Let me paint you a picture of a typical modern restaurant experience. You and your family sidle up to the hostess stand. Instead of greeting you warmly, the greeter holds up an index finger, telling you to wait. They are busy on the phone, coordinating a DoorDash delivery.

You stand there for a few minutes before this person finishes the call. Then it’s time to finally add you to the waiting list. You’re given a beeper and told it’ll go off when your table is ready. Once you are eventually seated minutes later, you still can’t interact with a friendly server. Not yet. If you’re lucky, a busser will come by with waters. If you wish to put in a drink order, you’ll get the brush-off. “Your server can get that for you when she comes by.”

Except that server doesn’t usually come by right away. They’re too busy flitting around other tables, inputting someone else’s order into a touch screen. When at last they finally do acknowledge you, it could be 15 minutes since you sat down. Let’s ask: Is this customer service?

Not the kind I grew up on. The managers I worked for at more than a dozen restaurants would have fired me for treating customers this way. And yet last week, my family had this exact experience. I’ve since come to think restaurants have adopted a doctor’s office business model. Increasingly, patrons are shuffled to different areas where they are made to wait for the privilege of being seen.

What’s mind-boggling is that, unlike doctors, servers rely on tips. And yet so many are perfectly fine disappearing after they deliver your meal so that you have to later hunt them down just to pay your bill.

It wasn’t always this way.

COVID-19 exacerbated the problem for hospitality businesses in many ways, including restaurant shutdowns and in-person dining restrictions. But perhaps the biggest challenge they faced was finding workers. As Time reported in 2021: “The labor crunch is widespread, affecting many industries that dimmed their lights during the pandemic and are now scrambling to turn them back on. From warehousing to trucking to hospitality, the shortage is rippling through the economy, causing supply-chain bottlenecks and driving up costs that are preventing many sectors from fully recovering. But it’s particularly pronounced at restaurants, which are short on chefs, washers and wait staff.”

Read the full article at Forbes