The Nightmares of running a buffet

(Note: On here and any future articles about my job, I will be giving myself and co-workers nicknames of characters from the hit anime series, Aggretsucko to protect both mine and my co-workers identity)


 My local KFC use to have a buffet and it's like a poor man version of the Ponderosa and I literately mean a poor man's version since I live in one of Michigan's poorest counties and we have mostly pizza joints, bars, coffee shops, and fast food places, and few sit down restaurants that haven't gone under yet for example, we have a so call Italian restaurant and a Mexican one and we formally had a Big Boy once until it went out of business and another sit down joint took over its place and that one went under too after the owner of the place was caught watering down the beer and selling them for a high price.

I'm getting side tracked here and I apologized for it. Anyways, our KFC's buffet is nothing fancy and not worth mourning over cause it was basically nothing more than a gimmick to try to make our fast food joint look unique from everyone else's and more "family friendly" looking. Ever since we closed it down for good due to COVID, almost everyday while working front counter, I would get people asking me the same damn question about when we're going to open the buffet back up or if we're going to bring it back while comment about their fondness for it or a stupid joke where the customer orders buffet. (Oh, wow. I never heard THAT one before./ sarcasm) I even have one customer who suggested we open it up only for the dinner rush hour and claiming how it'll bring in more customers and money and never thought about the fact that we're still in the middle of a pandemic

When we tell them no and explain to them why it's never coming back like how you would explain to your child why Grandpa isn't coming home from the hospital, my customers would either be disappointed and order food anyways, complain and order food anyways, or they simply walk out the door either politely thanking me and wishing me a good day or they just stormed out in disgust and telling me to my face that they're going to eat elsewhere as if it's some kind of threat to get us to suddenly to open the buffet up again.

Let me be frank with all of you, my co-workers and I for years have developed a hatred for our buffet and why we are happy to see it get closed down and praying to God to keep it closed for good so we never have to run it ever again the minute we hear news about the higher ups wanting to open it back up again and then letting out a sigh of relief when they change their minds. Sure, the customers love buffet cause they're not the ones running it and having sweat over how much chicken and biscuits we put out or if any of the side dishes needs to be switch out into clean pans or refilled. I will go step by step on why working in buffet is a nightmare and why we're glad to get rid of it.

1. Setting it up and tearing it down

Every morning, my routine as both cleaning captain (Fancy word for janitor) and buffet handler is not fun to balance out. I come in, I have to do as much cleaning as I can to get the lobby ready for opening, and then I hurry to help get the buffet set up. Setting it up by yourself is a bitch of a task to complete on your own while your co-worker is helping you out with the cooking of the side dishes cause they always have to be fresh for buffet.

Imagine carrying a heavy tub of ice for the cold well on a cart and carefully dumping it in and place a tub under it to catch any water that drips out of the well and then having to make sure that the cold side dishes and butter are in the correct order and the pans are buried in the ice and not slipping around. Next, you have to turn the Hot well on and fill it with water and making sure it's not under filled or over filled or otherwise, your pans are going to float and bump into each other.

Then we got the last and "fun" part of putting the buffet together, carrying a large ass stack of side dishes to the buffet table without burning or dropping them from the cart. The solid ones are no problems to put into the hot well but the gravy, green beans, and corn? You have to take extra steps to make sure you don't spill any of them on yourself and the customers when later on you have to change the pans or replacing the side dishes.

Tearing it apart after buffet closed is a bitch when you're mostly doing it yourself cause your co-workers are too busy cleaning dishes and wiping down equipment for the night. All the left over chicken and biscuits have to be bagged and tagged for Salvation Army to know how fresh it is before they take it from us and you have to check the packing line for drive through to see if they need any side dishes for the rest of the night before you wrap up your task and help with the other cleaning. If that's not bad enough, wait until I tell you about-

2. Balancing out your side tasks and restocking buffet

Okay so this one is slightly not bad cause I do get a lot of help around the time when we do open buffet and have someone cover for me quick while I'm refilling side dishes or doing other cleaning tasks but it's still a pain in the ass to duck behind the counter, check on everything and it's worst when you got a massive line coming in for the lunch and dinner rush hour and I'm worrying my ass off about how many chicken and biscuits I'm allow to take to refill my line while we're fulfilling orders in drive through.

The prepping? Yeah, we can't dawdle on it and we have to make sure we get on top of all of them on time for the lunch or dinner rush hours or else my general manager, Tons, will chew us out for doing them wrong and she did with me over the damn bread pudding. Yeah, she even gone as far as screaming at me about how you're not suppose to squish them in the pan and rudely showed me how its done and I was a newbie at the time crying in the walk in fridge so I don't embarrassed myself.

If keeping track of refilling food and remembering the time you put them out isn't bad enough let me tell you about the customers.

3. Buffet makes us hate our customers more than ever before

Imagine this. You're minding your own business and then suddenly this cranky old woman starts complaining to you about your buffet food looks "old" or it's always "dirty" looking whenever she comes in to eat when the old bat doesn't realize that all we needed to do is simply change the pans out for a clean one or use water to refresh the food and you were busy with other tasks to get around cleaning the mess up around the buffet. You try to be polite and calm but no, this old woman won't stop finding every reasons to yell at you and demanding to see the manager every five seconds. Even our manager hated this old woman cause it turns out she has a history of causing trouble and complaining over about every thing.

"I found something in my coleslaw! I want you to throw it out!" she said in a nasty demanding voice while flopping the plastic plate in front of me, "I want to see your manager." she said to me again and then I ended up going into the back to get one of my managers and they started complaining to me about theirs nothing I can do until one of my favorite past manager I use to have before he quit talked to her and he was also polite to me about how to handle her better. My past and former co-workers basically call this certain customer Bean lady cause whenever she's up at the buffet line, she has the habit of counting her green beans out one at a time onto her plate before going back to her table and grabbing huge stacks of napkins and barely use them all.

Another customer I had on the same day as Bean lady walked up to see what part of the chicken we laid out and I was apologizing to him about being late on putting out certain chicken, "Good! Now put the rest of the chicken out," he would say in a rude and bossy tone of voice and let me tell you, that guy does look like the kind of man who would beat his wife and doesn't care if anyone would notice.

I do get chatty customers too and that one though is a mixed bag. I had one lady who would talk to me about how it has been a long since she visited one of my home towns and then have to feel like she needs to pour out her life story to me and then I had another customer who kept repeating her suggestion non-stop that we should sell coffee along with our doughnuts during the time when KFC was selling the doughnut chicken sandwich when I told her more than a few times why we stopped selling coffee. Looking back on that one, it did made me wonder if that lady had a memory problem or something going on at that time.

The worst thing of them all that will make you say "What the fuck?" when I tell you how stupid some of the work rules are.

4. We're not allow to wear gloves

Working in buffet will give you a disturbing fact that you have a shitty 50/50 chance that your customers never wash their hands when they go to the bath room or done doing God knows what else and they're touching all of the same stuff that you're force to touch too from the ladles to the counter, this is a gross fact that use to haunt me whenever I look at our customers helping themselves to food. The smartest thing I ever done is washing my hands and putting gloves on to protect myself when ever I have to touch the same things that the customer touched and this was during the time when COVID was making its way into the US.

My higher up, she's not happy about me doing the right thing to keep myself safe when working the buffet and have confronted me about it before.

Kara: *Spots me wearing gloves at the front counter* Why are you wearing gloves?

Resuko (AKA me): Oh, I wore them while I was handling the ladles in buffet.

Kara: You're not allowed to wear gloves when you're doing front counter and you're still spreading germs around anyways and you could forget to take them off when go and do any prepping that needs to be done and spread more germs in the back.

Resuko: *Fully aware what the fuck I'm doing and always changing gloves between tasks to prevent spreading germs* Okay, I won't do it again.

When COVID hit America later on, our work place added new rules to try to keep the buffet going until our governor of Michigan told us all to go into shut down mode and the new rules they gave us were bullshit. We were told that we have to change the ladles once an hour, we all have to drop what we're doing every 30 minutes to wash our hands (This one I have no problem with mind you) and still there was no rules about us needing to wear gloves while handling the ladles changes, they just told us to wash our hands after we do that and I was pissed about it and not understanding why we're still not allowed to wear gloves.

On March 2020, one morning I got a phone call from one of my shift managers telling me that they don't need me for the day cause our governor ordered all restaurants and fast food places to close their lobby doors and buffets. Then the next day, I got another call from work and told me not to come in again and they only needed me just for cleaning captain work. This was a huge relief to me even though I was facing the possibility of making less money now since I won't be doing over 12 hours shifts helping to run it on certain days. As time went on, we replaced buffet with catering and Door Dash orders and my General Manager, Ton, even admitted that she hated buffet and never want it to coming back cause as it turns out, it cost more money to run it than to make profits off of it.

Yes, there was talk once about bringing it back but over time, the company decided not to bring it back and the higher ups recently talked about tearing it up and remodeling the lobby to put in a better pop machine and dammit, I can't wait to stop explaining to my customers about why buffet is closed for good and we can let go of this old relic.

Thank you for reading my articles and there will be more about my life working in the fast food lanes or things that would like to write about.

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