Posted on 08/25/2015 5:54:35 PM PDT by Theoria
Restaurant owners, customers and staff have long railed against the tyranny of tipping, but like a love affair gone bad, it has proved difficult to quit.
Now, prompted by a spurt of new minimum wage proposals in major cities, an expanding number of restaurateurs are experimenting with no-tipping policies as a way to manage rising labor costs.
Here in Seattle, where the first stage of a $15-an-hour minimum wage law took effect in April, Ivar’s seafood restaurants switched to an all-inclusive menu. By raising prices 21 percent and ending tipping, Bob C. Donegan, the president and co-owner, calculated he could increase everyone’s wages.
“We saw there was a fundamental inequity in our restaurants where the people who worked in the kitchen were paid about half as much as the people who worked with customers in front of the house,” Mr. Donegan said.
Nearby, the Walrus and the Carpenter instituted a compulsory 20 percent service charge. At Manos Nouveau and Sous Beurre, both in San Francisco, the menu prices include tips and taxes. Dirt Candy, an upscale eatery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, tacks on a 20 percent administrative fee.
Amanda Cohen, the owner of Dirt Candy, said she had fielded a flood of phone calls from other restaurants asking how her no-tipping policy was working.
“I think that restaurants will have to do this,” said Ms. Cohen, who pays servers at Dirt Candy $25 an hour, well above the $7.50 for tipped workers that will go into effect in New York at the end of the year.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Don’t want ANY legal income to be undocumented, now do we..?
Sounds more and more like Europe all the time.
YUCK.
I think this is also because in big cities there is often one type of person that sees tipping almost nothing as a type of activism.
“Nearby, the Walrus and the Carpenter instituted a compulsory 20 percent service charge.”
They can KISS MY BEUTROS. If they want to charge 20% more, then build it into your price, like Ivar’s. No way I’m eating there.
But I do agree with the article...I go to Seattle a lot, and I’ve stopped tipping there. They’re paid enough just through the higher prices for a meal.
Do away with tipping and you do away with the incentive to excel. That’s when everyone just mails it in.
The best shifts (I’m sure) are the ones where everyone busts their asses and they end the night over beers splitting up hundreds of dollars.
Waiters could quit and become independent contractors, then they could make an arrangement with the restaurant to rent floor space to work for tips, pay $1. Restaurant owners now don’t have to pay them wages and can revoke their floor rental contracts if they’re not good waiters.
So it will be interesting what ‘great’ wait people make vs. the new wage. Not so much at their level as to what they have collectively shared down the line before?
Exactly.
Even here in L.A., we either call or Google the resto we go to if the tip is already part of the meal. If I am going to tip, you better work your ass off and I DO know if you don’t as I was a bartender and waiter during my college years.
Being a server in a restaurant is one of the jobs that requires the least skill possible. It’s silly that just because you happen to directly interact with that person that there is a “tradition” of tipping them. They don’t even prepare the food, and that is somewhere where the skills of the worker matters more. Tipping a waitress is like tipping the checkout girl at the grocery store. It’s not a job that one person can do much better than any other. It’s not even a necessary job. You can do self-checkout just as easily as you could take a number and pick up your own food at the counter of a restaurant when you’re called.
If I had a restaurant I’d move to touch screen/cell phone ordering only and text or signal the customer when their food’s ready so they can pick it up themselves. And lower prices commensurately.
Great idea. They could also get around Obamacare because they would have less than 40 employees or whatever the mandate is
As a restaurant owner, I completely identify with these owners in big cities that are having to adjust to the “progressive” answer to paying staff. Most Americans have never been to Europe where there is no tipping because the cost of service is included in the tab. Meals are very expensive and it doesn’t matter if the service sucks.
My restaurant is in a small town in the southwest where these draconian progressive measures are yet to take effect, but I rue the day they do. Not only will staff make less money, it will be twice as hard to get a fledgling restaurant off the ground. And far fewer entrepreneurs will try.
I don't know about that. Nobody in my company ever gets a tip from a happy customer, and most people seem to have no problem striving to excel.
Self checkout in a fine dining establishment? You don’t get out much do you?
I helped a friend of mine who ran a small restaurant.....I loved serving the customers that I soon got to know well. Tips were sufficient to more than cover the minimum rate at that time.....
I am hearing from other servers writing about this that they are making less money now they are on hourly wages and no tips.
Due to the tip method of American restaurants, servers typically get paid only the federal minimum of $2.12/hour. Tips are assumed to more than make up the difference between this number and minimum wage. If this were not the case, restaurants would not make enough money to survive without a major increase in pricing.
If America wants to see a sea-change in restaurant pricing, and many of their favorite haunts fail, support this new progressive approach to server pay. It’s sure to hurt server and restaurant customer. Just try to have lunch for two in Paris in a modest little restaurant for less that 50 Euro.
Not a surprise at all.
Your employees aren’t making less than $3.00/hour.
“Being a server in a restaurant is one of the jobs that requires the least skill possible.”
I must disagree. If you haven’t tried it, you shouldn’t be quite so cavalier about disrespecting the job servers do. It’s a serious multi-tasking effort most newcomers to the position miserably fail at. Think about having 4 or 5 tables of 4 or more with various drinks, appetizers, meals with multiple requests for various special requirements, more drinks, and then various desserts. And, all items served at the precisely correct time for that table, whilst juggling the kitchen lag and the random vagaries of more than twenty different customers’ requests.
It’s why ex-servers always are the best tippers.
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