Denny's reviews

Where do I start? The company mandates countless hours of E-Learning to force employees to the Denny's policies and procedures. They constantly advocate the "Power of We," which is supposed to be the "family" atmosphere of teamwork approach. However, the whole concept completely contradicts actual practices and procedures. Our location was recently remodeled and the store looks great. However, the design is so abusive to the servers and demonstrates absolutely no respect or concern for the increased work load the new layout demands. Bus tubs and carts are gone forcing servers to haul large trays of dirty dishes to the dishroom, where they then have to clear each dish and sort into tubs. Coffee stations are gone, too causing servers to double more trips to the kitchen, which is a mess from all of the staff activity focused in one small area. The process takes you away from customers. Then, we run to pick up food orders and deliver to tables--yep...no time to wash your hands--it is insane. Second, Denny's is constantly adding more and more prep work to servers, once again, taking them away from customers. We have had more walkouts and more complaints because the server is expected to do it all with an inefficient floor plan. We spend half of our time off the floor doing what prep cooks and service assistants should be doing---if the company would hire them. Our stores does a pretty good business due to the location, yet we constantly are understaffed on weekend nights with two to three servers to handle about 40 tables from seating to cleanup. You don't even have time to pee. Keep in mind that servers have to handle all of this work, plus side work, too before you can even call it quits. In effect, we end up working for nearly half of minimum wage to roll silverware, restock inventory, etc because we never had time to do it during our scheduled shift.

It has a major "Yes" problem. From top to bottom, no one knows how to say no to new projects or responsibilities, and these responsibilities will come frequently, making workloads almost impossible to keep up with. There is also a work culture of passing on work to a different team, even if that team does not specialize nor deal with what the work is, this inflates responsibilities for teams without even a discussion of increased compensation.