Rant of the Day: Waiters Who Do Not Write Down Your Orders!

When I was a kid, I was always impressed when a waiter would take an order without writing anything down and then serve the food as requested. How did they remember all of our orders and who actually ordered what? Looking back at it, I am still amazed and impressed. I think that I have a fond memory of the professionalism of the wait staff and service industry in general.

Today, I get uncomfortable with waiters who do not write down our orders. Even when they do write orders down (with all of the customizations requested), one or more dishes are prepared wrong or served to the wrong person. It is frustrating to dine in a restaurant and be served a dish either you did not order or one that you ordered differently. It can be as simple as requesting a steak to be served medium and it comes out rare. Or it can be a request for a salad not to include olives and lo and behold it comes with olives. What has happened and why don’t waiters write orders down?

First off, with the advent of point and sales systems, waiters have to input orders so that they can be sent digitally to the kitchen staff. As a result, waiters no longer take their order pad and pass it off to the kitchen to prepare. The waiter has to input it at a station so if they write an order down, it is double work for them. They could get a handheld key pad to input the orders at the table.

Second, some restaurants feel it is more elegant and a better customer experience if the waiters take an order without writing it down. I will tell you a better customer experience is getting the order right!! There is a much better chance of doing this if you do not have to rely on the memory of a busy waiter handling multiple tables at once.

My other thought is that the professionalism of the wait staff has declined over time. Restaurants find it harder each year to find, hire and keep their personnel and, as a result, the quality of the people they find is not as good as it used to be. With that, certain abilities and characteristics of the staff end up being reduced.

So how do you fix this issue? Hire and train the people better. That is easier said than done. You can skip this issue and have the customers enter their orders themselves at the table on a iPad. I acknowledge that this impacts the restaurant experience. Or you can simply ask the waiters to write down the customers’ orders.

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