Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

Restaurants need servers to smile, and faking it is wearing many of them out

Restaurants lose workers faster than any other industry. The pressure to smile for tips wears servers down, and the best of them leave first

David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Starbucks $SBUX where Madison Connors works in western Massachusetts was already short on baristas, making the job more difficult in every way. The company wanted a cheerful note written on every cup anyway. "We are already dealing with a lot of issues like understaffing. As simple as it may seem, adding a Sharpie marker to our routine is stressful," she told the Boston Globe in May.

The notes are part of CEO Brian Niccol's plan to make Starbucks feel like a cozy neighborhood cafe again, and baristas can get in trouble for skipping them. "If the worker is having to write the message at metaphorical gunpoint, we are pretending it's something it's obviously not," said Michelle Eisen, a spokeswoman for baristas' union Starbucks Workers United.

Restaurants have asked the same thing of servers for decades: smile, whatever kind of night you're having. The demands are costly. Research finds that faking it wears people out and leads them to quit, and........

© Quartz