My Dinner With Harry

It was the time of night when the fast-food dinner rush abates, and the workers at this Harbor Boulevard food franchise were slowing down, too.

I and another man were the only customers at the counter waiting for our orders, which we had seen slide out of the kitchen five minutes earlier, it seemed.

Our clerk--a girl I’d guess was about 16 years old--was talking to a boy about 17. He was working the drive-up window. “One moment, please,” he said into the speaker, then resumed his conversation with her.

We could hear what they were saying. They were excoriating another girl who worked there but hadn’t shown up that evening. They knew that she had called in sick only so she could have a long weekend with her boyfriend. She was doing that all the time, and it only made everyone else work harder, they agreed.

The irony made me chuckle, and that attracted the attention of my fellow customer. “Children,” he said. “The whole restaurant industry has been turned over to children.”

I nodded.

“Look at the manager,” he said.

I looked at the manager.

“She can’t be over 19,” he said. “What does a 19-year-old know about running a restaurant?”

I didn’t mean it sarcastically, but I guess it came out that way. I said, “What do you know about running a restaurant?” I really wanted to know.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, turning to face me. “I started working as a fry cook in Philadelphia when I was 17, and I owned or worked in restaurants until I retired, and that’s 48 years. And I did everything. I owned a classy restaurant in Indianapolis and I owned a diner in Chicago. Every place I ran made money and had return customers. And I’ll tell you right now that around here you have to buy a $25 meal to get service as good as I had in my $1.19 diner.”

I told him I meant no offense. He smiled, said he wasn’t angry and introduced himself. His name was Harry. He lives in a mobile home and he eats out a lot. “I spent my life cooking and handling food,” he explained. “I don’t like doing it anymore.”

The clerk noticed our orders shriveling under the heat lamps, gave them to us, then returned to the boy at the drive-up window. Harry and I sat down together in a booth.

“I’m not against kids,” he explained. “I used to hire kids myself, but it was different. These were kids who were looking to make a living. They wanted to learn the restaurant business. These kids here are still in school, or maybe they’re just living at home until their folks throw them out. Their parents are paying the bills, and all they need is gas money for the car Daddy got them. And that’s about all they’ll get working here.

“It’s not their fault, really. They take these jobs not knowing anything about the working world and they get run around pretty good. They hire these kids because they’ll work part time and real cheap. They’d hire Mexicans fresh from the border and pay them dirt, but they don’t speak English. They do hire them to cook and clear tables. Lord knows what they pay those poor people.”

“Well,” I said, “you don’t expect much anyway when you come to a fast-food place.”

“Yeah, but it’s about the same in regular restaurants,” Harry said. “The owners are cheaping it out. I notice that, because that’s the kind of place I usually had.

“Remember the recession? Nobody remembers the Reagan Recession. Well, during that recession restaurants laid off a lot of waitresses to cut back on the payroll. They laid off the ones that were making the most and kept the cheap ones, the ones that maybe weren’t doing it for a full-time living. And they gave them maybe twice the number of tables they used to have to work.

“And the service was awful. What do you expect? But you know what happened? People didn’t squawk. They put up with it, and so they never hired back the waitresses. The recession is over, and you still have to holler to get a waitress over to your table. The one waitress is probably working the whole room.

“You know, a good waitress isn’t necessarily a classy waitress. When I ran my places, the waitresses were around for years. They were making a living at it. They knew all the regular customers. If they drank coffee with cream, they didn’t have to ask for the cream. The waitress brought it because she remembered them. She didn’t bring plates to the table and ask who ordered what.

“And--this really gets to me--she might say, ‘See ya later’ or ‘Bye now’ or whatever she usually says to her friends, but she never said (his voice in falsetto), ‘Have a nice daaaaaaay.’ Nobody says that and really means it. It’s not what people say.

“It’s no better at places in Newport where you drop 20 or 30 bucks on a dinner for two. Some of those waiters make me sick. They’re sooooooo friendly you just want them to go away. If I want to have dinner with a friend, I’ll bring a friend. Some of these guys think they’re entertainers.”

I asked Harry where he eats when he wants good service.

“I can’t afford to eat where I’d get good service,” he said. “I’m retired.”