Just another restaurant trained to micromanage the life out of their staff. Mostly management sits at expo and screams at their understaffed front of the house to run food. They actually have enough staff to have food runners and one server for every four tables but they make cuts to save money even if their service takes a huge hit and then they wonder why they have difficult lunches and dinners. There is a very small chance that you will be treated with respect unless you are close on a personal level with managers. They have VERY high expectations and instead of thinking "What can I do as a manager to make it easier on my staff?" many, many new servers will be taken to the back to get reprimanded and talked down to, and then expected to serve the rest of the night with a smile on their face.
The atmosphere is so casual and shows such obvious favoritism to senior servers that the conversations border on inappropriate often, and many servers were spoken of in a harassing manner by both management and servers when their backs were turned.
Theft was very common, and server books and money from the register would turn up missing constantly and there never seemed to be anything that upper management did to make the staff feel safe. The attitude was to hide your personal belongings and be careful rather than to assume the company would assist you in any way with this issue.
After 10pm during the week, management cuts the back of the house down to two people and the servers are expected to space out their orders by five + minutes before ringing them in. Even with four tables in the restaurant the ticket times were always at 20 minutes because management wanted to save $$ and cut the BOH, resulting in poor service and unsatisfied customers.
Customers are not there to appreciate your service. It's basically one notch above fast food for them, even if you are doing the same job that a server at a nicer casual restaurant would do. The tips are usually terrible, and you will have some of the most difficult tables in the industry coupled with hoards of teenagers and families with babies that leave a mess that spans half the dining room.
In my time at Applebee's, I didn't see one day go by without at least one server getting talked down to so heavily that they were visually upset. Many people did not quit by putting in a two weeks notice but by walking out in the middle of their shift, if that tells you anything.
