So I walked into a restaurant and took a peek around the back and saw a guy doing the dishes. I thought it was a one-off thing but I walked into another one and, just to check, walked to the back and lo and behold I saw another guy, washing the dishes. Is it like this everywhere?
If so, why do restaurants here wash their own dishes? Why don’t they just take cutlery deliveries from the sanitation company?
Dishwashing is prolly factored into the Happy Hour prices. 
Dishwashers are paid poorly, so the costs are low, and they can turn around the dishes quickly.
Follow-up question - why do non-American restaurants send their dishes to another business that washes them which in turn sends them a fresh batch the next morning?
And what if instead of dishes, they like… cigarettes???
Perhaps it is cheaper for them to do that in their non-America.
They probably have businesses that specialize in Restaurant dishes and utensil cleaning.
And I don’t think that we do.
It is possible that local regulations require dishes to be cleaned onsite and the process to be inspected randomly.
Also, Googler has an AI that can answer questions of all levels of inanity.
I think volume matters, my first job was bussing tables. We had a machine that washed in something like six minutes, so in a shift I washed a lot of dishes and returned them to the rack. Without that you might need a lot more plates to start with.
For sure by about 3:00 I had the lunch mess all sorted, if a restaurant serves lunch and dinner you’d basically need twice as many plates to start with. Depending on factors, of course, ymmv and all.
You would need so much kitchen space to store all the extra pots, pans, bowls, cups, especially bar ware to get through the lunch and dinner rushes
Dish washing is one of the worst jobs in the world and dish washers routinely quit with zero notice so it’s not a bad idea to get rid of the position entirely
Except that dishes need to get washed, and dried.
I mean in-house in a restaurant kitchen
And the dishes are basically autoclaved in standard restaurant dishwashers so there really isn’t a need to dry them
My recollection - and this is ~30 years ago - is that dishwashers get paid pretty well relative to other “low-skill” spots in a restaurant because most people don’t want to deal with piles of filth, which is what a stack of dishes becomes at a certain point.
Granted, I was in a small town in KS, I got minimum wage ($4.25) and no tips. Servers got $2.13 plus tips and made more. Bussing tables was the entry level shit job.
RN
Dishwashing certainly has that reputation. Yet the few jobs I worked when I was young that had some dishwashing duties, I always liked doing that job. Very satisfying. But granted maybe not something I want to be doing as my primary lifestyle.
satisfying for sure. you can see the progress. but the waves keep coming.
throw in the usual assortment of emotionally unhinged kitchen staff who need their cooking things recleaned first and immediately at all times and that’s where the stress level kicks up.
the best DW at the place I worked in HS was a deaf man. so he didn’t know they were yelling at him unless they went the extra step of coming down and yelling in his face. it happened enough that he quit. I think the head chef was a cokehead
It’s common, restaurants have one of the highest rates of people doing drugs while on the job. About one in six admit to it.
emotional instability seemed like a requirement for the field
IIRC, Anthony Bourdain talked about being addicted to drugs in his book, "Kitchen Confidential’.
Yeah, he drank and smoked pot, and got started on heroin when he was working restaurants on the MA coast. He was very open about his past.