The restaurant industry boasts more than a million locations, employs more than 15 million workers, represents more than 12% of the entire U.S. workforce, and serves nearly 100% of the U.S. population.
“Restaurants and bars are home to the most important happenings of our lives—anniversaries, reunions, celebrations of achievement, first dates, the breaking of bread, and the knocking back of a few cold ones with those friends and family we cherish most—happens in restaurants and bars,” says Howard Cannon. “Restaurants are Americana.”
We sat down with Cannon to discuss how this heart of America has become so dangerous.
AALM: You’ve said that the restaurant industry is the America’s most important and most dangerous industry. Why do you say that?
HC: Almost every single one of us relies on restaurants in some form or fashion, across every part of America. Conversely, many restaurant industry employees and employers are mired in a cesspool of poor performance, incompetency, toxic behavior and complete chaos. The industry is overrun with ignorant (defined as untrained) and apathetic (defined as uncaring) owners, managers and employees who don’t know the most basic industry standards, don’t abide by the most simplistic policies and procedures, and don’t even slightly care about the people they are paid to serve.
The industry has developed into a quagmire of creating and maintaining cultures where safety, health and security of people and premises is neither a priority nor even on their mental and emotional radar—instead they are often laser-focused on sales, profits, tips and income above all else.
This egregiously apathetic and below industry standard level of performance and blatant disregard for the well-being of people leads to countless incidents, accidents and events where men, women and children of all ages and from every walk of life are getting injured, harmed, sickened, maimed or killed at an ever-increasing rate on the premises of restaurants and bars across the country and around the world.
AALM: What sort of incidents are we talking about here?
HC: Well, I know it may be shocking to you and your audience, but—on the average day in America’s restaurants and bars—eight people die, 30 people get raped, 11,000 people get injured from a slip and fall, 100s get their private parts scalded due to a lid not being properly placed onto a coffee cup in a drive thru, and thousands more get harmed from acts of violence, intentional contaminations, food borne illness, drunk driving incidents and more. It truly is a heartbreaking and mind-boggling number of incidents that are damaging people nationwide. In fact, the restaurant industry is more dangerous than ever before—as we are experiencing a record number of criminal and civil cases hitting America’s courtrooms and a record amount of insurance claims and judgments against the restaurant industry.
AALM: Do these cases have any common thread?
HC: Yes, they do. Lack of training, lack of management competency, and little to no management oversight. I’ve been doing this now for 38 years, and training is at an all-time low. Often in these cases, it becomes rather easy to recognize that the management people working on behalf of the subject restaurant have very little training themselves and therefore their ability to be able to train and provide oversight to the employees is mostly non-existent. I also find that bad managers spend a significant amount of time sitting in the office looking at a computer screen rather than running the operation, managing the risk, and building the business from the dining room and kitchen floor like they should be.
In corporate restaurant chains there are a huge number of district and regional managers, directors and VPs who have never actually operationally ran restaurants themselves. Instead, they were promoted from positions within finance, marketing and human resources; therefore, they don’t even know the most basic systems for how to mop or maintain the floor to the industry standards of care or how to handle an act of violence as it is happening. With the single-unit independent operators, there are a huge number of owners who decided to become a restaurant or bar owner with absolutely no training themselves. It’s the blind owner leading the blind employees.
These are recipes for higher risk scenarios, where some restaurants have become death traps just waiting for an unsuspecting customer to enter. Obviously, with higher risk comes a higher likelihood for someone to get harmed. It saddens me really because most of these incidents where people are getting injured, harmed, sickened, maimed or killed are preventable.
AALM: Can you tell us a bit about Restaurant Expert Witness?
HC: We have been in business since 1987. We handle only restaurant and bar industry matters, and we do business in every state of the United States and several countries around the world (and we don’t charge for travel). We work with both plaintiffs and defendants, in state and federal courts and have 350+ litigation and 350+ pre-litigation/consulting cases to our credit. Our books have been published in 76 countries around the globe.
My team consists of several very talented people who bring a skill set to our office like none other—from a 20-year tenured paralegal who worked directly for a federal judge for two decades to experts in research, training, compliance, industry specific standards and risk management.
