Celebrating Waitresses Who Love What They Do

Jean Joseph - Al's Good Food. San Francisco, CA

Why devote my career to studying and celebrating waitresses?  First of all they are some of the most under-valued workers in America. How do I know? I waited tables for almost a decade. I spent many nights rubbing my swollen feet and I knew how painful it was to be yelled at by a hostile customer. Most sociologists write about jobs they have never done. The fact that I had waitressed for so many years helped my research tremendously. I wasn’t an outsider trying to understand the plight of the hard-working server. They trusted me. During interviews we traded insider stories about the industry and tricks of the trade. I was one of them.

Based on my own waitressing experience, I expected to meet women who felt overworked and under-appreciated, but that’s not what I found. All but a few said they loved their jobs and if given the opportunity, they “wouldn’t do anything else.” I thought, how can this be true? Waitressing can be a grueling, thankless job. And where were all the complaints about carpal tunnel and varicose veins?

After five more years of research and listening to heartfelt testimonies about the job, I took a closer look at their lives. I analyzed their work environment. I studied theorists, academics, and historians who wrote about sociology, gender, ethnography, labor, restaurants, spatial politics, and power. I read Michel Foucault, John Berger, Barbara Ehrenreich, James Clifford, Dorothy Sue Cobble, William Foote Whyte, Studs Terkel, Richard Gutman, Mike Rose, Victor Burgin, and many others. I considered that, although we had the same job, an older waitress’s experience might be different from mine because we were raised in a different time.

Career waitresses know how to make the job easier. In many cases, their seniority status earns them a higher hourly wage and respect from their coworkers and managers. Ironically, the physical and mental labor keeps them healthy instead of wearing them out, and their regular customers make the job more enjoyable and profitable. Regulars often leave better tips than strangers who are just passing through. These are not poor, struggling women. Most of the career waitresses I know are financially stable, they own their homes, drive newer cars, and many have sent their children to private schools. That's why I wrote the book.

Dolores Jeanpierre - Ole's Waffle House. Alameda, CA

"Counter Culture" is not a scholarly study, a memoir, or a historical account of waitressing. And even though there are over 100 photographs, it’s more than a coffee-table book of a pop culture icon. It combines oral history interviews, cultural criticism and photography to recognize an overlooked group of working women who have brought meaning and culture to the American roadside dining experience. It show how career waitresses are different from average service workers; it investigates issues of power in the workplace; it shows how older waitresses are physically able to handle the job; it explains why they are marginalized and sexualized in popular culture; it examines the work ethic of their successors, and reveals why they choose to keep working well past retirement age. Ultimately, it explains how these women have taken a job that many people avoid and made it their livelihood.

I have launched a crowd funding campaign to produce an App, eBook and product line to celebrate the incredible women I interviewed for “Counter Culture"

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/celebrate-the-women-in-counter-culture

Counter Culture Facebook Page  - https://www.facebook.com/CounterCultureDiner

Read it for yourself.

How it all started

I started Taylor Made Culture in 2002. Wow, I can't believe that was over 10 years ago. I had just graduated from the California College of the Arts with a Master's Degree in Visual Criticism. It's a fancy liberal arts degree that may take me the rest of my life to pay off, but it was an incredible program and just what I needed. My Bachelor’s degree is in Painting & Drawing. I entered grad school as a scenic painter for film and television productions and left as a critical thinker who could tell a story in any medium. Viz Crit (that's what we called it) liberated me from a world of canvas and paint. It was one of the most challenging things I've ever done. I studied semiotics and deconstructed Foucault, Derrida, Burgin, Benjamin, and others. I felt like I was in way over my head but it taught me to think differently and find meaning in everyday experiences, like getting my hair done or eating in a restaurant.

My thesis was on diner waitresses which evolved into the book and exhibit, Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress. The idea came to me while slinging sushi in San Francisco. After a busy Friday night, I sat down in the back with the other servers to count my tips. The back table was a place to do paperwork, tip out coworkers, and relive all the drama of the evening. We swapped stories about our futile attempts to reason with irrational customers and commiserated about the great effort it took to get the food out of the kitchen. While eating our late-night dinners at 1:00am and balancing our sales reports we dreamed about what we were going to do with our lives after we left our service jobs for our true calling. We complained about how tired we were—our feet throbbed, our legs ached, and our arms were sore. I thought to myself, if we are this tired, how do waitresses twice our age (I was in my early thirties at the time) do this, and how do they feel about their jobs? Are they bitter after years of dealing with difficult customers? Do they have dreams they never realized? Are they worn out from the physical and mental demands of the job? And what about those who worked in coffee shops? They average eight to ten-hour shifts, and my workdays were only four to six hours. I made decent money serving sushi in San Francisco but what about those who worked in greasy spoons in small, remote towns? What about health insurance? Aging in the workplace? Retirement?

Truck Inn - off Route 80 in Nevada, near Reno.

The questions kept coming. I did some research and found that very little had been written about this subculture. Although there were several excellent books about waitressing only a few featured older career waitresses who refer to themselves as “lifers.” Realizing this window of opportunity, by the end of the month I was on the road with a digital camera, a recorder, a scanner, and a map (that was back when we still used maps to get around). Over the following six years I traveled over 26,000 miles interviewing diner waitresses. I loved being on the road capturing the stories of these American icons. I was hooked. 

Jean Joseph has waitressed for over 60 years - Al's Good Food. San Francisco, CA 

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