r/mildlyinteresting Nov 19 '22

Olive Garden gave me a daily sales report instead of a receipt Quality Post

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86.0k Upvotes

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4.9k

u/IntoTheMystic1 Nov 19 '22

Kinda surprised they're more busy during lunch. Olive Garden always seemed like a dinner place to me. But maybe they're near some corporate offices.

5.4k

u/TyRoSwoe Nov 19 '22

Former OG GM here. 300+ covers (guest count) for lunch is not too bad. They will probably finish with 900ish covers for the day. They have have pretty high addon sales. Anything over $5 is great. I will say that their appetizer sales is pretty high. If someone orders an app for dinner they don’t get guest count. 133 apps is like 1 in 5 guests getting an app. If every Friday was like this, they are probably a 5-6 million in annual sales restaurant. Last OG I was GM at, we were a 6mil a year restaurant and profited 18%. You do the math. OG makes some serious $$$. Multiple by 900 or so restaurant. I’m pretty sure the Time Square OG is about 15mil or more a year in sales. I started at the bottom. They were a great company to work for.

652

u/Sinful_Whiskers Nov 19 '22 edited Nov 19 '22

I was initially surprised that you had praise for your time with the company, but after thinking about it I think I might see why. I worked at Ruby Tuesdays back in 2006-2007 time frame. I started as a server and then became a bartender and trainer, along with doing every job in the back at some point. During that time, they wanted to break away from the other "burger and fry" chains and to seem more "refined." They remodeled their restaurants and got all the wacky shit off the walls and they started serving ketchup in ramekins to go along with their Triple Prime burgers.

They pressured us to get people out having lunch with a friend to buy a fucking bottle of wine. Same with an obvious pair of business colleagues. Every week it was a new unrealistic push. It was madness.

My point is, Olive Garden seems to have always known what it was. Unless I've missed something major over the past 15 or so years, I feel they've stuck with what they're good at, and nailed it down to a relatively streamlined science.

179

u/WantedFun Nov 19 '22

Working in chain restaurants isn’t a bad experience if the rest of the staff is chill. Obviously the pay could be better but that’s not the fault of the managers, or really anyone below the level of CEO.

57

u/Sir_Applecheese Nov 19 '22

CEO, CFO and their board.

2

u/viperex Nov 19 '22

I'm sure they will find someone to point the finger at for why they can't higher wages. The blame will eventually go to shareholder expectations

0

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

Hate to nit-pick, but the board sets everything up. CEO, CFO and COO are merely implementing what the board has decided.

And the trail leads to Darden Restaurants and their shareholders.

5

u/KingKoil Nov 19 '22

The board of directors is not going to set workers’ wage amounts.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

Indirectly they definitely are. If they for instance demand cost cuts, and wages are on that table, their demand for those cost cuts lead to the wage levels.

9

u/ShelSilverstain Nov 19 '22

Plus, you get really good at operating a microwave

4

u/MaxHannibal Nov 19 '22

My two best serving jobs was at red lobster and olive garden.

Honestly sometimes having some corporate rules help in certain situations.

2

u/WantedFun Nov 20 '22

That and it’s not as high and mighty. People eating there don’t get taken seriously when they complain that you took 3.4 seconds to hand them their food instead of 1.2. At least, if you have good managers.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 19 '22

I met some of the coolest people back in the day (2007ish) bartending at California Pizza Kitchen. So many gems. Went on to work at higher end boutique restaurants where people start to take themselves too seriously.

2

u/Accurate_Plankton255 Nov 19 '22

You can't blame them either. The market is what it is. People are willing to work for a certain amount and they are willing to pay a certain amount for a meal. The business exists to streamline the space between those variables that are essentially out of their control.

2

u/WantedFun Nov 20 '22

No, you absolutely can blame the owners of the business. They each rake in millions a year. They could afford to not buy another yacht each year so that their workers can make a decent living. People are only “willing” to work for what they do because they have no choice. Business owners know this—that’s why they can pay so little, because they all know everyone else is paying just as little. It’s a race to the bottom.

-2

u/owwwwwo Nov 19 '22

And then remove value that should belong to the workers, and gives it to stockholders.

FTFY.

It's not rocket science, it's breadsticks and microwaved "Italian style" food.

8

u/Accurate_Plankton255 Nov 19 '22

Then do it. Just because you don't recognize the value they are adding doesn't mean that it's not existent. Getting it to the place where you can get a bunch of drones to microwave food and people pay real money for it is the hard part. What you are saying is akin to saying a smartphone is just a rectangle with some lights in it. It's shit like that why nobody takes socialists seriously.

2

u/WantedFun Nov 20 '22

The CEOs of OG or Chillis could quit tomorrow and all of the restaurants could operate just fine. If even 10% of the staff quit, the restaurants could collapse before new staff was found. CEOs and the other owners of these chains do not actually work for their money, they get paid by simply owning.

Your smartphone analogy is irrelevant, as the CEOs in that analogy would just told an engineer to make the phone, not actually make it themselves. That act of commanding something does not justify an average of 300x the pay of the typical worker in their business.

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u/owwwwwo Nov 19 '22

Strawman

4

u/Accurate_Plankton255 Nov 19 '22

No it's not. You didn't present any argument to strawman against. You only had a completely unfounded claim that everything should belong to the workers and a laughably bad summation of what the business is. There wasn't an argument anywhere in sight hence whatever I said can't be a strawman.

-1

u/owwwwwo Nov 19 '22

Your strawman was the whole socialist bit. Sorry, might be an ad hom or poisoning the well. Just woke up I'd have to check.

Either way you just have some ideological issue with "socialists".

Nothing I said was false. Darden are a publicly traded company.

0

u/heythereeggboy Nov 19 '22

Calling things logical fallacies just makes you look stupid man. If something is a bad argument, say why it’s a bad argument. Using what is essentially a literary term in attempt to devalue what someone says just makes it look like you can’t be bothered to explain why you disagree with it.

2

u/owwwwwo Nov 19 '22

They're not literary terms. They are well-defined fallacious argument structures.

Anybody who has taken classes in formal logic would recognize them, and not require me to explain further.

The fact that you think fallacies are merely "literary terms", exposes a gap in your knowledge base. And creates a great opportunity for you to learn something new!

1

u/heythereeggboy Nov 19 '22

Dude this comment literally proves my point please re-evaluate yourself

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