If you have ran a shift you will understand.

[Donnie-M]

Someone said to me, you have a tough job, restaurants are tough.  And it reminded me that so many of you are out there everyday slinging hash.

They expected an answer about food costs, or labor, or finding staff, but none of those things are actually hard on their own.

Making a sandwich is not hard. Greeting a guest is not hard. Counting a drawer is not hard. Every individual task in a restaurant, taken alone, is manageable by anyone with thirty minutes of training.

The hard part is doing twenty of them at the same time. And then the twenty-first walks in the door.

Anyone who has worked a shift knows this. The never ending to do list.  There is no moment in service where the list is empty. The job is not getting to the end of the list. The job is keeping the list moving while the list keeps getting longer.

Talk to anyone who has worked outside F&B and tried to explain this and they look at you like you got a horn coming out your forehead and are exaggerating. They have never been in a job where chicken portions, a late prep cook, a delivery surge, a credit card decline, and a hood cleaning deadline are all the same problem at the same moment.

A seller walking the floor at 7:15pm on a Friday is pulling signals from five different systems and making a judgment call no single system could make. They are not executing a dashboard. They are holding the whole operation in working memory and triaging.

That is what makes F&B different from almost every other industry. The compounding is the complexity. Nothing alone, everything at once.

Curious whether other sellers feel this. Does F&B work like any other industry you have been in? Or is the compounding the thing that makes this work specifically harder to explain to people who have not done it?  What is your batch of easy tasks that is hard?

https://tableandledger.com/blog/why-restaurants-are-hard/