Worked here for 3 years and what a roller coaster that was. Despite working here for many years my raises hardly kept up with the minimum wage increase while I was expected to run the entire restaurant on shifts. Only redeemable things were the nice people I worked alongside with and the fairly decent health insurance.
They expect you to put 110% into your job but give you very little incentive to do it. No bonuses, bare minimum pay, difficult getting any kind of raise, expect you to manage an entire restaurant for as little pay as they can give you. Only start getting PTO if you have been there for 6 or more years. People that have been there 10+ years are still only making a few dollars more than minimum wage (it's a joke) to try and push them away.
Poor compensation would lead to employee's sneaking food or outright stealing it or giving it away to customers. It made employee's feel undervalued which made them not care for there jobs. They came in to get paid what they could and then left. Since management never cared to punish anyone or write people up the problem never got better.
Constant call outs and no shows with no punishments, strong unwillingness to fire bad employee's, general managers generally seemingly have no idea what they are doing (probably because they won't pay enough to afford decent GM's).
Poor pay, middle and upper management are all over the place with no consistency, constant turnover of General and District Managers, who knows who your bosses will be in 6 months.
Poor training for equipment with little reinforcement. Things are constantly broken with management being unwilling to replace or repair things. They throw you on the line expecting you to learn so that the GM's can use training hours to manage there labor better.
Revolving door of food's and dishes that vary wildly in complexity and difficultly that you are expected to learn and master every few months. Seems like they are trying to catch on to trends or seasons but they can't even keep the basics like chicken or steak consistent.
Weird mix between dine in eating and fast food. They want you to come in and sit down to eat but expect orders to be out in 6 minutes. However if we often get too busy/overwhelmed (due to poor staffing) leading to long wait times and impatient customers expecting fast food. They try to double dip into both areas but fail to do either one well.
CONSTANT cutting back of labor and employee's on staff. Every year came with less labor hours per money made, and less hours for catering done. Yet prices for food were constantly going up. Poor staffing led to food getting out late or not being properly cooked (burned, charred, black, incorrect), which lead to dissatisfied customers, leading to less sales, leading to less staff, leading to an infinite downward spiral. By the time I left full staffing for the entire restaurant was close to 3 or 4 people and a GM, when optimal is twice or triple that. This issue compounded into lack of breaks and times to rest. Required to work through breaks or take none at all.
No one in management is willing to stand up to blatantly rude customers or people trying to get free food. We are expected to cater to every customer regardless of what they said or claimed. The few times we did stand up to jerk customers we would get chewed out for simply wanting to be treated like a human being. "The Customer is always right" is the lifeblood of this place. Get a bad review and get chewed out, get a good review and get nothing. No incentive to actually do good.
Poor partnerships in the industry, such as food ordering and delivering. Food orders would constantly get things wrong and send us the wrong items. We would consistently get things that were for a completely different type of restaurant. 75% of the time food shipments were late, often by 8 or more hours and would often arrive during our NO DELIVERY times. Constant cockroach problem in food warehouses, often would get them in our deliveries. DoorDash drivers were often rude and lazy wanting us to do everything that there job is supposed to be. Even had one guy that drove so crazy he almost ran over a customer twice in the span of a minute.
All around poor upper and middle management while they don't seem to have any kind of strong leadership or central leader (like a CEO) to drive the company in one direction. Pretty sure none of the upper management has worked a shift in a restaurant in 10 years, if ever, which led to them not understanding the actual needs of a restaurant. The one district manager that was good and actually worked restaurant shifts got fired.
In short, this company is the epidemy of the "High turnover, low pay, floundering modern day corporation." It seems like they went into it for the money but don't really have any idea of what they are doing or how to maintain it and grow it successfully. This is probably why they recently declared bankruptcy and why they keep closing locations.
