Why Olive Garden Servers Hate The Unlimited Food Promotions

Olive Garden: when you're here, you're ready to gorge on enough pasta to keep an army regiment stocked in carbohydrates for an entire basic training cycle. The faux-Italian chain (not started by an Italian or an Italian-American, but rather by General Mills) isn't known for quality so much as it is massive quantity, mainly their endless food promotions. 

The company offers multiple pasta passes, including the Never-Ending Pasta Pass (which provides you with unlimited pasta, sauce, and toppings, not to mention salad, soup, and breadsticks for nine weeks) and the Lifetime Pasta Pass (the same as the above, except literally for the rest of a consumer's natural life), not to mention its ubiquitous Never-Ending Soup, Salad, and Breadsticks deal.

But how do Olive Garden servers feel about these sorts of promotions? Unsurprisingly, they're not big fans of them, and it's not hard to see why: never-ending food promotions make a server's job harder while also cutting into their bottom line. It's not great.

The problem is that servers rely on tips to survive. Most states have a tipped sub-minimum wage — an amount restaurants can pay servers per hour. The federal rate in the U.S. is $2.13/hour, and many states either go with that (17 states) or have an amount that's only slightly higher (another 11 states under $4). Since that amount typically goes entirely to taxes, most servers get very little on their actual paycheck. Restaurants are supposed to make up the difference if a server doesn't get enough tips to meet minimum wage ($7.25 federal minimum), but this often doesn't happen in practice. Tip and wage theft by restaurant operators are shockingly common.

Enter Olive Garden's endless food promotions. The Never-Ending Soup, Salad, and Breadsticks deal is bad enough — servers report that with checks at $8 or $10, they'll frequently run around like crazy refilling customers' tables and only make $2 per person. Combine this with the possibility of wage theft, and it's not hard to see how this goes wrong for servers' bottom lines — and that's not even getting into the customers who get angry and refuse to tip at all after being told that no, they can't take as much soup, salad, and breadsticks with them as they can carry home with them in to-go containers as part of the deal.

Free food promotions or massive discounts aren't great from a server's perspective. The issue is that customers will often see a check that says $0 (or maybe $5 if they got a couple of sodas) and tip based on that amount rather than on a percentage of what the check would have been under normal circumstances. It's an understandable mistake but not ideal for servers who only make small hourly wages.

A decade ago, McCormick and Schmick's offered a free entree to any service member on Veteran's Day. While this generosity went over great with customers — the restaurant was routinely packed that day — it wasn't great for servers. Considering they would generally work a hectic 8-hour shift and walk out with minimal tips, it's not surprising they generally were not pleased. It wasn't good for the company's bottom line, either — as of 2022, the company was instead offering half-off select entrees that day.