I am an employee in Buffalo Wild Wings in Goshen, and I want to say that working conditions do to management are dreadful. With unemployment being so low there really aren’t many other options left, but to stay and undergo the abuse from the management. In the Buffalo Wild Wings in Goshen the managers have favorites that get away with anything. This is all do to the fact that the favorite employee is the managers daughter. There are no rules there anymore; it has gone as far as to changing the policies back and forth. For example there is a big group that comes in on Sundays and always goes to counter so they wouldn’t need a waitress, it is big group of 30 to 40 people. On many occasions employees complained about the mess they leave and room they take up resulting in less tip money for the servers working. The same group came in just a week ago and went to counter like always; well the manager’s daughter was serving that night, instead of letting them order at the counter the manager changed the policy for that night telling the people that they do not have the option of ordering at the counter and that they will need a server. Following this with seating them in the section his daughter was working in. This is only one of times the manager has changed things just so his daughter would be happy.
One of the big things in the restaurant are seating people in a specific order to split the number of tables between the servers equally. Anny given time when the manager’s daughter is serving the normal procedure does not work. According to the manager whenever she complains she is right and she should get whatever tables she wants. The most recently there was a new policy that was started, whenever a large group that would take up more than one table would be seated in one servers section, that server would be skipped when seating new customers to equal out the tables. (If one server got people that take up three tables, that server would be skipped two times to give two more tables to other sections) Tonight there was a large group that came in and got seated in the managers’ daughters’ section. They took up four tables and according to our managers’ policy that he came up with we should skip her section three times to equal it out amongst other servers. But he decides that we do not need to skip his daughter, but still follow the procedure of skipping sections on other servers.
Another reason why working in Goshen’s Buffalo Wild Wings is so bad now is how much the same manager abuses his power over employees with scheduling. So far every single person who has tried to talk to him or other management about any problems had a instantaneous decrease in hours and termination within couple of weeks. Even when it is not about a problem asking for anything is a risk. When one of people that work in the kitchen tried requesting some hours on the floor he was ignored the first time, the second time instead of just answering and saying no the management scheduled the employee to work only two days of his average five days. A week after the same employee had no hours at all. A number of times when people have tried asking to become servers they were ignored, when the request was repeated they were removed from the normal schedule and put on serving one day a week to two days, until they ended up quitting do to lack of hours.
If the employees do not follow the ridiculous wants of the manager they will get abuse until they quit, or they will just get fired.