'Waitering is an easy job.'
I beg to differ.
ANY job is an 'easy' job if you just do it. If you want to do it RIGHT that is when it becomes tricky...
I'm sure I could pray some and talk about God some and make being a Pastor look like an 'easy' job. That does not mean I'd be any good at it and certainly it doesn't mean the people I service would gain any real benefit from it.
I think server (the new name for the profession) is actually a very tricky and difficult job. You are serving people food. The nature of feeding people has all sorts of cultural, class, socio-economic, and psychological dynamics as does the serving of people.
You have people who want to just eat and the only thing between them and the food is you. These people are the ones who get hostile about having to tip, having to wait for you to serve them, having to deal with you at all.
You have people who WANT to be served. They want their presence acknowledged, they want their every needs attended, and these are the people who tend to value good service because they expect it and reward it.
Then you have the folks in between who think that servers are a necessary evil. As such they will use it to their benefit and if they feel the server meets some ingrained psychological criteria they have passed a test and will be fairly rewarded (anywhere from 10-18%) but it doesn't matter so much what the server does as it does what this customer is thinking and what type of mood they are in.
Given these sorts of dynamics...how can one say its an 'easy' job. I did it for ONE day and said 'no, thanks.' But I have many friends who've made little or lots of money doing this.
Some try to make a living doing it...they are truly professionals who would scoff at the idea that their ability to make a life out of serving at fine restraurants is akin and easy as working at Denny's.