Gratuities suck, and I avoid
any place that employes them.
It’s just an added fee over and
above what the employer is
willing to pay it’s servers.
I owned a restaurant. The quality
of a good server is evidenced
in their tips. I won’t pay for
a servers lack of ambition
to benifit the establishment.
>>Gratuities suck, and I avoid
any place that employes them.
That’s your prerogative. And as a former restaurant owner, you’re aware that the server minimum wage is well below that of other occupations. So if you as an owner weren’t willing to pay servers for the services they provided and preferred to have customers take care of that for you, then maybe that’s an example of you not taking responsibility for your own business. Relying on tips is a lazy and inefficient way of trying to maintain quality control.
Or to put it another way, it’s a way of underpaying your servers in order to attract customers who aren’t willing to pay servers for the work they do. Think about it. You have two identical tables. They both order identical meals and the server does the same amount of work for each. One table tips $15 and the other one tips $5. When that happens, the $15 tip table is subsidizing the $5 tip table.
Now you as an owner might be happy with that outcome. And if you as an owner, had charged a gratuity instead, you may (or may not) have lost the $5 table’s business, so the logic from your point of view is clear. The problem is, in order to not risk losing the $5 tip customer’s business, you’ve given him a discount, but not out of your own pocket. You’ve given him a discount out of the server’s pocket. You make the same amount for each table, regardless and expect the server to take the loss on the cheaper customer.