From The Bitchy Waiter

As Hurricane Florence makes a beeline for the coast of the Carolinas and Virginia, millions of people are being advised to evacuate the area immediately and take shelter from the massive Category 4 storm. Most people will heed that advice, but plenty of others will be forced to stay and weather the storm because they have no place to go or simply cannot afford to leave. Others will make the possibly unwise decision to stay in place because of a reason that is completely out of their control: stupid ass restaurant owners and managers requiring them to come to work.

Every time there is a natural disaster of some sort, I’m bombarded with stories from servers and restaurant employees who tell me that their boss made them go to work. Such is the case with Beth who, despite living in a mandatory evacuation zone, will get written up as a “no-show” if she chooses to focus on the safety and welfare of herself and her family rather than the livelihood of her restaurant. “Even Wal-Mart is closed,” she says. And we all know that when the fucking Wal-Mart closes, that shit is serious.

I want to take a minute to speak directly to the restaurant managers and owners who are expecting their servers to drive through 125 mile per hour wind and sheets of rain just so they can sit in an empty restaurant making $2.13 an hour:

Fuck that. If you want to keep your restaurant open during a Category 4 hurricane, fine, but you better find yourself an apron, a chef’s hat and a clipboard because you should be the one who waits tables, cooks the food and seats the customers. Let your servers, cooks and hosts take care of their own property while you take care of yours. You can argue that you want to remain open to help serve the community in this time of need, but you shouldn’t expect your staff to do it. Why would you think they’d want to put your needs ahead of their own? So, what, they work their seven hour shift and then they can’t get home because the road have been washed out and there’s a fucking tree laying on their car? No. Just, no. For the sake of everyone’s safety, including your own, accept that a Category 4 is a major problem and it’s alright to let the restaurant be closed for a few days while you focus on more important things like sandbagging your home, securing outdoor furniture and staying fucking alive.

To all of you who are in the path of this hurricane, I wish you well. I hope it’s not as bad as they say it is and I hope the recovery is swift. Most of all, I hope that if you work for a boss who expects you to ignore this storm and come to work that your boss gets hit in the head by a tree limb just hard enough to know some fucking sense into them.

--The Bitchy Waiter