Restaurant forces staff to compete for a chance to keep their jobs, letting customer reviews decide who keeps their job: 'Slacking off is not an option'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Oct 23, 2024 7:00 AM EDT

We thought the titular contests of the "Hunger Games" series were just some SciFi hoopla, yet here is this eerily similar real-world equivalent: competing for the privilege of working so that you can continue to support your own survival. In fact, "Hunger Games" is a fitting name given the fact that the arena for this real-world analog was in a restaurant.

This restaurant's management posted a new policy declaring that servers' hours would be decided based on the reviews that they received from customers, effectively leaving their fate to the fates to decide what their income would be on a weekly basis. One of the servers shared a photo of the new policy with this online service industry community, asking readers whether or not they were in the right for their concerns and objections about it.

Everyone who has ever worked in the service industry or retail knows that customer reviews are a total grab bag, you can do nothing exceptional and net a 5-star review or do everything in your power to get the customer a good result, going above and beyond your reasonable duties, only to get slapped in the face with a 1-star review. People are strange, and their perceptions of the world and interactions as they take place are even stranger, so there's no telling what you're going to get.

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_{Image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Image is for illustration only and subjects are models.}
Plus, no one even grades on the same scale. If the grading scale is 1 through 10, some may regard a 6 or a 7 to be an excellent mark, yet the net promoter score (NPS), a metric that most companies use for market research, regard those scores to be "detractors" hurting the scores of the stores that receive them. According to this same system, the only score that is positive or a "promoter" is a 9 or a 10, with a 7 or an 8 merely being "passive" responses. This, of course, is insane and is the bane of any retail or chain restaurant manager everywhere whose arguments to such fall on deaf ears of regional and higher operations managers.
Read on to see the original post as it was shared with the community.
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