Patience is the Key

I work at Gowell’s Shop n Save in the kitchen, and let me tell you, it takes patience to work there. There are a lot of things that we have to do throughout the day; we have to make sure the warmers have food in them, dishes, cleaning around the kitchen, prepping ingredients, and making food for customers along with assisting them when needed. Most customers that come in are nice and understanding if we are taking a bit longer to make their food, especially if there’s a rush, but some of them aren’t; They get irritated and impatient when their food isn’t done when they get to the store.

When people call and order their food we take their order and at the end of the phone call, we give them an estimated wait time for when their food will be done. Most customers will come in during the estimated time we gave them or just a little bit earlier, but others will come in 5 minutes after they call and expect their food to be done. For example, a couple of weeks ago there was a big snowstorm and the whole town was out of power, we were in the middle of a big rush and we were giving people over an hour wait time. There was one person that I remember who came in almost 20 minutes early and we hadn’t started their food yet. It was an older guy who we have had problems with a couple times before. I was stressed out because we were short-staffed and in the middle of a huge rush so I told them we were starting to work on their food soon. I was so frustrated when this happened because we were trying our best and they were upset we hadn’t even started their food yet. I told the customer “We have a lot of orders to make and it looks like we still have about 20 minutes until your food should be done, we are working on your food soon and should be done in about 20 minutes.” I was as patient and respectful as I could be with them. In the end, I felt stressed and upset with how the customer acted, as this wasn’t the first time they had done something like this and all I could think about at the time was working on other people’s orders so this rush could be over as soon as possible.

While this can be frustrating for both us and the customers, we are patient with them and try to understand their frustrations. I know that there are going to be people that come in who are understanding and patient, but that there is also going to be people that aren’t. What I have learned from this experience is that having patience is a very important skill to have and I would say definitely is needed when working in the food industry.

“PATIENCE” by gemb1 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.