I know many here blow their top at any mention of a minimum wage but i have pretty legit question. I have certainly become a more critical reader than in the past.
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average pay of tipped workers is about $10 per hour nationally and $9.50 in Michigan. The National Restaurant Association says this amount “greatly underestimates” the actual earnings of servers, which their survey data shows to be $16 per hour for entry-level workers to $22 per hour for experienced servers.”
How many hours do they make those averages? Is it just the dinner crew for an average of 3 hours a weeknight? Do they make 40-50 an hour in peak and far less other hours? Hard to trust anyone because anyone can make any number look different than it is.
In the past when I worked as a server at restaurants, the register kept track of the food totals that each worker did. For example, server A may have served $400 in food that evening while server B may have done $285 in business, server C may have done $365 in business. If the average tipping rate is 15%, then server A should have earned $60, server B should have earned $42.75 etc.
Total up the hourly wage earned for the shift, add in the tip they SHOULD have earned and look at the total. If the worker earned a total of more than min. wage, then the employer doesn’t have to make up the difference.
It doesn’t matter what the server ACTUALLY earned, only what s/he should have earned.
In some places that I’ve worked, the manager would then extract the (in this case) 15% of the tip total, and you were required to relinquish that amount to the bus people..despite the fact that their hourly wage was more than yours, AND you couldn’t write off the expense from your own taxes. Nor did it matter that you may live in a depressed area and NOBODY ever earned the full 15% tip on the total food sales.
There are some people who do not tip, nor do they feel obligated to pay wages for the employer. Some people are just cheap and look for even the slightest excuse not to tip. Maybe they didn’t like the shape of your butt under your uniform, or you didn’t jiggle in the ‘right’ places, or you brought the beverages with the meal instead of after the meal, or whatever.
There are people who run you around wanting you to do extras for them..above and beyond good service, and not tip you for that extra running.
Many people don’t stop and think that the tip is part of the meal service experience, and so they don’t plan for it. They could order a slightly less expensive dish so that the money is there for that tip, but they often don’t. Everybody wants McDonalds service (fast and free, not necessarily good) not stopping to think that there’s a reason why a hamburger and fries costs 10 bucks now, while the local sit down store has burgers and fries for $6.95. The McDonalds employer has to pay ful min wage while the sit down only pays $2.25 an hour, and sometimes less even in this day and age.
Waiting tables is the hardest job I ever did, and I sure didn’t appreciate the bus people stealing tips, and then having to fork over 15% of what little I managed to earn in tips, over to those who stole more than half of everybodies tips.
How did I figure it was more than just a suspicion? Easy. Try working with only half your usual tables, no bus people and quadrupling your tip income, while wait persons in a different area working WITH bus people walked out with $20 each for the entire evening in a 5 star place.
Yet another scam is when the customer puts the tip on a credit card, and the wait person has to pay a percentage of that tip, to the restaurant owner simply beause it’s on a card. And you don’t get to write THAT expense off your taxes either, but the restaurant owner sure does!
Raising the min wage isn’t going to cure any of the issues wait people must endure, but the hit piece above is NOT accurate.