by Caitlin Kenney

Elizabeth writes from Arizona:

Many years ago, in high school, one of my teachers was telling me that the way you can tell if a restaurant is doing well is by their napkins (at least the restaurants that use paper napkins). Think about a typical short order restaurant that has napkin dispensers, the ones with the paper napkins inside, at every table. This teacher told our class that all the napkin dispensers are pretty much one standard size and are usually filled with one size of paper napkins.

He stressed that a restaurant that was doing well always has the napkin dispensers crammed super full so that whenever a restaurant patron goes to get a napkin, they usually pull out 2-3 more than they really need and wind up wasting them. However, you can always tell a restaurant that is struggling a bit because the napkin dispensers are always less full, meaning that you only pull out one napkin at a time, waste fewer napkins, and save the place some money.

 

You know that the restaurant is doing really poorly when the napkins inside the dispenser are smaller (like half size) than the ones that normally fit inside the opening. And lastly, usually a matter of months before a financially suffering restaurant goes out of business when they have the napkin dispensers up at the order counter where they can watch you take napkins or put only one or two napkins on your tray with your meal.

Having worked as a food server through high school and college, I have seen this validated time and time again. However, in present times, it seems like every restaurant we go to has is at some stage of this "cutting back on expenses" cycle. Not that I am about wasting paper and killing trees but it seems a bit sad for the state of the world when people are so desperate to save money for their business that they have to resort to saving pennies on cutting down their napkin consumption.