A cafe worker in Australia’s coffee capital has opened up on the one question customers ask that shows a lack of respect.
Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier has worked on and off in cafes and bars for almost eight years, and in that time has learnt a lot about people and how they treat those serving them.
But the Melbourne man said it’s not the lack of thank-yous and the occasional impatience shown by customers that is most galling to him.
Instead, he said, the question that most gets to him is that customers ‘have a fanatical interest in the level of education achieved by the people serving them’.
In all the jobs he’s had, including in a creative agency in London and being a content creator in San Francisco, nobody ever asked where he went to university – except when he has worked in hospitality, where he hears it all the time.
‘There is an assumption in this country that wait staff above a certain age are where they are because they lack the skills or gumption to “get a proper job”,’ Mr Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier wrote in The Age.
He said wait staff ‘occupy the unskilled peripherals of the workforce, yet there is hell to pay if we fail to magic up 12 espresso martinis the moment they’re asked for’.
‘The bloke behind the bar and the girl clearing your plates aren’t as dense as you think they are.’
Cafe worker Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier (pictured) has opened up on the one question customers ask that shows a lack of respect
Customers don’t realise that the person taking their order and delivering their food and drinks is multitasking and taking care of many people at several different tables, including watching out for food allergies and intolerances, he said.
‘I’ve worked in hospitality for a long time and I’ve always encountered this pervading stigma,’ Mr Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier told Daily Mail Australia.
He said the attitude doesn’t just come in the bars and restaurants he’s worked in, but also in everyday life.
Sometimes he has felt like ‘inventing an alternative job title’ because when he told people he worked in a restaurant ‘their face kinds of drops’.
‘And that line of inquiry just then lapses because the assumption therefore was, “Oh, you just work in a restaurant”,’ Mr Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier said.
While at work, he said many people assume the people wiping tables are there because they are poorly educated.
‘I could never tell if diners were surprised or disappointed when I disclosed I had a first-class honours degree,’ he said, adding that he often wondered if they then wonder “If he’s so smart, why is he working here?”,’ he said.
He pointed out that long-term service workers are often those who can’t afford to study full-time or take an unpaid internship with a big business.
The people who are most well off are usually the ones who are most disrespectful to hospitality staff, he said.
It’s not the lack of thank-yous and the occasional impatience shown by customers that is most galling to service workers. Stock image
Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier has copped abuse (pictured) over his surname since writing about the situation
Mr Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier has copped abuse over his surname since writing about the situation, with one person trolling him to say ‘Sorry but if you’re living life with a name like that and you’re not an aristocrat or living off a trust fund then that’s on you.’
He is neither an aristocrat, nor on a trust fund, and found the comment funny.
Mr Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier said that those who call for the return of national service, as UK prime minister Rishi Sunak did in that country’s recent election, should make every young person work in hospitality for a time if they really want to punish them.
There was a lot of support for his views online, with one commenter saying ‘As a 63 yo I can say that respect died out long ago.
‘People these days think they are entitled and better than others. Luckily I’m retired and don’t have to deal with these clowns.’
Another said their ‘daughter worked in a cafe in a well off suburb while a student, and some of the older people were so horrible to her she left in the end’.
‘Fortunately she found work in another cafe with lovely customers. It certainly opened my eyes to how horrible my generation can be.’
But others suggested it ‘works both ways’.
‘I have been in cafes where I stand waiting to be served behind the sign that says “please wait to be seated” only to be passed many times by wait staff who were not busy, nor was the cafe, but instead chose to chat to the other wait staff,’ one said.
