads to more insight and better choices, then Arnett’s vision of an insightful, sensitive, thoughtful, content, well-honed, self-actualizing crop of grown-ups would indeed be something worth waiting for.

Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer. Her last article for the magazine was about anxiety.

#4191

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Mon Aug 23, 2010 3:45 pm
Subject: What Is It About Twenty-Somethings?

waitersworld

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2010%2F08%2F22%2Fmagazine%2F22Adulthood-t.html&h=78f12

This age group is the primary labor pool for FOH restaurant positions!

Interesting in-depth article.

What Is It About Twenty-Somethings?

#4192

From: "victorian_artist" <artist@...>
Date: Sat Sep 11, 2010 12:55 pm
Subject: Hi Paul

victartist

Still around I see.

Georgina

#4193

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sat Sep 11, 2010 7:16 pm
Subject: 9/11

waitersworld

God Bless America... Let there be peace on earth.

#4194

From: "Paul" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sat Sep 11, 2010 5:10 pm
Subject: Re: Hi Paul

waitersworld

Hi Georgina !!!
You should connect with me on Facebook too at
http://www.facebook.com/pages/WaitersWorld-Paul-C-Paz/255848664097?ref=ts
Please stay in touch.
Paul



--- In WaiterNews@yahoogroups.com, "victorian_artist" <artist@...> wrote:
>
> Still around I see.
>
> Georgina
>

#4195

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sat Sep 11, 2010 5:58 pm
Subject: Oregon Labor commissioner files complaint against Typhoon

waitersworld

Brent Hunsberger, The Oregonian
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oregon_labor_commissioner_file.html

Published: Friday, September 10, 2010, 7:27 PM Updated: Saturday, September 11, 2010, 9:39 AM

Story tools

In an unusual move, Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian filed a civil rights complaint against a local Thai restaurant chain, specifically accusing its owners of encouraging unlawful practices.

filed this week with the agency he oversees, Avakian accused Typhoon! Inc. of discriminating against Thai cooks by paying them less, denying them raises, providing them less vacation time and requiring them to work longer hours than U.S.-born workers.

He also accused Typhoon of forcing chefs to sign labor agreements that negated their civil rights -- and then retaliating and harassing two chefs when they refused to sign the pacts.

Avakian said that husband-and-wife owners Steve and Bo Kline aided and abetted the restaurant chain in its unlawful practices. The Bureau of Labor and Industries investigation could take six months, spokesman Bob Estabrook said.

Steve Kline and Richard Anderson, Typhoon's chief operating officer, called the allegations "outrageous" and denied violating any employees' rights.

"This happens every time a contract ends with an employee and they decide they don't want to go home," Anderson said. "We don't do anything illegal or underhanded. I welcome their investigation."

Kline accused Avakian of grandstanding for political gain.

"Just because he's made a career of protecting civil rights doesn't give him the right to trample over ours," Steve Kline said. "I think it's very hard to expect a fair investigation when someone comes out and assumes you're guilty."

The action specifically names Typhoon's downtown Portland and Beaverton locations, as well as its corporate headquarters. The Tigard-based company also operates restaurants in Northwest Portland, Gresham, Bend and Redmond, Wash., and plans to open a new one in West Linn. It owns Catering by Bo and Bo Asian Bistros.

Avakian's action marks the fourth time that workers or a government agency has brought allegations of labor violations against Typhoon.

Six years ago, Typhoon settled a federal lawsuit brought in 2003 by two former chefs who alleged, among other things, that the restaurant denied them overtime. Typhoon also sued the couple in Thailand, alleging the two conspired to steal its recipes and had breached their employment contract.

Also in 2004, the restaurant agreed to pay $170,000 in back wages to 33 employees to settle U.S. Labor Department charges that it failed to properly pay cooks overtime. The department investigated after an American worker complained about the treatment of Thai employees.

More recently, Sarinya Rearboy accused the restaurant and the Klines in a 2008 lawsuit of violating human trafficking laws, wage-and-hour laws and anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation laws. Typhoon moved to dismiss the suit, pointing to a clause inserted in its employment contract in 2005 requiring all disputes be arbitrated.

U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty last year
unconscionable, partly because it required a worker earning $8 an hour to pay thousands in arbitration fees. But in June, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, noting that Typhoon had agreed to pay arbitration costs. The case now awaits arbitration.

"We're not going to put undue financial stress on an individual," Anderson said Friday. "We're not here to enslave or encapture anybody. There's never been an issue with that."

Normally, Avakian's bureau investigates workplace complaints filed by workers. In this case, Avakian invoked a legal provision allowing him to bring the complaint. He also invoked the power earlier this year to file a sexual harassment complaint against John Minnis, the former head of Oregon's police training and standards division. The state and Minnis settled that complaint in July.

Avakian was unavailable for comment Friday, but Estabrook said he invoked that right because he suspected workers might be too intimidated to file complaints on their own.

"The thing that sort of stood out in this case was the potential insecurity of the workers," Estabrook said. "They're pretty dependent on the good will of their employer to stay here. If they are being mistreated, they're not going to be in a strong position to challenge the employer or file the complaint."

Avakian singled out the Klines, potentially making them financially liable for any fines, because "the information that we had indicated that they were really involved in some of this conduct," Estabrook said. "Some of the threats may have come directly from them or that they were involved in this recruitment process that brought workers here in the first place."

Steve Kline denied intimidating employees. "There's no record of that. ... This is a model company for Oregon."

Typhoon recruits five-star chefs from Thailand using special treaty E-2 visas. The visa program is designed to spur foreign investment and create jobs for Americans.

It enables investors from countries with U.S. treaties to bring highly skilled workers to the U.S., provided the investors show the skills are essential and unavailable domestically. But unlike traditional work visas, called green cards, E-2 visa holders generally are dependent on their employer to remain in the country.

Bo Kline gave up her chance at U.S. citizenship to qualify for the visas, which require employers be at least 50 percent owned by foreign nationals, Anderson said. Of Typhoon's 320 employees, nearly 50 hold E-2 visas.

"We use E-2 visas because we bring people here legally," Steve Kline said. "We have never once prevented anyone from leaving our company, ever. ... This is a very humanitarian company."

Avakian brought his complaint largely on behalf of a couple, Suchart and Nualjira Treemeth, who worked for 12 years as line cook and lead cook/
kitchen manager at Typhoon.

Avakian said the restaurant forced the couple and other Thai cooks to sign a series of agreements that forced them to work only for Typhoon or be returned to Thailand immediately and be subject to retaliatory lawsuits. The agreements almost always coincided with the renewal of the workers' immigration status, the complaint said.

He also accused Typhoon of confiscating the cooks' federal and state tax refunds from 1998 to 2002. He said the restaurant in 2000 cancelled an application for a permanent work visa after Suchart Treemeth refused to sign the employment agreement. The visa would've allowed Treemeth to work elsewhere.

When the Treemeths again refused to sign the agreement, the Klines and restaurant managers retaliated by not helping with Suchart Treemeth's work-visa application and by verbally harassing the Treemeths at work, the complaint said.

Anderson said Typhoon cancelled the work visa application at Suchart Treemeth's request. He said similar cooks earn $30,000 a year and chefs $40,000 a year, and are guaranteed 50-hour work weeks. "There was absolutely no harassment or coercion of any kind," he said "We wish them well. They're good people."

Anderson said Typhoon is reducing its reliance on E-2 visas because applying for them has become too difficult and expensive. The company now plans to help its Thai national workers obtain permanent work visas, or green cards. It also plans to hire U.S. cooks with its Thai chefs at its new West Linn location.

"The goal is to use local talent and teach them to cook Thai," Anderson said. "It's the right thing to do, so people have a chance to do what they want when they want."

The Treemeths' immigration attorney, Jimmy Go, declined comment.

Last week, the Treemeths opened a food cart, Thai Food Factory, in downtown Portland, just blocks from Typhoon on Broadway. They also declined comment Friday. But Anderson said Suchart Treemeth told him that the couple had obtained permanent work visas to stay in the country.

#4196

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Tue Oct 12, 2010 9:16 am
Subject: Life Magazine - May 1948 - Waitress Training School

waitersworld

http://books.google.com/books?id=MkEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA150&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Life Magazine - May 1948 - Waitress Training School

#4197

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Thu Nov 4, 2010 2:42 pm
Subject: Truly Good Service - Help People Just Because You Can

waitersworld

http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/lifestyle/article/5-ways-good-restaurants-teach-how-to-give-truly-good-service-hannah-howard

Truly Good Service
Help People Just Because You Can
“Carry someone's bag, or their drink. Hold the door, pull out the chair, fold their sweater nicely if it falls on the floor. Help someone fold up a stroller, hail a taxi or get directions. People will notice.“

5-Ways Good Restaurants Teach How to Give Truly Good Service

Hannah Howard (Serious Eats) Oct 08, 2010 -

Most everyone has experienced the acute frustration that comes with lousy service. We navigate endless phone menus while in hope of talking to a human. The cable guy who's supposed to show up between noon and 4 p.m. is late. We sit at a restaurant with a bowl of soup in front of us, but there's no spoon in sight.

Good customer service means making your guests feel welcome and taken care of. It means that no matter how they come to you, they leave happy. Most important, no matter what the business, giving good service means your customer will come back for more.

Even at the fanciest restaurants, it's rare to receive stellar service. But when all the pieces fall into place, it is a memorable and wonderful thing. Here are some tips from the restaurant hospitality pros:

Pay Attention

At a swanky, busy restaurant, a chef friend sent out a cornucopia of desserts to our table on the house. But what impressed us as much as the generous gift was that, at the start of the meal, a vegetarian companion asked about meat-free offerings. When those sweets arrived at meal's end, the server subtly pointed out which dessert was made with gelatin (an ingredient that's often a no-go for vegetarians) to the meat-eschewing diner. We all felt taken care of, our needs anticipated before we had to voice them. Paying attention to details and listening goes a long way.

Do It Right the First Time

Once a guest waits too long—or way too long—for their short ribs, it almost doesn't matter if they're the most succulent, flavorful, perfect short ribs ever prepared. The diner is already hungry, irritated and let down. Once there is a negative turning point, it is incredibly difficult to win back over a disappointed customer. What's easier? Avoid disappointing the customer in the first place.

Read the Guests

Everyone is different. People go out to eat for many reasons—to do business, to celebrate, to seduce, to taste new things. Some might enjoy a lengthy discussion about Italian wine varietals, others might dread it. Many are right at home in a fancy dining establishment, but many feel intimidated or awkward. So indulge in a long conversation about sous-vide or the provenance of the meal's ingredients only when your guests want to.

Fix Problems

Answer complaints. Do everything you can to find a solution. It's true that you can't please everyone, but maybe you can please this one person.

Help People Just Because

Carry someone's bag, or their drink. Hold the door, pull out the chair, fold their sweater nicely if it falls on the floor. Help someone fold up a stroller, hail a taxi or get directions. People will notice.

Tags: customer service, serious eats, hannah howard, dining

#4198

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Nov 10, 2010 10:25 am
Subject: Tip-Pooling now legal in Oregon, Washington, and other states

waitersworld

http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2010/11/09/restaurant-assoc-wins-tip-pool-case.html?ed=2010-11-09&s=article_du&ana=e_du_pub

Restaurant assoc. wins tip pool case

Portland Business Journal - by Suzanne Stevens

sstevens@... | 503-219-3480

Date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 4:45pm PST - Last Modified: Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 6:41pm PST

Restaurant owners can require servers to participate in a tip pool that redistributes some of their tips back to the house without violating federal wage and hour laws. That's according to a decision upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The case stems from a 2009 lawsuit filed against Vita Cafe that claimed the Portland restaurant was violating federal law using an illegal tip pool among employees.

The Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association teamed with the Washington Restaurant Association to help defend the case and to file an amicus brief on behalf of the industry.

ALSO SEE

http://www.oregonrla.org/govt/operations/2010/tip-pooling.php

According to a recent decision by the Ninth Circuit, Oregon employers in the restaurant and hospitality industry may now require their servers to participate in a tip pool that redistributes some of their tips to the back of the house without violating federal wage and hour law. In Cumbie v. Woody Woo, Inc. (9th Cir. Feb 23, 2010), the Ninth Circuit held that an employer may establish a mandatory tip pool with non-customarily tipped employees without violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), as long as the employer does not attempt to take a tip credit and pays at least the minimum hourly wage. The Ninth Circuit's ruling is beneficial to Oregon restaurant and other business owners who want to broaden their tip pools to back of the house employees, such as dishwashers and cooks.

In Cumbie, the Oregon restaurant took no tip credit and paid its servers an hourly wage in excess of the hourly minimum wage in accordance with Oregon law. Under the restaurant's mandatory tip pooling policy, tips received by the wait staff went into a tip pool that was redistributed to all restaurant employees, except managers. The largest portion of the tip pool went to dishwashers and cooks, who are not customarily tipped in the restaurant industry, and the remainder was returned to the servers in proportion to their hours worked. The plaintiff claimed that this tip pooling arrangement violated the FLSA's minimum wage provisions, arguing that the FLSA requires employers to allow employees to keep all of their tips, except where the employee participates in a tip pool with other customarily tipped employees. The Ninth Circuit disagreed, ruling that nothing in the text of the FLSA restricts employee tip pooling arrangements—even with non-customarily tipped employees—if no tip credit is taken by the employer.

Within the Western States, the Department of Labor (DOL) will now be bound to the Ninth Circuit's decision when enforcing federal wage and hour laws against employers. This will be an important change for Oregon employers because the DOL previously took the position that federal tip pooling restrictions apply regardless of whether a tip credit is claimed against the minimum wage.

The Cumbie decision is good news for Oregon restaurants and other businesses whose employees receive tips, but employers should still take precautions in implementing mandatory tip pooling arrangements. First, because the default rule is that tips belong to the employee in the absence of a contrary agreement, employers requiring the sharing of tips are encouraged to put the terms of the tip pooling arrangement in writing. Second, the Ninth Circuit's decision did not discuss whether owners, managers, or supervisory employees may participate in an employee tip pool. While the Cumbie decision did not expressly prohibit the participation of managers in tip pools, this remains an open legal question and employers should be extremely cautious of extending tip pooling agreements to management staff at this time. Finally, while the Cumbie decision defines the permissibility of tip pooling under federal law, it does not prevent a challenge to a tip pooling arrangement under Oregon law. Although Oregon employers are allowed to require tip pooling under the FLSA, employee tip pooling agreements are still subject to litigation in Oregon state courts. Oregon employers are advised to remain aware of future rulings, and revise their policies accordingly.

Jenna Mooney, Partner

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

Jenna counsels hospitality and restaurant clients in best practices on all employment law-related issues from hire to separation of employment, including employment agreements, wage and hour issues, anti-harassment and discrimination trainings, and managing the complicated web of leave laws and the ADA. Jenna also defends employment-related litigation including agency charges and litigation in state and federal court.

Kaley Fendall, Associate

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP

Kaley Fendall has assisted the firm's litigation practice on employment, telecommunications, government relations and commercial matters. Her court-related experience includes an in-depth research and review of records in preparation for final opinions, review of a range of court documents and drafting legal memoranda. Kaley has also researched and written congressional testimony and speeches.

#4199

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sat Jan 1, 2011 7:42 pm
Subject: 2011

waitersworld

Happy New Year to all for 2011!

#4200

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Tue Feb 8, 2011 9:31 pm
Subject: Need server for new media interview on mandatory tip pooling

waitersworld

Looking for a server in the Orlando, Florida area that works for Red Lobster or Olive Garden... MUST BE willing to interview with news media regarding mandatory tip-pooling.

Contact me: Tips@...

#4201

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Tue Feb 22, 2011 4:07 am
Subject: Magazine Article: Hourly employees that run social media for their restaurant

waitersworld

Hello...
I'm working on an article about hourly employees that run social media for their food service employers. It may be just posting on their restaurant's Facebook page or it might be running the entire social media campaign. Mom N' Pop, small chians or big corporations. Got any leads I can talk to? I can be reached via FB or message or direct email here.
Thanks!
Paul

#4202

From: "peter.brown39" <peter.brown39@...>
Date: Mon Jul 18, 2011 3:55 pm
Subject: Re: Where do your restaurant tips really go? (This is Money - UK 8.9.08)

peter.brown39@...

It is getting worse.

from september pizza express will not only take 8% from credit card tips but
also 30% that will be use to pay the staff of the backhouse to replace the bonus
system that they had(which none of them saw coming since a long time)
Pizza express is now getting at the waiter income really badly and I do not
think that Waiters will be able to leave...As already they were struggling to
pay there bills.
Because pizza express get rid of staff representatif a long time ago , and that
almost none of the staff have union representatif nothing ca be done to save
them.
This is just apoling....

--- In WaiterNews@yahoogroups.com, "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...> wrote:
>
> Where do your restaurant tips really go?
> Dan Hyde, This is Money (UK) - 9 August 2008
>
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/consumer/article.html?in_article_id=449364&in_page_\
id=5&position=moretopstories
>
> Restaurants and bars will be banned from using tips to top up staff's minimum
wage, but what really happens to tips after you leave the table? This is Money
investigates
>
> The news that restaurant and bar owners are to be banned from using tips to
top up staff's pay to the minimum wage came as a long awaited victory for
waiters and waitresses across the country.
>
> Meanwhile, diners and drinkers who intend to reward servers for their efforts
- rather than line restaurant owners' pockets - also initially raised a glass to
the move.
>
> However, when put under the spotlight the announcement has left many
unsatisfied. The proposed changes will only exclude tips from a basic minimum
wage, making no mention of the sought-after tip transparency that would force
restaurants to give 100% of gratuities to staff.
>
> Unite, the largest union in the UK, says: 'Money left as a tip on a credit
card, or paid as a service charge on a menu, is legally the property of the
employer to dispose of as they wish.
>
> 'Bad employers use this as an opportunity to take a cut of waiters' tips and
only pass on a proportion back to them. Just because it is allowed doesn't mean
you have to do it. Waiters should be entitled to 100% of tips left for them.'
> Unite is continuing its 'Fair Tips' campaign, aimed at increased transparency
and encouraging employers to end bad practices.
>
> So, with a successful conclusion still some way off, This is Money takes a
closer look at the High Street's leading restaurant chains and their tip
policies…
> ________________________________________
> Pizza Hut
> - Doesn't automatically add a service charge to the bill but encourages
customers to leave tips for staff.
> - 100% of tip money goes directly to the member of staff that served your
table.
> - All tips are a bonus on top of a minimum wage that is paid separately.
> - Back of house staff are paid a slightly elevated rate in the interest of
fairness.
> This is Money says: Be confident leaving either a credit card or cash tip in
Pizza Hut. All of it will go to the waiter or waitress that served your table.
> ________________________________________
> Wagamama
> - All of the tips and gratuities, whether cash, cheque or credit card, left by
customers go to the staff and are shared on a basis agreed by the staff.
> - No deductions are made from tips or gratuities, other than tax where
required by law.
> - Wagamama always pays national minimum wage or higher and does not use tips
or gratuities to top wages up.
> - Also, no mandatory service charge is imposed.
> This is Money says: Yes, tipping in Wagamama is fine, but be aware that your
tip will not reward your table's waiter or waitress specifically.
> ________________________________________
> Tragus Group (Café Rouge, Bella Italia, Strada, Ortega, Brasseries)
> - Tragus Group restaurants, including Café Rouge, Strada and Bella Italia,
have been accused of paying a basic rate of less than the minimum wage, making
the rest up with customers' tips. The group declined to comment on the nature of
their practice. - Strada automatically adds a discretionary service charge to
customers bills
> ________________________________________
> Admin charge: PizzaExpress dishes out tips via a 'tronc' system and charges
staff 8% for this
> PizzaExpress
> - PizzaExpress has never used tips to make up a minimum wage. All staff are
paid at least minimum wage before tips.
> - All cash tips go straight to the waiters or waitresses.
> - However, PizzaExpress does take an administrative charge of 8% on all credit
card tips. The restaurant employs a 'tronc' (a system that manages tips and
their tax), and insists the 8% 'covers the costs incurred for running the tronc
and not, as implied previously, to generate additional profit for the company.'
> This is Money says: PizzaExpress is doing nothing wrong by law, and even
argues its 'tronc' system benefits employees tax-wise in the long run. But if
you want to see all of your tip go to the staff, leave it in cash.
> ________________________________________
> ASK & Zizzi
> - All cash tips go straight to the waiting staff and it is their
responsibility to ensure these are taxed.
> - Ask and Zizzi also use a 'tronc' system for credit card graduities in the
same way and for the same reasons given by PizzaExpress, a sister restauarant.
> - The restaurants claim that there is no limit to the amount of gratuity
allocated to an employee after the administration fee is deducted.
>
> This is Money says: The same rules apply for Ask and Zizzi as outlined for
PizzaExpress above. Always try to tip using cash.
>

#4203

From: Paul Paz <waitersworld@...>
Date: Mon Aug 15, 2011 5:58 pm
Subject: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn

waitersworld

Confirm that you know Paul

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

- Paul

Paul Paz
Social Media Administrator at 2011 Northwest Food Service Show
Portland, Oregon Area

#4204

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sat Sep 3, 2011 3:59 pm
Subject: "Don't bring your fake smile to work"

waitersworld

http://www.futurity.org/top-stories/dont-bring-your-fake-smile-to-work/

Don’t bring your fake smile to work

MICHIGAN STATE (US) — Faking a smile to keep customers—and the boss—happy can lower productivity and put employees in a bad mood—particularly women.

“Employers may think that simply getting their employees to smile is good for the organization, but that’s not necessarily the case,” says Brent Scott, assistant professor of management at Michigan State University. “Smiling for the sake of smiling can lead to emotional exhaustion and withdrawal, and that’s bad for the organization.”

Scott and colleagues found that while fake smiling can cause some employees to withdraw, workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts—such as a tropical vacation or a child’s recital—have better moods and are more engaged in their work.

For the study, which appears in the February issue of the Academy of Management Journal, researchers studied a group of city bus drivers during a two-week period.

They examined the effects of surface acting, or fake smiling, and deep acting, or cultivating positive emotions by recalling pleasant memories or thinking about the current situation in a more favorable way.

The study is one of the first of its kind to examine emotional displays over a period of time while also delving into gender differences, Scott notes.

The results were stronger for the women bus drivers, he adds.

“Women were harmed more by surface acting, meaning their mood worsened even more than the men and they withdrew more from work,” Scott says. “But they were helped more by deep acting, meaning their mood improved more and they withdrew less.”

While the study didn’t explore the reasons behind these differences, Scott says previous research suggests women are both expected to and do show greater emotional intensity and positive emotional expressiveness than men.

Thus, faking a smile while still feeling negative emotion conflicts with this cultural norm and may cause even more harmful feelings in women, he adds, while changing internal feelings by deep acting would gel with the norm and may improve mood even more.

But while deep acting seemed to improve mood in the short-term, Scott says that finding comes with a caveat.

“There have been some suggestions that if you do this over a long period that you start to feel inauthentic,” he says. “Yes, you’re trying to cultivate positive emotions, but at the end of the day you may not feel like yourself anymore.”

More news from Michigan State University: http://news.msu.edu/

#4205

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Sat Sep 3, 2011 4:03 pm
Subject: Connect with WaitersWorld on social media!

waitersworld

Here's your invite to connect with WaitersWorld on social media!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/WaitersWorld-Paul-C-Paz/255848664097

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/waitersworld

#4206

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Oct 5, 2011 11:49 pm
Subject: Oregon - Restaurant Tip- Pooling Deemed Legal 4/7/10

waitersworld

CUMBIE v. WOODY WOO, INC.
http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=infco20100223188

4/7/2010
Tip-Pooling is legal in Oregon (Cumbie v. Woody Woo) Ninth Circuit Court's order dated 4/7/10 denies plaintiff's petition for rehearing en banc in the Woody Woo case. Plaintiff has 90 days in which to file a petition to the Supreme Court asking the Court to hear the case.
IN ENGLISH: The ruling stands unless it is appealed to the US Supreme Court (not likely).

10/6/2009
The US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circut, has ruled that tip pooling in restaurants is legal in Oregon.

In the case heard, the restaurant Delta Café, was taking all the staff tips and placing them in a "pool". Delta Café owners determined the distribution, calculation, and percentages (see items in red below). 33-45% of the tip pool was redistributed to the servers rationed on the basis of number of hours each server worked.

The court ruling made no determinations of any limits or formulas a restaurant operation would be subject to. That means the formulas and amounts for tip pool calculations are completely up to the business owners and the employees have no say in the matter.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years. In the past it has been calculated that the average earning for Oregon tipped restaurant employee averages $17 per hour (minimum wage and tips). This court decision could reduce that average of $17 per hour by 55-65%... or more.

There could soon be a dramatic drop in the net earnings for Oregon tipped restaurant employees in the coming years.
over a year ago · Delete Post
Barbara Abshire
i doubt it seriously as 17.00 is an estimate per hour not a fact--and these tipped employees are making minimium of 8.40 an hour, a more reasonable estimate would be closer to 20.00 per and up--as a server for many years, i base my opinion on experience. The dshwasher is making minimum or a little more and works as hard if not harder and has an interest vested in what is happeninging in the front of the house--ie, clean silver dishes floors etc--and the cooks are in for minimum to starting at 10.00 per, the going runs around 12.00 to at top for a good line 15.00--totally out of proportion--what serversmake is bordering on okbscene, either make them share or stop paying them minimum wage!!!!When I worked as a server, I did it for less than minimum, much less.
over a year ago ·
· Report · Delete Post
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
Interesting points, Barbara.

We could dicker about the hourly rate ($17-$20) per hour. The statistical info used is from the Oregon Restaurant Association's research over the past several years and was used as part of the argument in favor of implementing a "tip credit" in Oregon. Interestingly, their research also revealed that the average restaurant hourly employee works 25.5 hours a week... not exactly fulltime work and probably why so many work more than one job. That is not a comment, but a fact.

When you say, "... these tipped employees", there is a hint of marginalizing that part of the restaurant labor pool... especially when you also use the term, "obscene".

You infer that the tipped employees are those who set the wage levels for the other departments. Here is something that is obscene... in a lifetime career of producing millions of $$$ in sales for the industry... it is the industry standard (nationally) that you will ALWAYS be paid minimum wage. The understanding is that tipped employees will earn the bulk of their income from their tips based on the level of their service skills.

The obscene thing is that in using this formula, designed by the industry leadership to save labor costs, those tipped employees who excel and develop their craft to make it profitable for themselves… are then considered “obscene” for using the system at its best!!!???

An irony, is that the industry’s negative perception of tipped employees being “overpaid”, is tied to tipped income for which employers do not pay nor are they liable for in taxes (on declared tips).

So to set the record straight: tipped employees do not decide the industry wage levels for non-tipped hourly positions… THE OWNERS DO.

The bulk of the income that tipped employees can EARN does not come out of the pockets of the employers (either directly or in tax liabilities). It comes from the dining public. (Reminder… those are the income terms DETERMINED BY THE INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP/OWNERS and not by the workers.)

There is no guarantee, law, or obligation for the public to provide gratuities. If I get “stiffed”… it is an occupational hazard (I do not expect my employer to make up any difference). There are good incomes to be EARNED by tipped employees if they learn their craft and ply the trade well.

But, we should not be chided, criticized, punished, or penalized for being successful with a formula not of our design or control.

If we want to become an industry of choice with both FOH and BOH career paths, then we must stop attacking our own for becoming successful with the terms set by the industry.

If our BOH is underpaid… then the industry needs to increase the wages… but that’s not going to happen too soon as it is easier to take away from other employees and make them the scapegoat for wage issues… again wage issues that hourly employees have no decision making powers.
over a year ago · Delete Post
Ranelle Jerome
Excellent !!
over a year ago ·
· Report · Delete Post
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
It was reported in the 9/3/2010 editon of the Portland Business Journal that the CEO of McCormick's & Schmick's restaurant group received a salary of $690,018 for2009 (not including any bonus income). He earned that on the labor of minimum wage short term and career tipped employees. He also chose to pay the BOH staff the $8.40 to $15.00 per hour mentioned earlier.
over a year ago · Delete Post
Kyle Cagley
Bill Freeman the CEO of M&S is a piece of shit.
over a year ago ·
· Report · Delete Post
Barbara Abshire
Paul, thank you for your input, and I thought that I had deleted that post--but apparently not. I was not thinking as rationally or as clearly as I should have when I wrote that post--I am an owner, one of those of which you speak. One of those who, as you say and I will not argue for or against, supposedly sets the "industry wage level". I can say, however, that I have first-hand, hands-on knowledge, athough perhaps limited, as my cafe is a small one, on both sides of the proverbial "fence". I also line cook, prep cook, wash dishes, wait tables, hostess, keep books, pay taxes, do payroll--I do whatever is necessary to keep my little business afloat. I also worked over the years as a bartender, bar manager, dining room manager, catering director, and I have done paperwork and have performed other managerial duties in restaurants much larger than the one I now own--but my primary profession and the one that I have always loved is that of server.
over a year ago ·
· Report · Delete Post
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
Dear Barbara...

Yes.... it is an emotional issue.

But, to give credit where credit is due... the owners do take all the risk and we hourly employees are provided an opportunity of gainful employment because of the entrepreneurial spirit of the owners. For that I am grateful for having all those owners who created an environment that I could provide comfortable for myself and my family… especially as a single parent for most of my professional life in the restaurant business.

I am grateful to my current (and previous) restaurant employers for offering we hourly employees (FOH & BOH) an incredible bank of resources to call upon at our discretion and as needed when serving our customers.

Thank you, Barbara, for your very gracious reply!

Paul
over a year ago · Delete Post
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
PS... For my peers coveting those CEO six-digit salaries… all you have to do is take all the risks and become an owner! However, take note of Barbara’s list of responsibilities as an owner of a small independent operation... her list is very abbreviated I assure you.!
over a year ago · Delete Post
Patti Bloom Benka
It is unfortunate that the "waitstaff" is always the ones critized for the small income they do make. Some one that has chosen to be in the industry that is not in the "tipped" area of the house is by choice. The "waiter" position is open to those that apply themselves to be there. It is the choice of the customer to tip and the amount. It is NOT a new idea in the industry. Just as in any type of sales position it is up to the person in that position to be educated to sell the "wares". I can say as an employee that has worked in "sub-minium wage" states, I worked 3 positions 3 different places to make what I make with the minium wage available here. I was unable to have a personal life to enjoy my earnings, i.e. my home with a pool, my friendships, etc. Most of us that are waiters are still in the poverty range of income. Gratuity is just that, a show of gratitude for services rendered. You can give anyone money for their service, it is just common practice it happens in the restaurant industry. Remember we are taxed 8% of our sales whether we are tipped on it or not & 100% of all charged tips! If you work at a hotel or resort that usually adds up to 70% of sales, since it is convient to the customer.

REMEMBER WAITERS ARE PART OF THE POVERTY LEVEL INCOME!!!
over a year ago ·
· Report · Delete Post
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
Restaurant assoc. wins tip pool case
Portland Business Journal - by Suzanne Stevens
sstevens@... | 503-219-3480
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2010/11/09/restaurant-assoc-wins-tip-pool-case.html?ed=2010-11-09&s=article_du&ana=e_du_pub

Restaurant owners can require servers to participate in a tip pool that redistributes some of their tips back to the house without violating federal wage and hour laws. That's according to a decision upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case stems from a 2009 lawsuit filed against Vita Cafe that claimed the Portland restaurant was violating federal law using an illegal tip pool among employees.
The Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association teamed with the Washington Restaurant Association to help defend the case and to file an amicus brief on behalf of the industry.
about 11 months ago · Delete Post
Post Deleted
about 9 months ago
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
David...
Sorry for my late reply.
Here's the press release from the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Associcaiton website
http://www.oregonrla.org/news/press/pr-2010-11-08.php
Managers sharing in tip pools has not been determined to be legal or illegal under the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court's order. It will take another court case to find out. No doubt we'll see it happen and then it will be another round of contention and probable lengthy court proceedings to reach a final answer.
Paul
about 8 months ago · Delete Post
WaitersWorld - Paul C. Paz
Tip pool ruling cuts restaurant costs
Oregon Business - January 2010
http://www.oregonbusiness.com/articles/94-january-2011/4584-tip-pool-ruling-cuts-restaurant-costs

A recent ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that allows food service employers in Oregon and Washington to require employees to participate in a “tip pool” is being welcomed by the industry but not some workers.

A Vita Café server sued the Portland restaurant in 2009 in protest of the pool in effect at the time. The ruling will allow restaurants to redistribute some of servers’ tips without violating federal wage and hour law. Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association spokesman Bill Perry says the ruling gives restaurant owners another way to get around additional costs such as the minimum wage increase effective this month when Oregon’s minimum wage will go up 10 cents to $8.50 an hour. But the server community is worried about the ruling’s implications. “We’re not against tip pooling,” Portland Restaurant Workers Association spokesman Jim Nolan says. “We just think the power to make that decision should be the worker’s, not mandated by the employer.”

Though most servers balk at a system that seems to be a disincentive to provide good service, Perry asserts tip pooling is beneficial to a business as a whole. “Some servers will see themselves as a ‘wage earners’ rather than a ‘commission salesperson,’” he says.“[But] it does give restaurant owners a new management tool.”

With the tip pool, restaurant owners can lower base wages of employees who often are not tipped out, such as cooks, and supplement their wages with tips that are typically distributed to servers. This can help lower prices and keep customers, Perry says.

Randy Capron, maitre d’ of Huber’s, Portland’s oldest restaurant, sees the practice as effectively lowering server pay. “You’re walking away with an 8% not a 20% tip.” Capron says.

The full implications of the ruling for the restaurant and hospitality industry are still unclear. Hospitality law expert Greg Duff recently wrote on his blog: “The short answer is ... that employers in Washington and Oregon may initiate mandatory tip pools under certain circumstances.”

PETER BELAND

Read more: Tip pool ruling cuts restaurant costs - Oregon Businesshttp://www.oregonbusiness.com/articles/94-january-2011/4584-tip-pool-ruling-cuts-restaurant-costs#ixzz1WibyNPja

#4207

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Oct 5, 2011 11:51 pm
Subject: Restaurant job totals near 2008 peak (Portland Busiess Journal 8.26.2011)

waitersworld

Restaurant job totals near 2008 peak
Portland Business Journal - by Maureen McGrain
Date: Friday, August 26, 2011, 3:00am PDT
Cathy Cheney | Portland Business Journal

Marco Roberti, owner of Gilda’s Italian Restaurant near Jeld-Wen Field, has hired four employees since May, an example of how the leisure and hospitality industry gaied 9,300 jobs, up 5.7 percent, in the past year.

While Oregon’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate hovered at 9.5 percent in July, Oregon’s leisure and hospitality has been a bright spot in the state’s labor market, adding 5,200 jobs in the past two months.

That’s good news for the sector that got hammered in 2008 and has been slowly clawing its way out of the economic doldrums ever since.

Oregonians working in restaurants, hotels, tourism outfits and the like numbered a seasonally adjusted 171,500 in July, according to the Oregon Employment Department. That’s 9,300, or 5.7 percent, more than a year ago and the highest it’s been since September 2008 when the hospitality industry employed 172,400.

While it is typical to see an employment increase at the start of summer and tourism season, the number of new jobs in June and July is far more than what’s normal due to seasonality.

“It’s a sign that the economy is strengthening and says a lot about consumer confidence,” said Jeff Hampton, executive vice president at the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association.

The leisure and hospitality sector encompasses a number of sub-industries.
• Arts, entertainment and recreation added 600 jobs in July to reach a seasonally adjusted 25,900, its highest level ever.
• Accommodation and food services employment added 4,000 jobs in June and July combined, to reach a seasonally adjusted 145,600, 3.4 percent more than in July 2010 and the most since November of 2008.
Accommodation and food service employment numbers are available separately, but aren’t seasonally adjusted:
• After adding 1,700 jobs in June, accommodation employs 22,300 jobs, slightly less than its year-ago figure.
• Food services and drinking places added 6,100 jobs in June and July, reaching 128,500, the most since September 2008.

Full-service restaurants have been particularly strong, adding 2,300 jobs in June and July, and 4,200 over the past 12 months. Growth had been slow since the economy tanked in 2008 and shuttered independent and chain restaurants alike.

Marco Roberti, chef and proprietor of Gilda’s Italian Restaurant near Jeld-Wen Field in Southwest Portland, has added four new employees since May. The restaurant Roberti named after his grandmother has grown steadily since opening in July 2010. Roberti plans to hire even more people by Sept. 1 when Gilda’s will be open seven days a week for lunch, dinner and happy hour.

Jacob Murray got hired on at Gilda’s as a pantry chef at the beginning of August, after completing an internship there.

“This is my career and my only job” as he finishes culinary school, Murray said.
“You have to be a lifer and be passionate about food for me to hire you,” said Roberti. About half of his 10 employees work part time.

In fact, many jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector are considered part time by most industry standards, said Hampton. The nature of the work dictates it. Many restaurants, for instance, have a three-hour window when there’s a need for extra staff. The flexibility is precisely why most people choose those jobs, he said.

The hospitality employment landscape has changed, though. Gone are the days that high school kids can simply pick up a restaurant job in the summer with no experience, said Paul Paz, owner of local hospitality and customer service consulting firm Waiters World.

The recession shook out restaurants that weren’t running lean. It also shook out the labor pool.

“Like any industry, the average employee now has to be more productive and skilled than ever,” said Paz, who’s been a waiter for 30 years and a past board member of the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association.

The recent surge in hospitality jobs is undoubtedly good news for the state’s economy, but some may downplay their long-term impact, particularly if those jobs are part time, seasonal and low-paying.

Paz says there is a misconception that waiting tables isn’t a “real job.” After 30 years, Paz still earns the industry standard — minimum wage — at his waiter position at Oswego Grille. However, as a tipped employee, Paz says his income pays for real bills, real vacations and real contributions to his 401(k).

Hampton agrees. Senior positions in hospitality are living-wage jobs, and often the tipped staff is the highest-paid in an establishment.

As for the longevity of hospitality employment levels, time will tell. At summer’s end there will be some drop-off, and those levels should reflect historic trends (minus the last few years of a struggling economy), Hampton said.

There’s also the question of which direction the economy will go. Though higher numbers of hospitality jobs reflect consumer confidence, an erratic stock market could push the U.S. economy back into recession or at least rattle the nerves of consumers.

Paz remains optimistic. What do the stressed-out stockbrokers and executives need when their portfolios are tanking one day and rallying the next? “A stiff drink, and maybe some food to go with it.”

#4208

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Oct 5, 2011 11:48 pm
Subject: The Lost Art of Service

waitersworld

On the Menu: Less than first-class service is a missed opportunity for restaurants
Sunday, September 11, 2011
By China Millman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
John Heller / Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11254/1173144-46-0.stm?cmpid=newspanel2

Contemporary restaurants are dominated by kitchens. We know chefs' names and faces and follow them on Twitter. When people talk about restaurants (or critics write about them), they are mostly focused on the food. This wasn't always the case. For decades, the maitre d' was the most powerful figure in fine dining restaurants -- so powerful there was often a separate line on a check for tipping him.

Today, front-of-house staff command no such respect, and people rarely discuss the art of service except to complain about it. We're in awe of cooks' culinary skills but collectively seem to think that anyone could be a server with a few days of training.

A controversial article from restaurant critic Alan Richman in the September issue of GQ accused many New York restaurants of a "disastrous decline in service," which has resulted in "inconsiderate servers who do almost nothing for customers other than slap plates down in front of them and expect a generous tip."

The complaint is not limited to New York restaurants.

Roger Levine, an instructor at the International Culinary School at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, posits that these days diners have greater expectations about service as well as food, and that restaurants aren't meeting those heightened expectations -- a huge missed opportunity.

Restaurants cannot rely on individual servers to manage customer relations. They should have coherent service philosophies, which empower servers not just to perform the technical tasks that are required for a meal, but also to create an atmosphere of true hospitality. Mr. Levine calls servers "ambassadors," because "If ... the food doesn't reach the [diner's] expectations, the server can still win the customer back."

Most of the time, servers are like stage managers. If they do their job right, we don't notice them, but if they forget to move a piece of furniture off the stage -- or forget to bring you a spoon for your soup -- it can bring the experience to a screeching halt.

Servers' jobs are made up of dozens of tiny yet essential tasks: Setting the table, taking orders correctly, serving food and drink, replacing silverware, keeping water glasses full, bringing the check and collecting payment.

These are just the elements of service that most diners are aware of. Add in entering orders into a computer system, following up in the kitchen to ensure that orders are executed correctly, and being the first line of defense for any problems that arise -- and multiply that by the number of tables in a server's section.

Habitat, in the Fairmont Pittsburgh, Downtown, bucks the trend of more casual dining rooms and offers a more elaborate, European style of service. There, servers go through two days of hotel orientation followed by five fully supervised shifts, before they're set loose on guests, said Nicole Tabori, the director of outlets for the Fairmont Pittsburgh.

Ms. Tabori oversees training for front-of-house staff at Habitat, as well as in-room dining, Andys bar and the refreshment center, but Habitat's executive chef, Andrew Morrison, also plays a role in server education by conducting staff tastings when specials or new menus are introduced.

That knowledge of the product they are serving is essential to today's servers. As diners grow ever more experienced and sophisticated, restaurants try to stay one step ahead, sourcing unusual ingredients, and offering more personal, creative interpretations of dishes. Where once servers mimicked the role of servants, today, skillful servers are more like tour guides.

The overall quality of restaurant food in America has never been better, but for every person who goes online to rave about a restaurant's food, there seem to be two people complaining about service, often at the same restaurant. When diners call or email me to complain about a restaurant experience, they usually focus on a problem with service.

Restaurant service is rarely technically perfect. Whether it's a missing steak knife, a long wait at an empty host stand or a burger with the wrong kind of cheese, mistakes happen at every kind of restaurant all of the time. But it's what happens after a mistake that determines the quality of the service.

In "Setting the Table: The Transformative Power of Hospitality in Business," New York restaurateur Danny Meyer describes the moment that he realized that perfection in restaurant service was an impossible goal, but that mistakes could be viewed as opportunities, rather than disasters. He wrote, "In handling mistakes, our goal is always to alter course to create a positive outcome and an experience that ends up being memorable for the right reasons."

The best restaurant service experiences happen when a server turns a problem into an opportunity to impress. Often it's something as simple as a server letting you know that there are only two peach cobblers left in the kitchen in time for you to reserve one.

There is a lot of genuine bad service out there, just as there is still plenty of mediocre food. But talk of bad service seems to have totally overwhelmed any discussion of the many restaurants offering consistently great service. There may never be a show on television called "Top Server," but the very best servers and the people who manage them are every bit as deserving of our respect and admiration as the talented team in the kitchen.

China Millman: 412-263-1198 or cmillman@.... Follow her athttp://twitter.com/chinamillman.

First published on September 11, 2011 at 12:00 am
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11254/1173144-46-0.stm?cmpid=newspanel2#ixzz1Xli99PUe

#4209

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Feb 22, 2012 7:07 am
Subject: How Waiters Read Your Table ~ Wall Street Journal 2/22/12

waitersworld

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204909104577237152011781364.html

How Waiters Read Your Table

Restaurants Train Servers to Judge Diners, Make Service More Personal; Nixing 'Hello, My Name Is…'

By SARAH NASSAUER ~ Wall Street Journal 2/22/12

What looks like a convivial scene is a waiter's nightmare: people at a table, chatting away, menus closed with drinks in their hands.

Yet when Alex Martin, a 26-year-old waiter at Blue Smoke restaurant in New York, tried to take their order "they didn't even look up," he says. "If you are standing there for more than three seconds it's like an eternity."

At such times, Mr. Martin employs his go-to strategy of "the hand on the table." Placing down his palm draws the group's eyes up and out of the conversation, interrupting but without being pushy, he says. A few minutes later the men had ordered and quickly returned to chatting.

Called "having eyes" for a table, or "feeling" or "reading" the table by restaurant workers, it's how the best waiters know what type of service you prefer before you tell them. From fine dining to inexpensive chains, restaurants are working to make service more individualized as the standard script ('I'm so-and-so and I will be your server tonight") is sounding dated.

Even chain restaurants like Denny's, T.G.I. Friday's, and Romano's Macaroni Grill are focusing more on personalized service by training staff to note body language, eye contact and offhand remarks, hoping to make service feel less mechanical. Traditionally, eateries taught waiters to follow a script and push add-ons like desserts and drinks.

Getting service right, not just food, is increasingly crucial for restaurants. The number of people going to restaurants is expected to grow by less than 1% through 2019, slower than population growth, predicts NPD Group, a market research firm. At the same time restaurants from Applebee's to fine-dining spots like Press St. Helena in California's Napa Valley say guests expect better service as they continue to demand top value for their dollar and learn more about restaurants' behind-the-scenes operations through TV shows and books.

How Waiters Read Your Table

View Interactive

Luci Gutiérrez

"We asked what can we do that will set us apart from the scrum," besides discounting and coupons, says Wayne Vandewater, vice president of learning and development for Applebee's, owned by DineEquity Inc. "Food is easy to copy, a building is easy to copy, but it's not east to copy our people."

Some restaurants still employ waiter scripts, but now they are being used to dig for guest information. At Romano's Macaroni Grill, an Italian-themed chain, waiters are taught to use their scripted offer of house wine to find out if the table will want a fast, leisurely, or lively meal. If "they say, 'no, well, we are going to the theater,' " then the waiter knows dinner isn't the main event, says Brandon Coleman III, chief marketing officer for the company. To speed up service, the waiter may bring the check at the same time as the food.

If diners have a laptop open on the table, they might not be interested in appetizers that are best for sharing or learning a lot about the cocktail menu, says Ricky Richardson, chief operating officer for Carlson Restaurants Inc., which operates T.G.I. Friday's.

"We changed 'suggestive selling' to 'situational selling,' " says Rene Zimmerman, senior director of training and development for Bob Evans Farms Inc., a family-style restaurant and food maker. Instead of offering every breakfast guest one additional item, say biscuits and gravy, waiters are taught to adjust their offer depending upon the guest. For a diner who places a lighter order, like a bagel and fruit, the waiter might suggest a cup of coffee or tea.

Restaurants are investing in training despite the historically high churn rate in wait staff, though turnover has slowed since the recession. Waiters can be paid below minimum wage in some states because they earn tips. In other states, they are paid a minimum wage that varies by state from $5 to $10, plus tips.

As part of a recent, two-week training course at the Cheesecake Factory in Burlington, Mass., Lauren McDonagh, 23 years old, sat with four other new employees before the lunch rush. They heard tips on how to interact with tables with children (if a kid says he doesn't like green things, don't use lettuce, even as a garnish), first-time guests (walk them to the restroom, don't point), and celebrations (get at least five employees to sing "Happy Birthday").

Ms. McDonagh and the others are taught to "tour guide" guests toward menu options they think are best, like easy-to-prepare food if they are in a hurry. When Ms. McDonagh began waiting tables without any training at age 18, "it took me three months to realize you give the dessert menu quietly to the mom, otherwise kids scream," for dessert, she says.

Reading a table happens within seconds of a waiter coming to a table. By asking for a cocktail menu or smiling and making strong eye contact, "they are saying 'hey, I want to engage with you and I want you to make me feel really important,' " says Mark Maynard-Parisi, managing partner of Blue Smoke, a pair of barbecue restaurants in New York, owned by Union Square Hospitality Group. If people seem shy, "you want to put them at ease, say, 'take your time, look at the menu.' "

Blue Smoke does seven days of training with new waiters, five days of trailing an experienced waiter and two days of being trailed by the experienced waiter. Each day includes a quiz and a focus such as greeting guests.

With parties of four or more, "the most important thing is to read the dynamic between the group," Mr. Maynard-Parisi says. Alcohol (who is ordering more or less) is a potential point of contention. He reads eye contact and body language to see if a group is friendly (looking at each other) or less secure, like an uncomfortable work meeting (glancing around the room, fidgeting). "Am I approaching the table to rescue them or am I interrupting them?"

Because people often resist speaking up when they're unhappy with their meal, waiters are taught to detect if a guest is unhappy. When asked about dinner, if a guest says, " 'It's OK.' That to me is a red flag," says Allison Yoder, general manager of Press.

At Cheesecake Factory, employees are taught to look every guest in the eye when moving through the dining room, watching for people looking up from their meal, pushing food around their plate, or removing ingredients from their dish—all signs they might not like their meal. Even if it's not their assigned table, they are trained to ask if anything is wrong and try to fix problems.

Reading a table is still more art than science. On a recent night at Blue Smoke a couple came in with a baby in a stroller, usually a demographic looking for a quick dinner. Instead, the baby fell asleep during the meal. "They spent so much money," says Mr. Maynard-Parisis. They "got another cocktail and dessert and an after-dinner drink."

The Signals You May Be Sending

If a waiter reads the needs of your table correctly, you're likely to end up with a good experience. Inadvertently giving off the wrong signals can doom a table to service that's too rushed, too slow or just off kilter. Here, how to work the system.

If you're chatty... A waiter is more likely to assume a friendly, chatty table is there to party. Get ready for more offers of drinks, dessert and a talkative waiter.

If you act moody... You may get better service. Several waiters said they are more careful to get every detail right when they believe a table is already in a bad mood (a couple fighting or a tense business meal perhaps).

If you say 'It's OK'... To attentive waiters, saying food is 'OK' is a red flag that you aren't happy with your meal. The waiter or manager might dig for more information to fix the problem.

If you ask about the menu... Food questions are a sign that you either like learning about everything you might eat or you feel lost and need guidance. One menu question could lead to a long, full menu description. If you seem overwhelmed, the waiter might try to steer you toward a particular order.

If you grab the wine list first... Expect the waiter to focus wine explanations and questions about refills to you.

If you're early and fancy... Diners who are dressed up and have an early dinner reservation may lead waiters to suspect they have another event that night and serve them at a fast clip.

If you're wearing a suit at lunch... Diners who look like they just stepped away from their cubicle, whether in a suit or business casual, are bound to get speedier service. The exception: If the waiter realizes the boss or valued client wants to set a slower pace by asking for more time before ordering or pulling out papers for a sales pitch.

If you act like the ring leader...
A waiter will try to determine who is in charge at the table through body language, clues in conversation or by who made the reservation, and defer to the wants of that diner.

If there's no obvious leader...
If no take-charge person emerges at the table, the waiter may struggle to figure out whether to be chatty or invisible and whether to make the service quicker or more leisurely.

Check, Please?

How the check is brought to the table can make diners grumble. Some guests want the check without asking, some feel rushed if a check is placed on the table before they ask. When researchers asked customers which restaurant service mistake is worst in terms of overall satisfaction, they said not promptly settling the check when the guest is ready to leave, or problems with the check amount. (This complaint was second only to messing up the food order.) The research, which surveyed 491 people who had dined at a table-service restaurant within the past month, was published in the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly in 2010. It's 'tricky,' says Serge Krieger, general manager of fine-dining spots TRU and L2O Restaurant, both in Chicago. Instead of leaving people in check limbo, 'we make them ask,' says Mr. Krieger. 'After coffee, we say, "Anything else I can get you?" And they usually ask for the check.' To signal when diners are ready to pay, Applebee's, owned by DineEquity Inc., has introduced check holders (see above) that say, 'I'm ready to go!' The new books are in about half of its 2,000 U.S. locations and customers are using them, says Wayne Vandewater of Applebee's.

#4210

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Feb 22, 2012 8:33 am
Subject: (No subject)

waitersworld

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-02-07/business/os-minimum-wage-servers-20120207_1_minimum-wage-senate-bill-florida-senate-committee

Senate bill could cut hourly wages of servers, bartenders

February 07, 2012|By Sandra Pedicini, Orlando Sentinel

A bill that would cut the hourly wages of many waiters and waitresses was unveiled Tuesday by a Florida Senate committee in Tallahassee.

The bill (SPB 7210) would slash Florida's minimum wage for tipped workers — now $4.65 an hour — to the federal tipped minimum of $2.13 for companies that agree to guarantee that with wages and tips their employees will make at least $9.98 an hour.

#4211

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Wed Feb 29, 2012 6:55 am
Subject: WHERE'S MY FOOD? Documentary Filmmaker Seeks Food Servers with Compelling Stories

waitersworld

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9232836.htm

Documentary Filmmaker Seeks Food Servers with Compelling Stories

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wheres-My-Food/182125791891005?ref=ts

For his upcoming documentary “Where's My Food?!” filmmaker Lee Godden is interviewing waiters and waitresses who have true, compelling stories about how serving food has affected their lives. “My goal for this film is to improve social awareness,” Godden said, “by revealing amazing and touching stories hidden in the hearts of the people who serve us our food.”

#4212

From: "Mr Paul C. Paz" <waitersworld@...>
Date: Thu Mar 1, 2012 3:05 am
Subject: Turnover costs restaurants between $4,000 and $14,000 per departing worker

waitersworld

Treat restaurant workers well, expect better business, study says

By Tiffany Hsu

January 24, 2012, 2:45 p.m.

It’s an equation that seems simple but still escapes many restaurateurs: Treat your employees well, and your business will be better for it.

Offering restaurant workers good pay, benefits and career mobility usually translates into high short-term costs -- a burden that causes many low-margin eateries to underpay and overwork their employees.

But generous management policies also help dining establishments save big in the long run, according to new research from Cornell University and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.

The restaurant industry is a notoriously difficult place to work. Wages tend to be lower than those of any other occupation. Nine in 10 people on staff don’t get sick days, paid vacation or health insurance. Advancing up the ladder tends to be a rare occurrence.

The tough conditions are evident in worker productivity and retention, researchers found.

Employees often underperform, doing only what is necessary to keep their jobs until they can find a better position. The quality of the food and service suffers, in turn preventing the eatery from building a loyal customer base.

Turnover is rampant, usually costing restaurants between $4,000 and $14,000 per departing worker in new recruiting, screening, training and other costs. Some establishments said they often have to train four potential candidates before finding one they’re willing to hire.

More investment in workers could end up saving the restaurant industry millions of dollars, according to the study. More interested and productive workers would help draw more revenue to offset the higher initial labor costs, researchers said.

The Cornell report is based on studies of 33 restaurants in eight cities, including at Good Girl Dinette and the Chaya chain in Southern California.