Vantaggi
-Pay rate is alright for difficulty of the actual work you perform -Waitstaff is quite friendly and fun -You are fed if you are schedule early enough in the event. This good is pretty good. If you are scheduled for a 5pm shift (not unlikely) you could potentially work 7-9 hours w/o an offer to take a break or take a lunch break (you will often be offered the food left over after all other employees have ate, but this is typically pie or perhaps mashed potatoes nothing truly filling/nourishing). -Shifts are at-will and first-come-first-serve. This can be a pro or con. It offers flexibility, but it also can limit your hours if you are lucky/not offered shifts for some reason.
Svantaggi
The management is absolutely awful. They have failed to pay the entire staff for whole months. For instance, I received a check for work performed on December 31st, 2014 more than a month late. Checks were supposed to be issued near the 9th of January. Checks bounced and payment was delayed repeatedly (next week, we swear) and illegally for over a month (was sometime around February 10th-13th we were finally paid). This has apparently happened repeatedly in the past. The owner, Reid makes excuses for these, but I along with most of the other staff are highly skeptical of these explanations. There seems to be validity to this, as the company apparently has an allegedly sordid financial past, with repeated bankruptcies, large debts, etc. frequently rumored among the staff. Much of the staff, including at least for or 5 office employees recently quit due to the delay in receiving our paychecks. Rumor has it that at least one employee was terminated on-the-spot for mentioning she would have to put in her two-week notice *if* they kept failing to pay them in subsequent weeks. I was not witness to this, but know that the employee in question is no longer was with the company. Sadly, she was one of the best people in the management/planning section of the company to work with/under. Always very helpful/good at her job/calm. I cannot say that for most of the employees.... That being said, there is an unbelievable level of hysteria that goes on at Kenmare. You will be yelled at for virtually every reason under the sun. Often, these reasons will have little bearing on putting together a smoothly-running event. Formerly, Kenmare employed large numbers of college students, but they have largely left due to mistreatment. They now prey on high school students who are generally very timid when management yells at them for everything under the sun. This leads to them being too afraid to a) ask questions when they first start working b) they'll usually elect to do nothing rather than be yelled at for something utterly meaningless. Since most of the staff is inexperienced to begin with, this has disastrous effects. I hear from employees who have been around for very long periods of time or are in more managerial positions most of this culture comes down from on-high, directly from Reid, one of the owners, himself. Hours are highly unpredictable at the best of times and this combined with a fairly mediocre pay rate in the grand scheme of things makes things like the bad treatment by management (both the endless yelling and the payroll delays) completely untenable. Understandably, employee turnover is astoundingly high. At times when there has been a recent mass-quitting, the company has had to rely on staffing agencies/other catering companies to staff events. Beyond this, many of my co-workers of color have expressed a concern with discrimination issues. Allegedly the highest levels of management have done things such as ask that black/latino employees not be selected as hors d'oeuvres/drink passers, and have allegedly complied with requests not to staff "alternative" (allegedly taken to mean LGBT-seeming) individuals at events. Again, this is all rumor, but these whispers are incredibly widespread within the waitstaff/lower levels of management, such that I have serious concerns about that aspect of the culture.