The Camper...

We all love to camp. Hell who doesn't. Goin out with friends or family knockin back a few drinks and relaxing around a campfire tellin jokes and old stories. One problem though, when you decide to camp out in a restaurant you have taken a time honored tradition of the great outdoors and made into a WMD against your server.

Now its been called a few different things in other places but I know of only two: Squatting and Camping. What this means is when a table has paid for their food but is still sitting at the table for a considerable amount of time after. A considerable amount of time being over 15 or so minutes.
A lot of you might as what is wrong with this? Well let me explain. A big part of serving is how many tables you can get in front of you. The more tables you serve the more money you will make its that simple.
So imagine you are a server with serving two tables on a busy weekend night. You are running back and forth getting everything for your customers as fast as you can and making sure everything is going smoothly. Things start off well for the first couple hours and it looks as if it will be a good night for you. But then a table decides the hour they spent waiting plus the 45 min at the table weren't enough time to talk. They have decided to build a fire, pitch a tent, and camp at your table. 15 minutes turns into a half an hour, half hour turns into 45 minutes and just like that those people have cost you an entire new table which who knows how much money you could have made off of them because you will not get that table back. You have now been dealt a death blow that is very hard to recover from because you know only have ONE table to make money off of. And even if you average good tips on that one table the night isn't long enough to make a significant amount off of only one table.
Say that table left an $8 tip. Well now that they have decided to say and CAMP so long that $8 tip has now basically become a $4 tip. You as the customer are paying the server for the time you are with them and eating being SERVED. Once your done with your meal and the SERVICE ends then you are now on the servers time and your servers time (in the State of Utah) is worth $2.13 an hour. So while those customers are sitting there wasting a table your server is making next to nothing. At the end of the night, say the server would have made $100, with just one table that camps they could lose at minimum of $10 and could even go up to $50. Trust me I've seen it happen when servers will leave at the end of a busy weekend night with only $50 or even less because customers sat at their table so long. Now I don't know about you, but on a weekend night when you should make over $100 but you don't even come close because someone else was enjoying their weekend at your table just makes me furious. I'd much rather be out with my wife on a Friday or Saturday night but those are the big money days so as servers you usually have to work, you can't afford not to.

So consider this, next time your out with old friends you haven't seen in a long time or family whatever the case may be. If you feel the need to sit at your table much longer that the time you need to eat remember you are on that servers time. The best way to handle this is communicating with your server and letting them know you will be there a while. And most importantly taking care of your server with the tip. If you are going to be taking more of your servers time add a bigger tip. Simple right? My wife and I have left up to an $80 tip at a sports bar because we wanted to watch a game on their big projector screen. The game went over a good 3 hours and so if we had only left a 15-20% tip that server may have only made $8 over that 3 hour span, I'm not so great at math but I'm confident that is $2.7 an hour. Add in hourly wages and that is $4.83 an hour! Not the best pay rate am I right?
Serving is a tough job that gets stressful very quickly and there are a million other jobs we could make average money at, but we serve because the money can be good not just average. A restaurant is not a lounge where you can just sit and talk all night if you want that then head to your nearest Starbucks or Bar. But don't come waist our time please take the conversation outside, away from my table.

Tip well because Karma is a bitch.