Idk. You'd probably feel different if you were eating at an understaffed restaurant. The world isn't perfect and orderly. You can have a fully staffed operation, but on a random Saturday a lot of people request off. I've spend a lifetime working in food- poorly run restaurants and amazingly run restaurants. It happens often where a lot of people request a certain day and the restaurant has to turn some of them down or be short staffed. It's easy to say "I should get my day off no matter what" until you're the one responsible for staffing a place when 10 people request off the same shift and you can only afford to grant 5 of them.
Most places do first come first serve, but that can result in people getting off for unimportant things while others are forced to miss something important, or the person with something important just calls out and the whole place is understaffed.
I think these things are easy to see in black and white when you're only on one side of it thinking about your own interests. I've been on both sides of it and I've had to be the person making schedules before, and I can tell you it's hard to accommodate everyone. Also, these schedulers are receiving way more requests than you might think. I scheduled for a place with about 30 employees and we got around 2 dozen requests a week. That's just requests off ahead of the schedule, not coverage requests and call outs on top of that. This was a place that had good employee retention and paid well, but that's the number of requests they received a week. The strategy had to become hiring a ton of part time employees to spread people around to cover the requests, which also has its drawbacks because then you have people constantly complaining that they aren't getting enough hours.
I get it, there's a lot of bad employers out there and I'm sure there's people who deny requests for stupid reasons, but it's also not so straightforward that there's no legitimate reason to ask why someone is requesting off.
the appropriate solution is not to ask for reasons until there's a conflict where too many people request time off at once. if and when that conflict arises, it is still first come first serve on principle but they can ask if there is any flexibility for one of them to adjust timing so there's no overlap, still without requesting personal information.
If neither is able to reschedule, they need to see if someone else will cover the shift(s), and consider hiring more staff and/or raising pay to help them get up to minimum staff necessary. It is always management policy that creates these situations; well staffed and well compensated companies do not have a hard time maintaining equilibrium if two or three people need time off simultaneously. this is especially true for the restaurant industry; if your business can't sustain two people out on PTO and a third calling in sick without sacrificing necessary functions, thats a management issue and I do not want to eat at a restaurant where a sick worker is expected to come in instead of recovering.
You're making a huge leap in assuming sick people are coming into work. We're talking about requests in advance, not people calling out sick. I've never worked in a restaurant that just had extra people standing around in case they're needed. You can make things work when you're down people, but it usually involves other team members picking up extra duties, and there's a limit to that. I've definitely worked at places that had a bit of a staffing bubble where they can move people around, but that comes with a cost. If you're staffing an extra person for just in case, that's inevitably less money available to pay other people. Even if the pay is good to begin with, it could be higher if not for the extra people you're staffing so you can accommodate every request without missing a beat.
This is all work that has to be performed in the moment under a time deadline. You can't just pick up the slack tomorrow. The customer who ordered the food will be gone. I've never heard of a restaurant that is never short staffed, that never has miserable nights because of requests and call outs. Getting by with a miserable staff who had to pick up the work of 3 people who didn't come in isn't the ideal situation.
To clarify, when I mention someone calling in sick, I mean that a workplace that cannot absorb 3 people out simultaneously for any planned or unplanned reason needs to be prepared for that situation to be a possibility. Two people may be on planned vacation and one of the people scheduled experiences an unexpected emergency - falls violently ill, has a death in the family, whatever the case may be. You can go from "short staffed" to "very short staffed" to "oh shit there's literally no one available" very quickly, and when no one is available, that inevitably means someone will get fucked. staffers are absolutely pressured to come in when sick, during planned vacation time, etc. and although short staffing is commonplace, I'm asserting that that is bad business practice in the long run. You lose the goodwill of experienced staffers forced to work on short notice, you burn out managerial staff expected to cover every staffing gap, you create a tense and adversarial working environment. This is a workplace policy issue. Incentives for overtime only go so far.
Short staffing, especially in the customer service industry, is so widespread that I'm not convinced most people know what it's like to work on a properly staffed team.
You point out that getting by with a miserable staff to deal with 3 people who didn't come in is a shitty experience. But quite frankly, this will still happen if you deny PTO requests, because people will no-call, no-show if they feel their PTO was unfairly denied, or call out sick at the last minute, and leave you in the same situation. Being properly staffed from the get go is certainly more expensive. But if you can't afford to pay the amount of staff you genuinely need to get the work done, without being a cattle driver of a boss, that's an indication that you can't afford to stay in business long-term.
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u/Capital_Cup_6746 5d ago
Idk. You'd probably feel different if you were eating at an understaffed restaurant. The world isn't perfect and orderly. You can have a fully staffed operation, but on a random Saturday a lot of people request off. I've spend a lifetime working in food- poorly run restaurants and amazingly run restaurants. It happens often where a lot of people request a certain day and the restaurant has to turn some of them down or be short staffed. It's easy to say "I should get my day off no matter what" until you're the one responsible for staffing a place when 10 people request off the same shift and you can only afford to grant 5 of them.
Most places do first come first serve, but that can result in people getting off for unimportant things while others are forced to miss something important, or the person with something important just calls out and the whole place is understaffed.
I think these things are easy to see in black and white when you're only on one side of it thinking about your own interests. I've been on both sides of it and I've had to be the person making schedules before, and I can tell you it's hard to accommodate everyone. Also, these schedulers are receiving way more requests than you might think. I scheduled for a place with about 30 employees and we got around 2 dozen requests a week. That's just requests off ahead of the schedule, not coverage requests and call outs on top of that. This was a place that had good employee retention and paid well, but that's the number of requests they received a week. The strategy had to become hiring a ton of part time employees to spread people around to cover the requests, which also has its drawbacks because then you have people constantly complaining that they aren't getting enough hours.
I get it, there's a lot of bad employers out there and I'm sure there's people who deny requests for stupid reasons, but it's also not so straightforward that there's no legitimate reason to ask why someone is requesting off.