Waiters have told me to please not stack the dishes because it messes with their carrying technique.
Yes. If you do it incorrectly then there’s food on the bottom of the plates now and they can’t shuffle it to their preference anymore.
When I was a server I hated when people stacked their own plates. First off, I found it performative. Secondly it messed with my system. Thirdly it usually produced a 20lb pile of dishes covered in queso, half eaten burritos, and guacamole that was impossible to carry.
bussed tables for years; what are you doing clearing tables as a server?
I liked it when people stacked their shit up, it shaves a few seconds off me doing it before I dumped it in a tub.
As far as food issues - well yeah if they’re some kids acting like cretins pouring shit all over that’s a problem but what’s that got fuck all to do with the stack?
I find your hate performative to be honest.
Yeah man. I don’t stack anything, not because I don’t want to help, but I don’t want to mess with your system. Waiting isn’t as easy as it seems and I absolutely have no idea how to do it, so I don’t want to interfere. I prefer to sit awkwardly and pretend that me leaning back as much as I can to make more space is equally helpful.
Huh, me mum was a waitress at one point and taught me to stack for politeness, I didn’t realize it was a preference thing. Now I’m not sure what to do.
I’ll still keep ordering the queso though, that shit’s delicious.
offer them the plates so they don’t have to reach or move around the table and help them stack them when they’re there… pause your conversations and ensure they spend as little time sorting your dishes as possible, and then both they can get back to what they’re doing and you can continue your conversations in private
especially true when there are plates, bowls, and cups of all shapes
exception being it’s okay to pile cutlery on a single plate because that’s always going on the top and if not it’s easy to tip off all at once to restack
But people who put napkins in cups can go to hell, and that includes servers.
Sincerely,
Dish
P.S. Scrape your damn plates servers.
Okay, fair enough. How about putting eventual food, that has not been eaten, on the top plate (and in general making sure the plate is not completely dirty)
This. Heard the same from a waiter friend a while back. Since then, I do nutsack
Nutsack is preferable.
As a former waiter, I have a counterpoint:
- I can’t carry that wobbly precarious mess you’ve made, and it’s easier to disassemble and reassemble it because I know how to do this.
Thus, you’ve created work for me.
Thankfully I haven’t been a waiter in - oh look! - 30 years.
Plus if you hand me a messy stack, I now have to leave the table with it. If I can arrange food waste and cutlery on my own, I can carry way more
But I put the cutlery up top, so it’s not wobbly at all.
Wait do people really just stack them with all the cutlery scattered throughout the tower?
Yes they do. Some people are that stupid.
Yes, but most waiters won’t even put the cutlery on top of the stack. They’ll usually have the main stack on their forearm, while having a separate plate held in their hand. This single plate has all the cutlery, and it’s pinned down by their fingers
By putting all the cutlery on top, it’s much more likely for them to fall while walking around
I’m a former chef, so I’ve seen what happens when these best intentions go poorly.
Stack neatly and in manageable heights. If you leave utensils and food between the plates: you’re not helping. Scrape remnants on to one plate and leave it at the top of the stack with the utensils.
Also, tip well. At least until we get the radical changes in labor law that would prevent these ratfucking cokehead “Chef”-Owners from paying the dirt wages that makes people live and die by their tips.
My wife used to wait tables and we generally eat or box everything, so I’m pretty confident she’s right to pre-bus (and even wipe the table a little while waiting for check).
My only personal analogy is bagging groceries; self service shows how typical people have no idea, while an experienced bagger does. I saw a guy literally put eggs in the bottom of their bag. I can’t imagine how terrible their pre-bussing must be.
sheepishly telling the cashier thanks cuz my bag Tetris is no good
Hehe, bag Tetris. “Oops, I put the eggs in vertically to fill a hole and now the whole bag is empty.”
Ahahaha I’ll be watching out for that now
Well luckily for you I have restaurant industry experience, so I already know how to stack them the right way.
Yeah, I originally thought I was being nice until I heard this exact sentiment from another server. I try not to make a ridiculous mess and tip at least 20% for good service
Yep instead I pass things out of reach, look the waiter in the eyes, comment on how hard they’re working and chat to them. Just treat them like they’re human
I almost never had a table stack their stuff the way I wanted. Just make sure your spot is tidy, easy to grab, and there are no surprises like silverware or a tiny dish wrapped inside a napkin. Definitely don’t stick a paper napkin inside your cup that still has a drink in it. By the time it gets back to the dish station it will have turned into a paste someone has to dig out and will be cursing you!
I always prebus. If i don’t know how to stack funny dishes then I leave them in small piles by type with cuttery on the top of what makes sense.
Takes less than 5 seconds for a stack / pickup with a nod to the busser.
This comment section is a nice mix of “I’m a waiter, please don’t do this, you’re making my job harder” and “I always do this to make the waiters’ lives easier”
Checking in at 23 hours - I count one comment to this effect, but even there the caveat is ‘but only if you do it wrong’
As a waiter, I’ve never had a customer stack their plates correctly for me
If you leave your cart in a parking space, you’re sub-human
You’re passible if you take it to the corral
But a truly good human will stack the carts into proper rows if the carts are loose in the corral
I firmly believe in the validity of the Shopping Cart Test. On a related and depressing note, my little city is overrun with errant shopping carts.
I have a clip from my dashcam floating around somewhere of me stopping, jumping out of my car, then hauling ass to catch someone’s runaway cart moments before it hit a parked car. Honestly one of my proudest moments.
On the opposite end, I once left a cart (on a curb) and it haunted me. To be fair, it was absolutely storming outside and I was chilled to the bone and just wanted to warm up…
- I used to work at a supermarket and preferred returning carts to other tasks, and got paid hourly. When someone returns the cart, they’re doing that hourly work for the store owner for free. Since time is rival, you could be more effective with your altruism than helping store owners.
- You’re depressed because there’s so much homelessness, right?
I push products to the shop floor because some people prefer stacking the shelves to their other work. I’m an altruistic job creator. You’re welcome
Isn’t that just the parable of the broken window? Somebody ultimately needs to clean the dishes and return the cart - they’re not wasted time.
I’m even more altruistic than the lazy shits not wanting to put the cart back since I don’t just not do something, I’m actively doing it to benefit their day.
It’s not benefiting or harming them either way. Their day is spent and their odds of getting paid are the same.
I’m creating more work for them, if everyone just trashed the stores they’d go in we’d have more people working at the stores. I’m a job creator
I do have some caveats for this. As my parents both park in handicap, we’ve noticed that the cart corrals are super far from the handicap spots and I won’t blame someone who already has trouble walking half way down the parking aisle to a corral.
I do tend to take the random carts from the parking lot in to use for shopping when I see them though. No reason to take one of the ones already brought back.
The exception is the handicapped area. When I drive my 80 something mother, we park in a handicapped spot, and I get out and grab the nearest cart for her. She uses that like a walker to get to the store. When we get back to the car, and she gets in, I leave the cart near the handicapped spots for the next person. I have often seen others do the same thing.
We parked the other day, and there were no carts nearby, so I went and got one for her. She could have made it into the store with just her cane, but she would have been slower, and not as confident.
So leave a cart or two in the handicapped zone. The handicapped folks have already worked out their own system that the normies don’t know about or understand. It’s a Geezer Thing.
Apparently I’m a truly good human because my organizational autism trait gets triggered. I’m not even annoyed fixing them. It’s just satisfying to see them in order.
My dad gets legitimately angry when I do this. Boomers are a different breed
I don’t think it’s an age thing, more of an empathy test. I’ve been a dishwasher, maybe that’s why I tidy up.
I’ve owned a restaurant, and once you’ve done that, you’ve been the dishwasher, janitor, toilet plunger, punching bag, robbery victim, etc.
After all that, you tend to lose that sense that some jobs are below you. You just see it as work that has to be done, and you’re standing there, so it might as well be you, so get it done.
Yeah, my boomer uncle told me it was low class after he watched me do it. When I was a waitress at the time. Fuck him and that mentality - I do it to this day and make into 6 figures
Impressive. Employ a buncha seasoned techniques ‘n’ tactics during service? Influence by Dr. Cialdini had some, (including one that was essentially dishonest), but one more normal one like this:
My dad gets legitimately angry when I do this
I think it has to do with “putting the waiters out of their job”. Like, when you do a part of the job for them consistently, the restaurant manager will eventually notice that and realize they can do with a little bit less staff. So they hire fewer waiters, which means potential waiters face a tougher job market.
And for anybody saying “that little bit of support can’t make the difference between more and less staff”, yes, it can. Consider that a restaurant manager might have already decided to fire a waiter that’s a bit less performant (because they struggle to keep up) but decided to keep them anyways, just in case. Now they see that people do a part of the work, and that might just give them the idea that maybe, they could do with fewer waiters, and there’s that one lazy guy who can’t keep up anyway …
That’s bizarre to me.
edit: you just unlocked a memory of my mum bollocking me as a kid for doing it. It’s so bizarre why?
Too many people see life as a zero-sum game with a one-dimensional ranking. To them, success is defined as the number of people of people you’re better than. Worse, many people go by pass/fail,as in “they’re one of the good ones” (popular with bigots everywhere)
My wife and I do this, but I’ve always wondered whether I’m actually helping or just creating a different kind of inconvenience by not organizing them in a beneficial way.
It’s helpful! But don’t put trash inside the cups - this can be annoying to empty
What do you do with your shopping cart when you are done? Do you just leave it to fend for itself in the sea of the parking lot? Or do you do the right thing and bring it back inside or to the cart corral.
The REAL REAL sign though? When someone brings a cart from the parking lot into the store to shop with, ultra move.
I like to stay in the chaotic neutral category. I get my cart from the parking lot, but return it exactly where i found it. Even if it was in the middle of the lot. 😝
This has to be in the top 5 most US things.
You’d fail my test if I learn you have tests for people.
Maybe it’s just a matter of phrasing, but the idea that I could be kind to our server all night, tip well, generally hit it out of the park, but be disproportionately judged for failing to do this one small thing because it’s your personal test? Sets my social anxiety off enough that if I knew that were on your mind I’d probably just say we’re not compatible.
Obviously, keep an eye out for shitty people, and don’t put up with bad behaviour, but also judge people as people, wholistically.
It says the word ‘test’ in the post title, but if it helps I don’t think you need to take it so literally.
This isn’t necessarily “setting up” specific situations for people, but more like how people respond in normal everyday situations which you might consider to be either red flag or green flag behaviour.
For me, an example is littering. I’m not so sociopathic that I’d create some trash just to test someone, but if trash happens and they throw it on the ground, it’s a bad personality indicator.
Yeah, what you’re saying makes sense. I like “bad personality indicator” as an alternative, since it conveys to me it’s one of many indicators you might process, maybe not even consciously. I’ve just had rather negative experiences being “tested” and hearing that world applied to any kind of casual social interaction gets my hackles all the way up.
My test is the classic shopping cart test, for those who don’t know its a test based on if someone returns a shopping cart. Its a societal benefit that is not aknowlaged and requires minimal effort. You wont be punished if you dont return it yet you’re being an asshole.
If it’s a self service place, I tend to look around if there is a place to keep the dishes (kinda like SubWay has).
Otherwise, I don’t stack. Waiters can have different ways of taking the dishes and those ways are usually based on all the dishes being random-access. I’d rather do nothing, than stack it the wrong way.I may tidy up. But I don’t stack. I won’t even stack at my house, I hate touching the dirty bottom of a plate.
the server and busser will 100% stack them and grab them by the edges of the plates to keep their hands clean, plates generally arent 100% level surfaces and fully covered in gravy so the issue youre imagining doesnt exist
I don’t understand this. At all. Do you let them seat you at a dirty table? Do you think they don’t wash the bottom of the plate? Are you and everyone you eat with flinging food everywhere and somehow getting food on the bottom of plates from the clean table? Please explain it to me.
When one dirty plate go on top of other dirty plate, bottom of plate get dirty too. OP no like making bottom of plate dirty, so no stack plate.
Except once you’ve stacked it, you don’t have to touch it again because you’re just being nice and not the busser so it still doesn’t make sense. The only people obligated to touch the bottom of the plate after it’s stacked are being paid to do so.
OP have empathy and assume other people not like touch dirty plate bottom, even if get paid for it, so goes out of way to not make plate bottom dirty
It could just be a simple quirk of OCD.
Haha, no
Sincerely, a waiter
Could you elaborate?
As a waiter, on any given day you want to spend the minimum amount of time doing the “required” things, so you can spend more time on things that dont mediately require your attention. That is to say, clearing a table faster lets you give more wine tastings, or spend more time having a chat with a table when the time comes for it
This, of course, means that a minimum amount of trips to the kitchen with dirty plates is preferred. No matter how much of the “stacking” phase is removed, it will never make up for another trip it may cause
You might see what I’m getting at, but to put it bluntly, I have never had a table stack their plates in a way that actually helps - it’s always caused a second or third trip
What’s more annoying is that the person in the picture has clearly never had the opportunity to ask a waiter (off shift) about what they think (as they would very roughly disagree with them), yet asserts that people who don’t agree with them are in the wrong
OK, that makes sense. What’s the preferred stacking method, then?
When I stack plates at home I make sure to have all the food leftovers and the cutlery on the top plate and - if different types of plates are on the table - stack them by type, so that I create a stable and sturdy “tower”.
The correct way to stack plates for them is to not stack them at all. Every waiter has their own system, and there’s no way to tell what it is. The most respectable thing to do is to tuck yourself in and make it easy for the waiter to reach your plates. Even handing plates to them can result in them being forced to stack plates in an inefficient manner
you want me to work for you, pay for everything, and tip you?
At a time when the tipping options are 18%, 20% or 25%.
you do you, but if im just chilling talking after i eat, it feels like nothing to me - just something to do with my hands that doesnt feel like work at all and is massively helpful to someone
I mean, you could stack your dishes but still be a rapist or murderer.
