Waiting staff, wait staff, or waitstaff are those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers — supplying them with food and drink as requested. Traditionally, a male waiting tables is called a "waiter" and a female a "waitress" with the gender-neutral version being a "server". Other gender-neutral versions include using "waiter" indiscriminately for males and females, "waitperson", or the little-used Americanism "waitron", which was coined in the 1980s.
Waiting on tables is (along with nursing and teaching) part of the service sector, and among the most common occupations in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, as of May 2008, there were over 2.2 million persons employed as servers in the U.S.
Many businesses choose for the people waiting to all wear a uniform. A tradition that has been around in the waiting industry for centuries.
In recent times there has been a trend towards automation in the service of food and drink waiting, with the advent of technologies such as robotics to take on the waiting roles that once required human staff.
Read more about Waiting Staff: Duties of Waiting Staff, Tipping
Famous quotes containing the words waiting and/or staff:
“Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train,
Pallas Athena in that straight back and arrogant head:
All the Olympians; a thing never known again.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“... all my letters are read. I like that. I usually put something in there that I would like the staff to see. If some of the staff are lazy and choose not to read the mail, I usually write on the envelope “Legal Mail.” This way it will surely be read. It’s important that we educate everybody as we go along.”
—Jean Gump, U.S. pacifist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 10, by Studs Terkel (1988)