Pros
1. The job is incredibly easy to pick up. Be nice to guests, be patient, help out other servers, and just be a nice person. Boom. That's it. 2. The other employees, and even some managers are genuinely amazing. I like all the managers I work with, but I could also just be lucky. 9/10 of the workers are wonderful people and are the only reason (that isn't money, obviously) that I still work here. Without them, I'd have quit because the exhaustion would've turned me into a Japanese salaryman. 3. The scheduling, at least for me, is incredibly lenient. Especially for students, people with other jobs, parents, etc. You'll more than likely have a schedule that works for you. Plus, you can even just be off schedule and pick up unwanted or offered shifts. Super super flexible. 4. No tax on tips I guess, which is 99% of the money you'll be making here.
Cons
Where do I even begin, by golly. I encourage you to read through it all, but I left a short paragraph in the botton explaining the gist of my grievances. 1. Corporate policies will actively hinder our chances of having good shifts. On top of having 0 breaks, we'll have at least 1 section of sidework assigned and 100 rolls of silverware to prepare. I have no problems with rolling silverware and having mandated sidework, but there's often just not enough time to do it and leave on time. Every time I find out about a new policy, it's just a way to make our jobs more insufferable. For example, finding out I had to portion at least either 12 or 24 cups of every condiment for secondary because I had to constantly stop to deal with tables (and on top of that, whoever had the station last didn't maintain it properly and we were out of lots of condiments, so I had to restock it in its entirety by myself). For another example, we have slips we're required to fill out during our shift with friendly reminders to upsell and requiring us to go on little scavenger hunts to get people to check and sign our assignments. The slip itself and the papers they post of our beverage sale percentage reek of desperation from a company that would gleefully pay us literally nothing if a new law dissolved the federal subminimum wage. 2. There is a massive disconnect between what corporate wants, and what the guests want. The guests want good food and free bread that isn't frozen and reheated overnight. Corporate wants us to script a bunch of nonsense and have us act like used car salesmen. The guests are the ones who pay my bills and decide whether or not I deserve to eat. I'm going to act in their interests, not the company giving me $18~20 weekly. 3. Some of the guests make me want to throw the decorations from the wall through the window. There's no shortage of creepy old men that regular at cracker barrels and will only tip female employees. Guests also frequently just... do whatever they want like sitting wherever and walking inside the nooks between the kitchen and dining rooms. Plus, you have to enable their behavior because making them upset means you don't get paid. It really sucks being disrespected and not being able to do anything about it because you rely on them to pay you. 3⅓. No forced gratuity for large parties means a large group can waste at least an hour of your time and take up most, if not all your tables, with absolutely 0 compensation. And it happens to everyone. 3⅔. I have never seen a male server get a $50+ tip, but near enough every female server I've worked with (that do morning shifts) has gotten at least a $100 tip. If you're a woman, you're just more likely to get paid more. Men can still get good money, but women are far more likely to succeed here. 4. The time you're scheduled to leave will almost never be the time you leave unless you have something worked out with management to be an exception. Because of the amount of side work you'll have to do, plus the fact you can get sat a table AT the time you're scheduled to leave is ludicrous. I can't plan anything on days I have morning shifts. 5. They love having 1~3 hour windows with no hosts, to-go, and like 1, maybe 2, person /people on the line. This means we'll have to stretch ourselves thin during a time we could be rolling 1/100 mandated rolls of silverware per server, or doing our sidework to do the jobs of hosts/to-go's, who'd otherwise earn 4.5x/7x our wage. 6. Cracker barrel refuses to hire anything but servers. Just this month I've seen 2 servers learn other roles because of the abundance of servers gutting their hours. We desperately need more grill cooks and dishwashers, but no instead we have 2 new servers training on the same day. Because we surely didn't have enough of those. 7. Even though any location will likely have too many servers, working a morning and afternoon shift in the same day isn't rare. Coupled with my issues expressed in statement 4, and I'm pretty dang sure I'm not being overdramatic when I say that I hate waking up on these days. To kind of sum it up, servers are paid nothing and expected to do everything. Corporate policies consistently make our jobs more insufferable and dampen the guests' experiences. Guests can be the worst people on the planet to you, but you have to suck it up to maybe get paid by them. It's not guaranteed.