Societal Collapse (previously Societal Breakdown)

Reader SkippyMom recently took small issue with some of my statements in the post, The Double.

. . . I have to disagree with the “tag” you placed on this.

Your opinion about Halloween seems based on one diner’s observation and adults costumed who showed up at Carney’s – but you labelled it “societal breakdown” because kids no longer trick or treat – either you don’t have children or you don’t live in the right neighborhood {one which has a lot of kids}.  My oldest is 22 and my youngest is 11 – and they have all done the traditional trick or treating and this year will be our last year {for the 11 year old}, although we will still give out candy – Yay!

I know this is a weird post to pick to comment on, but not everything is as cut and dried as you sometimes present it and I don’t think because you didn’t have trick or treaters or your customer related to you that all the kids go to church or school related functions dictates a label of societal breakdown.  Just seemed a little harsh.

Still, just my opinion and I do like you blog

First of all, I want to thank SkippyMom for reading and writing. That’s the most important thing. I get some self-indulgent kicks out of writing this blog, but it’s really out there so others can read, learn, chime-in, disagree, etc.

Next, I kind of apologize for being too ‘cut and dried’ and/or ‘harsh.’ In truth, I am a very ‘gray area’ type of person. However, that doesn’t make good reading. I’m not saying I’m trumping up issues just to be controversial or raise peoples’ ire. I’m saying that because I’m writing publicly, I’ve decided to go ahead and make bold statements about which I feel strongly. And sometimes I’ll make statements that I haven’t necessarily thought through, but just appeal to me emotionally. At the same time, anyone reading this blog for long will trust that I’m not just some jackass shouting the most inflammatory, attention-grabbing things I can conjure.

Regarding Halloween specifically, I probably only grazed the target on that one. I’ve lived in five different neighborhoods since the ’80s. I’ve seen a continuous decline in the number of trick-or-treaters in each location (not just location to location, but year to year). And I’ll include my parents’ old neighborhood in the ’90s, which was teeming with trick-or-treaters but they were all ‘carpetbaggers,’ dropped off literally in busses from other neighborhoods – so that, to me, counts too.

This observation stirred my feelings about the traditions of society and how many seemed to be falling away. Collapsing, if you will. As a waiter, I’ve long held a private theory that the rise in demand for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving Day restaurant dining is actually a sign of a breakdown in society. Wherein important communal, familial rituals were being discarded in favor of merely ‘consuming’ a holiday meal.

Not that I invented the phrase ’societal breakdown,’ but I did come up with it in my own vacuum. After SkippyMom’s response, I realized I’d better find out what the hell it actually meant. Google didn’t have it. The closest match was Societal Collapse, which turns out to be the same thing I was talking about. If you’re interested, please read the first few paragraphs from Wikipedia about Societal Collapse.

I was prepared to apologize in general for speaking a little too loosely about the disintegration of certain societal customs, but reading the Wikipedia entry, it turns out I might have been right. Like a blind squirrel finding a nut. Heh.

It really is a subject close to the waiter’s heart, as it applies to holidays – traditionally spent at the hearths and homes of family and friend – that are now occurring at restaurants. I don’t mean to say this is happening unilaterally across the nation. But in my lifetime (the last 30 years of which have been in California, admittedly) I have seen this trend accelerate.

What waiters don’t like about it is that we have lives and families too. We understand, first, that we’ll make more money because of the ‘new’ business coming in on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, even Halloween. We understand that as it is, anyway, we are the ones working all those other weekend nights when most people are communing with family and friends. We understand also even on these ’special’ days our guests are having certain family and friends moments.

But we don’t care. We have family and friends too, and we would like to have these times with those people on just those few days of the year.

Rather than show up at home when everyone’s already asleep and the fire has died and there’s nothing but empty, sticky glasses on the tables. Rather than wake up Christmas day on 5 hours sleep when everyone else is eager and sharp for Christmas. Rather than eat a cold plate of turkey and stuffing taken from the refrigerator at 11 p.m, the rest of the family gone back to their homes.

Waiters: Happy Thanksgiving!

I don’t bemoan change. Society is always evolving, and indeed this is an evolution. Though nostalgia definitely plays a part in my feelings, I don’t complain just because it’s ‘not the way it used to be.’

I simply think the old way was better for me, for people, for society. There is a bonding that happens on those few special days (which is itself an evolution from when perhaps that kind of familial, communal bonding happened day-to-day, week-to-week, season-to-season). People are together as groups and they fairly celebrate that. I lived with my parents till I was 21, then off and on till I was 26, but the moments I remember best – some of the moments that cemented me to the family – were the gatherings at Thanksgiving and during the Christmas holidays.

I can hear the objections now. But I don’t think anyone would be the worse off if virtually everything closed at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve and didn’t reopen till Dec. 26. We’d lose some convenience expected in our everything-now modern world, but we’d be fine. What’s wrong with spending an entire day with the family? What’s wrong with making your own modest meal Christmas Eve, having some eggnog, and putting the presents under the tree – and having to suffer because you can’t buy a pack of smokes anywhere?

Is it that much of a hassle to cook your own food and do your own dishes?

Think of the meaning of the word ’society.’ Social. Being with, interacting with, people. This brings me to the final aspect of Societal Breakdown (Collapse).

Obviously, people going to restaurants with their friends and family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is still communal. They are having their gathering, it merely doesn’t happen to be in their homes. But I maintain it’s just not the same.

Before restaurants existed, the gathering over a meal was an important, even sacred, undertaking. But why?

Because any caveman could shake a berry bush and grub-down on the spot. He could catch a squirrel, and with a little fire, eat it in short order.

Merely eating isn’t the thing.

It’s the whole process of coming home with the food. Preparing the food. Preparing the table. Gathering the family. The participation. The anticipation. And finally, the consummation. A real day to remember.

Showing up at a restaurant at 7 p.m., knocking back a couple glasses of wine, eating some prime rib, having some conversation, paying a check, and driving away at 8:45 p.m. is not the same thing. You didn’t have Christmas Eve. You just had dinner.

And you deprived a whole crew of restaurant workers of the chance of even that small pleasure.

The Double

Managers and corporations like to call it a “split shift,” but waiters always call them doubles. You work lunch, then later, dinner. It’s no fun for a waiter to work that much. We’re sort of like sprinters: we gear for our race, give it our all, and then rest and relax with a cold drink and rehash how everything went down.

A double screws that all up. Instead of notching down after lunch, you immediately start thinking about dinner a short time away. When you start dinner shift, your energy is nowhere close to what it should be. If you’re lucky, you’ve grabbed a bite, put your feet up, and relaxed a bit. If you’re really lucky, you’ve even gotten an hour’s nap. But you’re still not the same as a fresh-for-his-shift waiter.

We work them because we need to. We need the money. There are only seven dinners in a week. You’re not going to work all of them. If you work as many as possible, and there’s still not enough money, you can:

1. Move to another restaurant, hoping the money is better.
2. There is no #2 because you cannot create more nights in the week.

Therefore, the double. You add lunch shifts. If you are a dinner server and you work lunch shifts, you will not make it unless you understand in advance that you will not make as much money at lunch for even harder work. Sorry, that’s the nature of it. These are two different animals here, and you can’t make a donkey buck like a bronco.

However, even at reduced rates, it can still be a pretty good deal working lunches. Consider how much you still make per hour, compared to many, many people in the ‘real’ world.

Take a four hour lunch. You walk with $40, which is not stellar, but probably pretty common. I’d bet Chile’s or Denny’s servers make that or more at lunch, typically. So, in California, minimum wage is $8 an hour. The easy math is you’re making $18 an hour for this. (And don’t forget that a lot of waiters don’t declare all their tips, so $10 of that is mostly ‘take home pay.’ For those of you in ‘real jobs,’ what would you be making per hour if your take home pay was $18 an hour? I’d guess $20-22.)

That’s good money. Take that logic up several notches for working the dinner shift, especially in an expensive restaurant.

So I’m rambling a little about Doubles and pay . . .

What happened today was $126 at lunch and $150 at dinner. That’s a poor night for Friday, but then, it’s Halloween, one of the worst nights of the year for restaurants. We felt lucky to do that well.

I noticed a disturbing trend during the night. I kept hearing: “We’re going out tonight to hide from the Trick or Treater’s.”

Although it’s good for restaurant business, it represents a breakdown in the fabric of society and family. This is a subject you will be subjected to later in the blog, no doubt, because it runs through the core of restaurants and holidays (always a point of contention among servers).

I don’t like to see ruined a great thing like kids canvassing their local neighborhoods, meeting the homeowners who live amongst them, and getting a sackful of candy that they will remember spilling on the floor when they get home for the rest of their lives. These social events are what makes a society. Yet I perceive Halloween is drying up. It’s a lot like Major League Baseball. All of us who remember it as a big thing from our childhood are still into it, but as adults, in adult ways. We don’t buy 10-cent baseball cards or put posters on our bedroom walls. We get together with our same-age (middle-aged) friends and get drunk in a sports bar. We bet at the sports book in Vegas. But the kids today aren’t doing the kid things regarding baseball.

Likewise, Halloween. The adults are still having their Halloween parties like nobody’s business. I saw more adults dressed up in Carney’s Corner bar than I would likely have seen coming to my door tonight (had I been home and not working – another problem). A diner I talked to tonight about this said it’s becoming much more common for kids to do organized functions, such as church or school gatherings, than to hit the streets as we did. Parents are worried about safety.

Well, I won’t digress into that subject . . . for now.

Instead, let’s leave it at a $286 day, where I had a nice time with my people, and now I’m home enjoying a beer. I guess that’s life for most everybody.