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| Pepsi-Cola. Photo: Dalton Rowe, Flickr |
Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the third in a series of posts.
Here's a confounding bit of restaurant math:If you and your three friends sit at my table and order a bottle of wine, all I'm expected to do is pick up the bottle from the bar, pour four perfectly measured glasses and toss the bottle in the recycling bin. On average, that particular routine earns me about $10.
But say your table contains three teetotalers who ask for soda instead. Inevitably, you'll slurp down your Sprite quicker than your tablemate polishes off his Coke, which means I'll have to make multiple visits to your table, each time sweeping up different glasses, carting them across the dining room and returning them freshly filled. All that work is usually worth about 80 cents.
McDonald's Korea and a poll after the jump.
Free refills are a boon for consumers, who can drink gallons of soda for the same price a convenience store might charge for a liter. But there are few other restaurant policies that so brazenly undervalue a server's work. Many servers are starting to wonder whether the free refill madness can be stopped -- and, thanks to the recession, some restaurant owners are supporting them.
Last month McDonald's Korea, where soda is not self-serve but refills were administered behind the counter, scrapped its free refill policy, saying customers' constant badgering for more soda was costing the company time and money. The new stance could be influential, since the fast food sector helped instigate the free refill craze.
Free refills on coffee and tea are a longstanding restaurant tradition most places, but it took franchises like Taco Bell to push bottomless soft drinks into the mainstream. Fast casual spots like Olive Garden soon followed, presumably pleased to create the impression of hospitality and value for mere pennies. By 1999, the practice had become so widespread that Orange County health inspectors began warning consumers of the dangers associated with free refills (think swapped cups and filthy soda machines).
There are now few restaurants of any caliber that dare to charge customers for a second cup of soda. Americans apparently wouldn't stand for it. But since diners at high-end eateries won't abide super-sized glasses or pitchers on their tables either, servers are stuck catering to their endless thirst -- and typically garnering less than the price of a soda for their trouble.
What do you think? Should restaurants maintain their free refill policy?
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