- Easy Tiger has a breathtaking turnover rate with the servers because they are treated as expendable. Easy Tiger (and the other restaurants in their family) are almost constantly putting ads on craigslist because the employee retention rate is so low. There is no continuity in the reasons they fire people; it is almost entirely based upon favoritism.
- The policy of micromanagement at this restaurant puts a serious strain on the server's job. Many tasks require manager approval, which requires tracking down a manager (in a fairly big restaurant), often waiting in line behind other servers (the restaurant has a problem with over-staffing, which I will go into later), at the expense of the guests' time. Additionally, the managers are very finicky about inspecting side work and must be flagged down to perform a check-out, sometimes leading to an 1-1.5 non-tipped hours burned away.
- The job is extremely financially unpredictable. The upper management will unapologetically cut all of the servers hours while bringing in new hires, which is why most servers also hold second jobs. It makes it very hard to feel like you're part of a team. I was lied to during my job interview when I was told I was going to be full-time.
- This restaurant has a bad reputation for overstaffing; a server is lucky to get with 3-4 tables. The restaurant benefits from this because they only have to pay their servers $2.15/hr and enjoys better service per table, but this is at the expense of all of the servers making less money and several servers being sent home early, usually earning very little.
- The management style - though it varies by floor manager - is based upon negative reinforcement. When a problem arises, rather than 'how can we work to prevent this from happening next time?', it is 'this better not happen next time or you will be written up or fired'. Additionally, the general manager at the time of my employment lacked any sort of charisma or leadership skills and was almost universally disliked by the staff. She was a disciplinarian whose heavy-handed approach to firing people was a tacit form of intimidation
- The upper management at Easy Tiger disregarded the health and well-being of the staff and guests and I can illustrate this with two examples: a) The sewage system backed up one time and started discharging onto the floor. The floor staff was instructed to clean the feces and urine from behind the bar without proper safety protection and the restaurant continued to operate while this was happening. Drinks were being served while the bartenders were slogging in human waste and the general manager stayed in her office while she delegated the cleanup to a floor manager. A barback required medical attention as a direct result of this mess. b) Company policy required that the server must present him or herself to the manager in case of an illness if a doctor's note could not be produced. The restaurant does not offer insurance and many of the staff does not have health insurance. According to what some of my co-workers told me, there were several instances of employees with contagious illnesses coming into the restaurant during business hours in order to have the managers perform a sickness inspection on them so that they would not lose their jobs.
