Part of the business model for quality restaurants is great service. How do they promote great service? By hiring and retaining servers who provide great service. And why do you suppose the servers provide great service? Because they don’t get paid if they don’t. Wow, what a concept!
If a restaurant added the 15 - 20% tips to the bills and then handed over the money to the servers regardless of the quality of the service they provided, take a guess what would happen to the quality of the service over time?
See, by making the transaction directly between the server and the customer the restaurant is establishing the optimum environment for providing quality service and thereby maintaining its reputation as a quality restaurant. Hopefully, that’s good enough to keep the restaurant in business.
“Part of the business model for quality restaurants is great service. How do they promote great service? By hiring and retaining servers who provide great service. And why do you suppose the servers provide great service? Because they don’t get paid if they don’t. Wow, what a concept!
If a restaurant added the 15 - 20% tips to the bills and then handed over the money to the servers regardless of the quality of the service they provided, take a guess what would happen to the quality of the service over time?
See, by making the transaction directly between the server and the customer the restaurant is establishing the optimum environment for providing quality service and thereby maintaining its reputation as a quality restaurant. Hopefully, that’s good enough to keep the restaurant in business.”
I’m not confused as to how restaurants justify the practice. I just don’t believe that employees have to be bribed into providing customers with good service, not beyond their salary and the value to them of continued employment anyways. But regardless of any of that, most of the large chains already implement mandatory tips on large parties(5-7+). My point was that if they thought the only thing standing between them and additional profit was a mandatory percentage tip, then they’d implement it in a heartbeat.